Ummm, guys? I’m still in that sinkhole that Eliahna’s mom warned me about.
I told Lassie to get help but the last time I tried that, the transvestite ADHD jerk stopped off to sniff butts at Fifi’s back fence and completely forgot about me.
Sr. Weasel’s grandma, may she rest in peace, once called him in New Hampshire because she saw footage of a fallen tree on the local news and she wanted to make sure he was okay.
I have a family friend who is afraid of rollercoasters because ‘‘birds could peck your eyeballs out!’’
Course, I could paper the walls with my own weird anxieties. They are not nearly as funny though, like my furnace exploding or general variations of me burning alive. The funniest one I’ve got is a legit phobia of mold. I once violently shoved my boss away and knocked over a chair because he was about to show me some moldy cheese. He thought it was hilarious. Don’t even talk to me about where cheese comes from. It falls from the skies like manna from heaven.
Before she passed, my elderly mother lived with me for 10 years. On Sunday nights I had my Gay Men’s Chorus rehearsals. Before I left home, she’d say something like “Be careful” or even “Don’t forget to use protection.” I had to yell at her, “What the hell do you think goes on during rehearsal? Do you think the Basses are having unprotected sex with the Second Tenors???”
I have my own set of weird-ish anxieties. Mostly I try to keep them to myself because (a) something is going to get all of us, eventually, so why waste time on worries, and (b) I make a conscious effort not to be that person who sucks the fun out of everything.
Probably my most eccentric “worry wart” decree is that my immediate family members are required to have a battery jump box in their vehicles. But I have known 2 people - including my uncle, a mechanic with 60 years experience - have automobile batteries blow up in their faces. With the self-contained charger box, you’re unlikely to be standing in the shrapnel zone.
My older kids’ step mom is the idiot who reads the Food Babe and similar stuff, and thinks that her shampoo and bread from Subway are going to kill her. If I ever turn into that, I hope that someone will smother me with a pillow.
adds new worry to the list
We don’t have kids yet, but we’re saving for adoption. I recently had a revelation, looked over at Sr. Weasel and said, ‘‘Ooooh. I’m gonna be one of those Moms who worries a lot.’’
He was like, ''You’re just now figuring this out?"
I’m already worrying about our TV falling on our child and we don’t even have one yet.
Get a flatscreen, they’re lighter.
Last winter I was walking my dog on a rural road near my house, when a truck pulled up and the driver leaned out to ask if I’d seen an old guy in his jammies and slippers walking around. It was about 30°F. :eek: Apparently it was the second time the dude had gone walkabout. I said I’d keep an eye out, and the guy said, “OK, call the sheriff’s department if you see him,” and drove off. I posted about it on Facebook when I got back. (He was found safe the same day.)
My mom called to tell me that I should be careful about stuff like that, because the man in the truck could have been a kidnapper trying to lure me in with a story about a lost grandpa.
I’m 49. And my mom gave me the “stranger danger” talk.
Back when a plane crashed into the Potomac River after takeoff from [then] Washington National Airport, my mother was beyond frantic to reach me by phone, despite the fact that incoming calls were restricted. A co-worker was similarly frantic.
I appreciated their concern but, sheesh,
I’m concerned about a wide variety of odd chemical/contamination worries. Things like ruptured batteries (there are people whose cars run over batteries and step on the contents by accident,) the leaked refrigerant that comes out of A/C units that malfunction, etc. I don’t like oven cleaners or Drano either.
I know someone who comes to a complete stop at all pedestrian crosswalks because she’s worried about running someone over, whether there is a stop sign at the crosswalk or whether there is a pedestrian within 100 feet or even four blocks of said crosswalk in the middle of the night. She will sit at a four-way stop until every other car has gone. It once took her 15 minutes to drive one mile in light traffic. We’ve tried to explain to her that her overly cautious, super-defensive, anxious driving is actually more dangerous because it’s unpredictable, but she just can’t let it go. I would never, ever be a passenger with her driving. I’d rather walk. It would probably be faster.
Only those who have upgraded to Business Class.
Try digging on the side and up, instead of down.
