Whew indeed! No, I don;t know any of you. I think.
Give my regards to Stinky next time you see him. Hubby, too.
In college, someone told me I pronounced my name wrong. Uh, no. Actually, no. Idiot.
Holy cow.
Is this like the guys who spent three hours in a German city looking for a place called Einbahnstrasse?
eta: Googles - pretty much, yes.
Reading these posts mine is mild, I tell you, mild. But it happened today at the grocery store. My husband and I were in the checkout lane, him at the business end unloading groceries and me at the helm. Suddenly the young woman behind me said “Excuse me ma’am, can you move?” I steered our cart forward at a slant so as not to make my husband a greasy spot and looked back to see what was going on. The young mother proceeded to stack stuff on the belt from the back of her baby’s (who wasn’t even crying) stroller. My husband, who is usually socially clueless himself…even he raised his brows in a WTF?
I didn’t think of it until later but I wish I’d said “Why, is my turn up?”
Last year I was riding the DC Metro through Federal Center SW. This station serves both the Blue and Orange line on the same track. We stopped on the platform and a woman poked her head into the car.
Woman: WHAT COLOR IS THIS TRAIN?
Entire Car: 
seconds pass
Dude near front: Um, Blue.
Woman: Oh. steps out of car back onto platform
Guy next to me: WTF? Is she blind or something?
woman on platform takes out Dean Koontz novel
Guy: Huh, maybe just stupid, then.
For those of you who have never ridden the DC Metro, I will admit that there are some confusing things about it, like distance-based fares, peak vs. off-peak, etc. We are used to helping tourists with these things. Figuring out what color line the train is? Well, let’s see. It’s on the front of the train. It’s on the digital signboards every 10 feet on the outside of the cars, both written out and with a helpful colored bar. It’s on the board that announces which train is coming next. The driver makes another announcement when the doors open. So how could this woman possibly have been expected to know? :rolleyes:
Dave Barry had something like this in one of his columns about a vacation he took. Except it was “Jeez, we’re on Einbahnstrasse again!”
My own (or my brother’s) Germany story: he went on a brief school exchange program for a couple of weeks to a host family in Hamburg. One morning he came downstairs for breakfast to find his host mother in a state of great alarm.
Mother: Your country is on fire!
Brother: :eek:
Brother: What, like, ALL of it?
Mother: What are you going to do? Will you be able to go home again?
It turned out that ZDF had been showing a story about the wildfires that happen in California every year. We lived in Maryland. Little bit of a size concept issue, there. I think it’s hard for many Europeans to grasp just how damned big the US is.
Several years ago I was asked to drive my employer’s 18 year old daughter around as needed since she’d never gotten her drivers license.
When she was finally ready to take the written portion of the drivers test, I drove her to the DMV office. On the way there she asked to stop at a store. She went in and came back out with a big bottle of water. When she got back in the car she took several big swallows of the water, mumbling something in between swallows.
Me: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you said…
Her: I said, I hope this works.
Me: You hope what works?
Her: This water… (She held the bottle out toward me) See, it’s that Smart water. I’ve been drinking it every day this week to get ready for my driving test. It’s supposed to make you smarter when you drink it.
Me: Ummm… Uhhhhh… Hmmmmm… Okay. I did not know that.
I was silent for a minute or two, sneaking glances over at her to determine if she was serious or trying to play a joke on me. She was TOTALLY serious since the next thing she said was…
Her: I need to drink as much of it as I can before I take my test to give it time to work. What time is it?
Me: You have about 15 minutes before test time.
Her: I’m very nervous. Please let it work… (gulp, gulp, slurp)
Me: I hope it works, too, Honey. (staring straight ahead, teeth clenched, with dual thoughts of “How sad is that?” and “DO NOT LAUGH!”)
I didn’t and couldn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive there. I was totally speechless.
She took her test that day and passed. She said she made the minimum score and was very happy. I guess it “worked”? Once she started driving herself around, I didn’t see her very often after that.
I still remember the automobile trip up the coast of California that spurred me to actually parse the word “frontage”.
A few years back I went to a donut shop to get tasties for the whole department. I asked for two dozen donuts. The person behind the counter asked “What’s a dozen? Is that ten?”
