So I’m at the IKEA in the Chicago area. It’s a circular multi-level design and I’ve been there on several ocassions. I’ve got to use the restroom urgently. I excuse myself from my wife. So I zip over to the restrooms and having visted them on previous ocassions I know blindly where they are and dart right on in.
I go in and no ones present but all the stall doors are closed except for the one on the far end so I make a bee line for it. I made it!
Then while I’m sitting there I notice the guy in the stall next to me is wearing some pretty effeminate looking shoes. I shake my head thinking “dang, someone should really tell that guy he’s wearing ladies shoes.” Then I hear a couple people entering the bathroom. That’s strange? Why does it sound like ladies voic… :eek: :eek:
(i’m in the ladies restroom)(you know I do remember thinking there sure were a lot of stalls in here for a men’s room)
Everytime I’ve visited the restroom at this IKEA the men’s room is on the right, ladies on the left. HOWEVER… on the next floor down for whatever reason they are reversed with the mens on the left, ladies on the right. I zipped in without even looking at the signage.
Then I had to make my escape. I counted 1…2…3… flung the stall door open, kept my head and eyes down, walked as fast as I could out the door and just kept on speed walking across the store and found my wife.
She looked at me and asked “Why are you sweating and breathing so hard?”
Once, when I had just learned to drive, I went up to the grocery store around dusk. When I came back out, my car wouldn’t start and it was now dark. I popped the hood and tried to do the only “car thing” I knew how to do: check the oil. So I pulled out the dipstick…and realized that I couldn’t see well enough to put it back in. At this point, I was ready to cry.
Suddenly, some good Samaritans came along. Two guys and a girl in a pickup truck (bless you, wherever you are)! They had a flashlight, so I could put the dipstick back in, and they looked around under the hood to see what they could see. They were stumped too for a while, until one of the boys asked, “Is the car in Park?”
Another time, I walked into work wearing my usual dress and pantyhose, but I had forgotten to change out of my “driving shoes” which didn’t really match, although they are quite snazzy. They’re black canvas sneakers with white stars. 
Ah yes, I’ve run into the “But the plugstrip is already plugged in! The power must be out!” scenario more than once under someone’s desk. Yes, it needs to be plugged in, but not into itself!
My head-smacker was last weekend at a friend’s garage. They wanted a GFI installed to replace the plain outlet that’s about two inches away from the laundry sink. I found the appropriate breaker, cut the power, installed the GFI and put the power back on. I plug my GFI tester into the new outlet to verify a hot hot, a neutral neutral and a grounded ground. All’s good, so I press the test button. The GFI’s button pops out like it should. I press the reset button, and it won’t reset.
Took me about 15 minutes of fiddling with it before I thought to look in the nearby bathroom and find a tripped GFI. :smack:
I left it tripped, went back to the garage to put the regular outlet back in and apply a “GFI protected” sticker to it so the electrical code mavens would be satisfied. Back to the bathroom to restore power, then off to the fridge for a beer.
Friday, on the hottest day of the year (107), I was taking down the crappy old miniblinds and installing room darkening cellular shades. It’s hot. It’s miserable. The window is screaming heat at me.
One of my windows has six holes in the molding above it because, while the ancient wood in my house is really, really hard, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get through it at all and figured I hit a knot or something.
I had the drill in reverse.
Lately when I’ve been driving I’ll park, turn my car off, and somehow get it in my head that the lights were on (middle of the day, even). I know it can’t be right, because I’ll sit there and wonder about it for a few seconds before turning the knob and… turn the lights on.
For my job, though, I’ve been called out for the not-clogged drains, and breakers that were off. One of the funniest was the gal that called our office, furious that she’d just moved in 2 weeks before and her referigerator was broken and her food was going to spoil and we needed to replace the whole thing NOW!
What was wrong with it? The fridge bulb was out.
When we moved our copy/fax machine to the new office, my boss called and told me to call the company because the screen was out.
Me: Are you sure it’s not the contrast dial.
Her: What’s that?
Me: The contrast dial. The dial all the way to your left that you can barely see. Turn it.
After 15 seconds of silence: Oh. Never mind.
Right up there with on black sock and one navy blue.
