The store I work in sells, among many other things, a variety of globes in various styles. A woman looked at all the ones we had on display, and then asked me if there were any globes with JUST the United States on them. Aside from saying “no”, I really couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t embarass her.
A person I knew who had to one up everyone else’s tragedies and I were discussing the worst thing I ever knew that happened to someone I knew: A woman whose four year old son was the victim of a murder/suicide by his father.
Ms. One-Upmanship: Well, nobody had it as bad as I did. I had to bury my parents.:eek:
Sweetie, you are supposed to bury your parents, but not your children.
In college, I made the mistake of sharing an apartment with two of my friends. I very quickly became the odd-man-out. It was a very difficult year even aside from that, and during one round of Beat the Phouka, Roomie B tore into me for not doing my chores on Saturday, instead of Sunday. I apologized, saying I had agreed to do them on Saturday, I had intended to do them on Saturday, but I’d spent the day on and off the phone with my mom trying to see if I could get home when she had scheduled her mastectomy surgery. You see, she’d been diagnosed with DCIS a month or two previously, and she had a horror of radiation and chemo. When I hadn’t been on the phone with her, offering every nanogram of love and support I could scrape from my soul, I was mostly sitting, staring at the wall while my brain spun circles.
“Well,” Roomie B told me, “life’s tough and all, phouka, but you really need to get your shit together.”
This happened a few days ago in a public park in an majority English speaking country…
woman:Ola! Se habla espanol?
grude: Er ola, roughly but why?
woman:Oh you speak english.
grude:yes.
woman:You look hispanic, where are you from?
grude:I’m not, the USA.
woman:What state?
grude:Texas…but I’m NOT hispanic.
woman:Ah I bet there are Mexicans in your family somewhere back.
<woman walks away before I have the chance to say while I grew up in Texas, neither of my parents did>
I…guess she slept good that night having confirmed my hispanic status?
I believe she’s the same young lady who was just fired from my daughter’s place of work. She is a medical assistant but doesn’t know the meaning of the word “defecate”. Also, (just as an example), she asked someone which city the Cascades were by. When they said (blink, blinkblinkblink), “the mountain RANGE”? She said “yes, which city is it by”?
They (still dazed and apparently not comprehending the depth of the poor girl’s stupidity) repeated, “but it’s a mountain RANGE”.
At this point she started to get mad and said “I KNOW That, I just want to know which city it’s by! Jeez”! At this point my daughter’s unfortunate coworker muttered something like “lots of them” and walked away (before she could really HURT the girl).
I’ve probably told this before, but it fits here.
Years ago Mr. S and I were walking out of a Kmart store to our car. We were holding hands. Broad daylight.
Him: male, about 5’6", slim build, long wavy brown Jesus hair, beard, typical guy clothes of shirt and pants.
Me: female, about 5’7", buzz-cut dark hair, average build, shirt and shorts, HUGE earrings, GINORMOUS purse.
We become aware of someone walking up behind us. As he passes us, we see that he’s some old guy, who says jauntily:
“Must be a mother and son!!”
As he passes us, he sees our (dumbfounded) faces, looks a bit startled, and veers away.
I’m still not sure which of us was supposed to be which.
Heh, Scarlett. Reminds me of the time I was walking down the street holding hands with my wife. Some horrible lady in insect-eye sunglasses drove by and shouted out the window of her SUV, “JESUS HATES LESBIANS!”
That’s what I told mine, but they kept hollering anyway.
/runs away/
When I was in the ER(my wife was with me) a nurse made mention of my mother, I was kinda huh as my mom was in another country altogether, but eventually realized she thought my wife was my mother. 
We’re not even 5 years apart in age and my wife is black and I’m white:dubious:
I would have said Seattle or Portland. That’s probably all she wanted to know. As in “if you were planning a trip to the Cascades what major city would you fly to?”
A few weeks ago, I went in to see my GP to get my foot X-rayed as I had suffered a fall a couple days prior and was in a lot of pain. When I was in the office with him, I explained how I had been fumbling with a tube of toothpaste, without my brakes being on, when I happened to slip and start to fall. When I grabbed the sink counter to break my fall, my left foot got caught awkwardly between the sink cupboard and the metal foot pedals of my chair. Since that time, I told him, I had been in ever-increasing pain in that foot; particularly the big toe.
Well the doc then grabbed my chart and began looking it over. After a few seconds he asks me without looking up, “So, you can’t feel anything below your waist, right?”
:dubious:
I was in Sequoia National Park, standing next to General Sherman, which is** the largest tree on the entire planet**. It’s just unbelievably huge, and there are signs everywhere, and tons of people gawking at it and taking pictures. This guy wanders up to me and says, “Um… isn’t there supposed to be a really big tree around here somewhere?”
I didn’t even know how to respond.
I have an acquaintance back in the States who recently emailed me and asked me to travel about 120 miles out of my way to a small archive, look up two documents for her research, and report back to her 1. how long the docs are 2. how long do I think it will take her to read them 3. are the contents relevant to her research.
She’s no longer a professional academic (having been sacked years ago from a tenure track job) and writes Master and Commander-style fan fiction (hence the
research). She wants me to do this because it will save her the £10 fee to have the archive scan and send her the docs as a .pdf. This from a person who regularly travels to conferences in the US and abroad as part of her ‘research’ (not to give papers, but to attend. I pay $200 conference fee & travel expenses, I’d better damned well have a line to add to my CV!)
I don’t even know where to start with this one. I teach full time, and as we’re at the half way mark in the term, if I’m not lecturing or marking papers, I’ve got tutorials all day. I have two articles I’m revising, and three conference papers to finish. My field is not early 19th century British naval history, and even if it were, I’d be in a huff to make the trip for my own research, let alone for someone who considered her Amazon reviews to be ‘published book reviews.’
Not to mention that petrol is $11 a gallon here, and the M27 is not in any way like I-95; the roadways here were designed to confound the Nazis, and consequently a ‘breezy trip’ up the interstate might be a piece of piss in the US, but can be a few hours here depending on the time of day, weather conditions, Luftwaffe, etc.
The mind boggles.
“Can’t see the tree for the forest?” 
I have seen pictures, and while the Sherman is a really big tree, it is still a just a very big tree. If you’ve heard stories of trees so big they have made roads through them, (as I heard when i was a kid) and if you believe what CGI tells you, then the real world Sherman is a bit of a let down.
Oh, yeah, I’ve had one of those too. Only apparently both me and my husband are blokes…
Coworker in regards to Christmas greetings: “I don’t understand why we all of these immigrants can’t adapt and be a part of our culture. They should say Merry Christmas like the rest of us We were here first!”
And we are a school division that makes First Nations education a “priority”.
This is what I was going to say. The question was poorly phrased, but hardly dumbfounding.
Sometimes you have to fill in some blanks. Working in tech support was a stark lesson in that fact.
2008 was a rough year for me. May: my best friend’s dog, who I adored, passed away. July: my cat that I had for 17 years (literally half my life) passed away. August: my leopard gecko that I had for 13 years passed away. October: my own dog passed away. November: my best friend herself passed away (suddenly from cancer.)
One day shortly after all that my Dad said to me: “You really need to cheer up. You sound “down” lately and need to cheer up.”
WTF, I lost 5 loved ones in less than a year, ya think I’m feeling “down”?
The biggest tree in the world. A let down???