I had just finished my Tech school in 1987, and was home on leave before heading out to Seoul, South Korea for my first assignment. My folks had a little family gathering, inviting some friends and family over. Uncle Doug (great uncle on my grandma’s side) who was in the Korean war, put an arm around my shoulder and pulled me a way from everyone else so he could give me some (The Graduate type) advise.
“When you get over there and start going downrange for drinks, you be careful of them Ornamentals. They’ll take you for everything you got.”
I just nodded, and went for another beer, mostly to get away before he started telling stories.
Me: Actually, I’m 1/8th Native American.
Co-worker: No you’re not.
Me: How do you know I’m not.
Co-worker: You don’t look it.
This is the same co-worker that complained that only “family” was supposed to be allowed in the back office when I was showing my nieces the building.
Me: How are they not my family. My sister legally adopted them.
CW: Yes, but she’s a lesbo. That’s not a legal adoption.
Me: You didn’t complain when my brother’s adopted son went in the back office.
CW: Well, he is your nephew.
At a previous job, there was a co-worker who was the most incredibly obnoxious person I have ever had to work with. She thought she was God’s gift to engineering and was often very condescending to other employees, which was made worse by the fact that her work was pretty damn sloppy. She would write passive-aggressive comments in her code, blaming some other engineer for the way she wrote a given bit.
She went to JHU for grad school; I went to JHU for undergrad. When I entered as a freshman, I was given a free coffee mug from the alumni association. It survived my college years and became my standard work mug.
Once, I was talking to her about something work-related and she noticed that my mug bore the JHU seal. She asked me if I had gone to JHU, and I said I had. She noticed that it said “Welcome to JHU from the Alumni Association” and asked me if I was in the Alumni Association (she was). I said “No, the AA gave the mugs to entering freshman as gifts, and that’s how I got it.” She said “Oh, so I paid for your mug” in a kind of tone that suggested that I owed her something.
You’ve never heard of the Soc Security card number in the wallet?
You really need to google that one - back when SS was new, people had an idea that they would get a card of some sort, somehow.
A company making cheap wallets had someone’s card duplicated and inserted in a window (much like the pretty people picture which comes in picture frames).
A few hundred people thought that was their card, and gave that number to their employers.
Once the system got digitized, that first numeric sort caused a great deal of greif - and entire page of the same account number - all with different names.
This one happened to me about three or four weeks ago. I have a friend on Facebook who mostly shares the latest conservative tripe. Now, he and I are both graduates of the same military school and a LOT of our fellow “old boys” have turned out to be rock-ribbed conservatives, which I don’t have a problem with – but this guy’s lack of critical thinking skills make me crazy. To my fellow alums’ credit, a LOT of them – including some conservatives – are happy to jump in and tell him the thing he just shared is full of shit, and so is he. Some lovely, lovely arguments have resulted.
Anyway, this time it was a patently ridiculous and NASTILY slanted piece about how Costco is now offering halal meat, and how this was horrifying for the following untrue reasons, blah blah blah. (for anyone who doesn’t know, halal is basically the Muslim equivalent of kosher.)
Ready for the jaw-dropping part? After… someone … posted a link to a Snopes article that debunked what my friend was sharing, he replied, “Well, you know, Snopes has a liberal bias.”
:eek:
I… guessssss? In that compared to the, how shall I put this, flagrant LIES you keep posting, snopes is full of facts – and we all know that facts have a liberal bias. Is THAT what you’re saying, here, Ignorant Friend? :rolleyes:
It was this exchange (which actually went on to plumb hitherto untapped levels of crazy) that finally got me to change my friend settings so I no longer see anything from him but status updates.
My friends had picked up some random dude and were giving him a ride to the grocery store; I was along for the ride, and asked him where he was from. He named a town on the Olympic Peninsula, “up 101, northeast,” he said. We were in Olympia.
“Northwest, right?” (Of course it didn’t matter, but even then I was a Doper at heart).
“No, no,” he said. “Northeast.”
“I’m pretty sure 101 runs Northwest.”
“Yeah, but,” and he started gesturing with his hands, “the earth spins west to east, man.”
He just got weirder from there.
The other time someone said something that dumbfounded me was when I was walking to class one morning, and a donkey brayed at me from behind. I spun around to look. No donkey. But as I looked for whoever made that perfect donkey noise, it came again, and finally I located the rascal: it was a crow, sitting in a sapling a few feet away, staring at me out of a beady eye. As I watched, it gave a third, pitch-perfect bray, and flew away. My best guess is it had learned the trick on a nearby farm, but good lord, was that ever weird.
I think I’ve posted this before, but when I got pregnant (many years ago) I was living in MI and working for a smallish company. I told my boss after the requisite 12 weeks and he asked me if I wanted a coat hanger.
I…just sort of stood there, and then wandered off. I was young and sort of ill (I was hyperemetic anyway) and I had absolutely no idea at all how to respond to that.
I was differentiating between a true status update (e.g., someone actually types something themselves like “I just saw the cutest kitten at my sister’s house!”) and a share, where they share something someone else posted like a story from another website or a photo. My friend does make the occasional status update, usually about the military school we both went to – his whole life revolves around the memory of that school and being a graduate of it – but mostly he shares obnoxious photoshopped pictures of the president and the latest conservapedia entry. I’ve blocked those, but I let the updates through because he’s the most reliable source of news about our former school, and I like hearing about it when one of us drops dead.
Oh yeah - almost forgot another category of Facebook post: The game notification. GOD I hate those.
I’ve worked in TV/video production as a cameraman for over 15 years. On two occasions when I was shooting video a person has asked me if I worked for the newspaper.
