Folks who want to help, whether you need it or not:
The guy at the deli counter, upon weighing and sticking the label on a container of potato salad or something.
“Whoa, $6.66! Here, I’ll take some of that out of there.”
I did a doubletake, but my wife was quick thinking enough to politely say that it wouldn’t be necessary. Dude went and “fixed” it anyway.
Batshit crazy religious guy tells a coworker: “When your car won’t start after Y2K, don’t worry. My truck has a carburator, so I’ll drive you and your kids to my house, and you will be safe with us while the tribulation happens.”
I walked off in silent bemusement while my decidedly unreligious coworker spluttered in confused indignation.
There seems to be an entire class of person, and not necessarily stupid or uneducated ones, who are just fraggin’ a-mazed that you could know this, that or the other fairly common - or uncommon - thing. It’s as if the idea of learning and retaining and being able to use information other than how to remain mostly vertical with your mouth mostly closed is reserved for some elite class of people who don’t really exist anyway.
That, and “Wow, have you read ALL these books?”
(To which I have a couple of canned answers: “No.” “Not the thin green one on the fourth shelf down, left side - I’m saving that one [for after you leave].” “Well, all the ones I wrote, yes.” and “Those are books?”)
I once worked with a woman whose son was using a matchmaker to find a wife. The matchmaker introduced him to a woman to whom he proposed on the first date. However, as my thoroughly annoyed co-worker told me, “She insisted on going on two more dates with him before she’d say yes!” :eek:
Harlan Ellison had a response to this in his story “Paladin of the Lost Hour”: “Nope, haven’t read a one. Who wants a library full of books you’ve already read?”
Many years ago I had a boyfriend who was a news videographer for a small-market TV station. One day I went to work with him so I could help with an assignment. Their recently hired, late 30-something female anchor saw us in the hall, walked up to me and said:
‘Hi! You’re cute! What are you doing here?’
Turns out she’d been turfed out of her previous job in favor of someone younger and my mere presence (I was about 20 at the time) apparently raised some (false) red flags for her …
Yesterday, a patron comes up to the desk. Young lady, maybe low 20s? Friendly, but concerned. “My account number won’t work.”
“Pardon me?”
“My card number - I tried to use it online, and it wouldn’t work.” (this is *not *a valid sequence of words for how our system works)
“… ooo-kay. Show me what you mean.”
We walk over to her computer, and she points at the current page showing - an application to a business chain. There’s a fairly standard Log In box asking for user name and password. “It keeps saying that it’s invalid.”
Pause, while my brain tried to assemble logic from these words and that visual information. “Um. Wait - you tried to use your library card number to access this website?”
“Umm hmm! The lady at the desk said all I needed was my card number and password.”
Longer pause while I mentally staggered around. “Have you applied to this company before?”
“Nope, yesterday I used it for some hospital application :eek:, but it looks like the computer forgot it. So you need to fix it so it works again.”
Even longer pause while I contemplate whether banging my head into the monitor would help the situation. “I. Um. Ok.” Pause. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
After a bit of time unscrambling my brains, I returned to sit down with her and try to explain the concept of websites, and how they don’t talk to each other, and how she needs to NOT use things like her library card number as her log-in names or passwords, and how she needs to keep track of the places that she’s applying so she can check back with them (not that I’m particularly hopeful of her needing to worry about them calling her back… ). I *don’t *think it sunk in, but I did try.
My entire extended family is full of idiots, but my grandfather-in-law takes the cake. He’s an uncaring, inconsiderate loud-mouth. Thankfully, my immediate family has pretty much relegated him to obscurity for all his horribleness and dumb-assery over the years.
My sister and I were at my parents house on spring break from college awhile back. My grandmother and he were also there. Out of the blue, he bleats, “Are we gonna go to el rape eh?” My dad and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. After a few moments, I asked him to clarify (out of horribly morbid curiousity, I guess). He replied, “Are we gonna go to el rape eh?” It took me another minute of bemused, awestruck silence to figure out what the hell he was getting at. There was a Mexican restaurant in my hometown called “El Zarape.” He wanted to shovel mounds of beans and rice in his sewer hole (no shitting, mounds. Well, maybe shitting [mounds? bleh!] later. My dad still swears that the only time they took him to the restaurant, he finished a 6-inch hill of beans and rice in under three minutes).
To this day, it’s a running joke with my family. “Hey mom, can we go to ‘El Rape’ to eat tonight?” “I don’t know about you, dad, but I could definitely go for some ‘El Rape’ esta noche.”
I was standing in a bar with a friend of mine when two girls approached us. One of them proceeded to quickly slap both of us in the balls with the back of her hand and say “That’s how I like to say ‘Hello.’”
I had a similar situation about a year ago. The gentleman was convinced we had changed his Hotmail password. Since he’s only ever accessed his Hotmail email account on our computers, he thought Hotmail was part of the library system. He handed me his library card and asked me to update his password so he could get into his email again.
I used to sponsor a little girl in India. One day the organization sent me a letter explaining that Malati and her family had left the area without telling the organization’s field worker (who was not present every day), and that they were not expected to return. They suggested that the father had gotten an opportunity to get a better-paying job in another village, which is good news of course, because it meant the family could better take care of themselves and didn’t need to be in the sponsorship program any more. The organization assigned me to another little girl, of course, but I was surprised to find how much I was emotionally affected by the news – is she okay? Is the family doing better? I’m never going to know what happened.
Anyway, I was feeling a little fragile and wanted some sympathy and support, so I told my supervisor all this, and I can’t remember her exact words, but she made a “joke” to the effect of, “You know, sometimes they sell their daughters into prostitution – I’ll bet that’s what happened.”
:eek: :mad:
No words.
My only consolation was that she had already demonstrated an ability to make inappropriate or at best unnecessary remarks disguised as humor when she is nervous. Maybe she was embarrassed later? But it really hurt at the time.
Several years ago, I was standing in a checkout line when I feel a poke in my shoulder and a female voice starts berating me about what a worthless SOB I am, etc. I turn around to see a passingly pretty young woman who promptly got a perplexed look on her face, then said (and I quote exactly): “Sorry - wrong sunnavabitch” and then walked off.
I may as well give myself up in the spirit of fair play. For a fairly long time I thought Ibid was some Platoesque Roman philosopher, who was frequently quoted.
I may have posted this before, but once while I was in downtown Chicago, a middle-aged white lady marched up to me and proclaimed, “I bet you’re Japanese!”
When a (apparently) mentally-ill woman getting off the bus turned around and called me a “nasty fat nigger” as she departed. The other riders and I just sort of looked at each other, stunned, as I’d had zero interaction with this person prior to her comment.