There’s a whole class of people who can turn something like “omg, I saw Jane three aisles away at the supermarket and she did not greet me!” into both a huge offense on Jane’s part and a weeks-long worryfest wondering why is Jane mad at them. Jane may not even have seen them, having been three aisles away and busy checking her shopping list while keeping her toddler in the cart, but hey, never let rationality impinge on a good worryfest.
It’s got to be terribly tiresome being them.
It’s kinda funny - my mom is almost the polar opposite of my MIL. If she hasn’t heard from me in a while, she’ll email me. Not call, tho - that’s a long-distance charge!! Really - she doesn’t have long distance service on her land line and where she lives, cell coverage is spotty.
Ha ha! Sounds like my parents/grandparents. When I was a kid whenever my grandparents or parents would visit each other (it was an hour drive between them) they always called after returning home and would let the phone ring one time as a code to let each other know they arrived safely…not answering the phone saved the long distance charge!
Remember when a long distance phone call was a Thing?…“Oh my god, it’s your Aunt Harriet calling all the way from Tampa! Hurry up, say ‘hi’ and quickly hand the phone to your brother so he can say ‘hi’…”
I don’t think kids come in a flat screen version yet, but I did convert ours to cordless…
You know, here I was laughing at everybody else’s paranoid friends and my husband is reminding me that he was all proud that he got a buyer for a car we were selling and I had a minor freakout that since this guy knew where our house was he was going to murder us (and steal our car).
He didn’t, but I still assert that that was reasonable and that it was an entirely reasonable precaution of me to text a photo of the guy’s license to somebody offsite.
For a couple of years, cellphone providers in many European countries did not charge if a call wasn’t answered but did if it was, and the charge for answering was relatively steep. People would come up with codes based on “dropped calls”, along the lines of “if we’re meeting at my place I’ll let it ring once and if it’s at Joe’s, twice.” Eventually the providers dropped those charges but people still use the codes.
Being a motorcycle rider I frequently get people warning me about my dangerous method of commuting.
Being a news writer, I like to tell them that deadly car crashes happen so often that we never cover them any more.
Heck, I don’t even bother with mass shootings any more unless at least a dozen people are killed.
My sweet mama in Utah worries a lot whenever anything that happens in a vaguely East Coast-ish locale. I’ve found – generally – that native Western and Eastern folks have only vague ideas of where states are located and how big (or small) they are.
Yeah, we get pinged by relatives for the same reason - mostly the ones on my husband’s side of the family (we’re even closer to DC than FCM is). Fortunately, since neither my husband nor I work in the District now, we’d be most likely to be slammed by the traffic fallout from anything that happened, but since I heard the plane hitting the Pentagon (from my office which was just a few miles away), it’s not THAT crazy a fear.
Many years back when we lived in North Carolina, the first I heard of a nasty series of tornadoes in the coastal region of the state was when my mother in law called to make sure we were OK. The storms were in a completely different part of the state but MIL didn’t know the geography.
I think it’s just human nature to worry about your “kids” no matter how grown up they are. Hell, I called my SIL when a flight from Denver to Chicago crashed back in 1989, as I knew he occasionally went to Denver on business.
Once, when I was 16, I was at the local Health Food Store with my mom, and I asked her if she would buy me some henna, as I was using it regularly at the time. This was the kind of store that sold it in bulk. so I hand the rolled-up, taped brown bag of henna to my mom as we stood in line. Flash forward to getting home. I change clothes, put the bag of henna on the bathroom sink, and went to the kitchen to get a bowl and spoon.
When I come back, the bag of henna is gone. Vanished. Poof! Nowhere.
After searching in increasingly unlikely peripheral areas, I finally asked my mom if she had seen the brown bag I’d left in the bathroom. (The one she herself had handled not half an hour before.)
“You mean your bag of pot?” she said, in a tone you can probably all imagine. Sheesh.
I did however, call my son when those pipelines exploded in San Bruno. But he was living just a couple blocks away at the time. And we had only very sketchy news about the exact location. As it turned out, he went right by there on his skateboard all the time, but not that day.