Vindication in disputes with parents!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When the three of us were in our early teens our mother started bawling us out for leaving the kitchen window open. She growled, “I suppose the window opened by *itself!”

  • Finally, one morning, with the three of us in the kitchen just after she had bawled us out yet again, she closed the lower sash–and, lo and behold, the sash actually rose a few inches, all by itself! She was quite apologetic for having wrongly blamed us… :slight_smile:
    Post here incidents in which your parents–or someone else with authority over you–accused you, and you were duly vindicated. :slight_smile:
2

When I first moved in with my husband, I would occasionally forget to close the garage door when leaving for work. It’s a detached garage, so you can’t get into the house from it, but it’s still bad. My husband would call me at work and rant at me about it. However, on several occasions, I was sure that I had closed the damn thing - I remembered watching it close before driving away. I attributed it to stress, and started leaving notes to myself on the dashboard of my car.

One Saturday afternoon, we left to go for a walk in the park, and we went out the back, past the garage. As we walked past the garage, the door started opening by itself. :o

After some investigation, and a house call from the nice Sears fixit guy, we discovered that my remote garage door opener was malfunctioning. The switch would stick and send a continuous “open” command to the unit. This happened even when the car was parked in front of the house (about 150 feet away). A new automatic garage door controller solved the problem nicely.

Ha!

3

My parents were from the “things don’t break by themselves” school, so when the record player broke and I had used it last, it was my fault. Not admitting it resulted in a two year stand-off. The repairman noted that the rubber on the belt-drive had rotted with age.

4

My father and I once got into the mother of all arguements because he asked me to proofread the annual Christmas letter he had written.

Without voicing my aversion to X-mas letters of any kind, I pointed out that commas are followed by one space while periods are followed by two. I couldn’t find a cite, and he basically told me I was insane. I didn’t even get the last word in the arguement…

Me: “Well, you’re just going to have to pay attention to the punctuation in every published item you read from now on!!!”

Him: “Fine!”

My only vindication is that he hasn’t mentioned it since, proving me correct simply by his lack of continued ridicule. We have a special relationship.

5

I occasionaly have the bad habit of forgeting to return things that I have borrowed from people, but I have been trying to do better.

Well about a year ago I borrowed two CDs from my dad and then returned them to him about a month later. He calls me after a month or two has gone by since I returned them and asks me where the CDs were at. I tell him I gave those back to him a few months back, he doesn’t believe me and tells me I’m never borrowing anything from him again blah…blah…blah. I tell him that’s fine with me. So every time I have seen him since he has brought it up.

Out of the blue 2 weeks ago I get a call from him telling me rather sheepishly that he found the CDs that I had borrowed from him and that he is sorry for being so mean to me. HA! I won! I won! I won! I love it when my dad is wrong! (doesn’t happen very often, so please excuse my excitement)

6

My dad was a serious intellectual ogre, and loved to play status games with people based on proving he was smarter than they were. The fact that he did this with his children just proves what an asshole he was, but never mind.

At any rate, given that situation, it’s not surprising that I remember one specific period during which I embarrassed him not once, not twice, but three times in a single month.

First: We all wanted to go see the movie F/X. (Yes, the one with Bryan Brown, from '85 or thereabouts. This sort of dates me, I know.) My dad asked me if I knew what that stood for. I said, “Uh, yeah, it’s a filmmaking shorthand term for ‘effects.’” (I’ve been a movie geek since way, way back.) He looked at me smugly, and said, “No, it means ‘factor experimental.’” I told him he was wrong; he just kept acting smug. Then we went and saw the movie; right after it ended, I dug out the copy of Starlog I had brought with me, and showed him a cite. He was pretty humiliated.

But that’s not all.

Second: Two weeks later, we were watching TV (I think), and someone came on with a neck injury, wearing one of those padded collars. My dad referred to it as a “clavical” collar. I said, “Um, no, it’s a cervical collar.” He disagreed, getting all smug again, and said that only a woman has a cervix. I shook my head, and I said, “No, the back of the neck is called the cervix also. That means a woman has two.” I had to go get an anatomy book to prove it to him. He was, again, chagrined.

And then…

Third: Two weeks later, I checkmated him. Yes, for the first time. He was absolutely shocked. As it turned out, it was also the last time I checkmated him, because he absolutely refused ever to play chess with me again.

Like I said, he valued his intellectual prowess above all else. Any threat was not to be tolerated. (Asshole.)