“I forgot you were Black.”
True, it wasn’t dumbfounding. But there’s no single good answer to it. The Cascade mountain range runs through three U.S. states and a Canadian province. “What city are the Cascades by?” just doesn’t make sense.
A crazy man ranting to himself on the street in NYC once called me a “nigger” too, and I’m a blue-eyed white girl.
Just today at work, a lady (and I use the term loosely) came in and declared, “It’s so cold my cunt is freezing off!” Another customer leveled a look at her and said, “You sit down and shut up.”
A girl I knew once and very briefly, for reasons that will become clear, excitedly told me, “People think I’m strange because I’m sexually attracted to serial killers, but I can’t help it. I was born that way!” I gaped at her in horror and scooted away.
“Hey baby, I burn down people’s stuff for fun, pee in my bed, and torment my cat. Any chance of a date?” 
Including the fact that all the train cars are, in fact, the same unpainted-metal color, with only small signs to distinguish them. All the underground stations are visually identical too, all with the same concrete waffle-arch roofs, with the industry-standard incomprehensible PA speakers, not to mention being badly, almost frighteningly lit. If you’re used to Boston subway lines, for instance, where all the trains are actually painted the colors of the lines they serve, it’s not unreasonble to be confused by having to look for a small sign saying “Blue” instead of seeing a blue-colored train.
So, I’d give that person a pass, and try to be more helpful.
Riding to work in LA, I had the choice between the always-crowded express or the slighlty-less-crowded regular bus. Either way, I usually had to stand the whole way to work. One morning I got on and not only found a seat, but a seat next to a cute guy! I sat down and was settling in when he turned to me and said, “Will you tell your feet to shut the fuck up!”
Dude would have had a brainmelt if he ever met my coworker the Seminole. He definitely didn’t look “injun”, having a lot of Scottish and Irish blood. Still a member of the Seminole Nation, the child of three Councilmembers (father, mother, and mother’s second husband) and planning on someday becoming a member himself…
Ah, he must have attended the same school of seduction as that project manager who made me travel to a location “close to Paris” (70km is not “close” by local standards) and, after insulting my professionality in front of the customers and denying me the job, wanted me to cook him a romantic breakfast the next morning.
I did have an answer, though: I offered him two fried eggs with chorizo :mad:
I hate loud feet…
Once, while talking to an anti-abortionist praising adoption like it’s some la-la land where nothing ever goes wrong.
Me: So do you support all adoptions.
Him: Yes, I do.
Me, pulling out trump card: Even gay and lesbian adoptions??
Him: Gays adopting children is child abuse!!!
This was not said to me, but I overheard the conversation at a bar.
For some reason the conversation turned to massage parlors and happy endings. One of the waitresses said something about how massage therapy is just another name for prostitution. “Some of my college friends said they wanted to become massage therapists. Yeah, we know what that REALLY means!”
It pissed me off because some very close friends of mine are MTs, and they would be appalled at the idea of doing something so unethical. (And could make them lose their licenses.) But I said nothing. I was on vacation, and fighting ignorance wasn’t my thing that day.
It may be very wrong, but I hope that Sahirnee hit her “devout christian” with a frying pan.
- I was fourth in line at a red light and saw in the rear-view mirror a full-sized Dodge coming at me and my three-year-old compact Cortina (imported by Ford Canada) at about 40 miles an hour with no chance of stopping on its own even if the driver had considered using the brakes.
My car, being a '69, had only lap belts, so I had time in the second or two that remained to lie flat across the width of the car to the otherwise empty passenger seat. The impact was incredible and the noise deafening.
I was unhurt, though, so I undid the seat belt but had to lie down again to push against the driver’s door with my feet to creak it open it wide enough to slither out. The car was an accordion.
The drunk asshole driving the now-wrecked Dodge that totalled my car, shoving it into the trunk of the car ahead, which in turn crashed into the car ahead of it, which in turn crashed into the car at the front of the line-up, lurched toward me, and steadying himself against the metal of the Dodge melded into that of my onetime Cortina and — perhaps angry at being delayed by a traffic jam — looked directly at me and yelled, “What the hell’s going on here!?”