A story told on an anonymous (and probably dead by now) stranger: Mr dad’s uncle used to sell Chevrolets. He sold one to a nice little old lady, who brought it back after a couple of weeks complaining that the gas mileage was terrible. He drove her home and drove the car around for an evening himself. Filled the tank, drove around town, and filled it again when he brought it back into work the following morning. Gas mileage calculates out just fine, and he reported such to the little old lady.
She comes back in a week later, insisting that the car is guzzling gas like a, like a, like some great guzzling thing. Uncle Chick repeats the service he performed the prior week, noting no differences, and returns the car to the little old lady. After two days, she STILL can’t get more than ten or twelve miles to a gallon of gas.
Uncle Chick, says, “Let’s go for a drive. I’ll sit in the passenger seat.” The nice little old lady gets in the driver’s seat, makes sure her mirrors are adjusted properly (wanting to impress the automotive professional with her knowldege of safe motor vehicle operating practices, no doubt), pulls a handy knob out of the dashboard, and hangs her handbag on the choke. Then she starts the engine…
Okay, that’s probably bad form, being both about a stranger, and a 1950’s-style CD-ROM cupholder story. So here’s one on me:
- I’m living in the BEQ at SUBASE, Pearl Harbor. My roommate is on leave. I’m sleeping in my tighty-whities. At 0300 (or so) I suddenly wake up and head for the door. More accurately I stand up, and head for the door. It’s not until I step outside into the breezeway and hear the door click shut behind me that I can be said to actually be awake. The all-night petty officer of the watch is in an office about a quarter of a mile across the base, in the newly built quarters on the other side of the EM club.
Fortunately, five minutes of pounding on the door of the guy two rooms down, woke him up, and he was kind enough to loan me a pair of dungarees. Still, not the kind of walk you want to take at 0-dark-thirty in your bare feet.
Well, the way it happened was that I was making a cheese sauce, okay? And it was going well, except somehow (I don’t remember exactly, it doesn’t matter) I got sauce all over the fingers of my left hand. Now the paper towels were on the other side of the kitchen, but the sauce was at that point where I had to keep stirring it or it would stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. But, Oh! No problem! There’s a pan of water here I can quickly dip my hand in and rinse the sauce off.
And it was in that second between my fingers going into the water and my actually feeling the heat that I recalled that this pan also contained the pasta to go with the sauce, and that only thirty seconds earlier I’d taken it off the heat because it had boiled for long enough.
Anyway, the marks are pretty much gone by now, so we’ll say no more about it, all right?
I was 16 and my sister was 18. Her (soon to be my) car was acting funny: it would shake when she got to a certain speed on the highway. I knew very little about cars, but I figured that, being male, I could probably figure it out.
Spent a day with my equally-incompetent father reading the owner’s manual, checking various fluids, gently unscrewing and rescrewing things, etc. before we decided that there was something seriously wrong with the car that only a trained expert would be able to handle.
The mechanic listened to us for a minute, and went straight to the front wheel where, after brief inspection, he pointed out the big lump of tar stuck to the tire tread. ::forehead smack::
How about going to the gym, opening up your gym bag and discovering that you brought along sneakers from two different pairs of shoes, both for the right foot?
I once turned the car around while driving to work because I couldn’t find my keys. You know, the keys on the same ring as the car key? The car key in the ignition of the car I was driving?
Yeah, I did this one once…even the dog wouldn’t touch it.
Drive into at a gas pump. Get out of the car. Take out wallet. Take out credit card. Swipe credit card. Nothing happens. Swipe credit card again. Nothing happens. Swipe again, feel funny about the way the card reader looks and the angle it is in…swipe again anyway. Wife comes out of the car, watches action, looks at me, point to the actual card reader located a little away. Hmm…so where was I swiping my credit card?
In the slot where where the receipt comes out. :o :smack:
At least it wasn’t your library card
Years ago I worked 2nd shift in a shop where you had to wear steel toed shoes. Early in the afternoon I put on my sneakers and walked out to get the mail, walked around the yard picked up some sticks and stuff, then looked at trhe time and realized I have to leave for work NOW.
Oh crap now I’m at work in ratty beat to hell wrong shoes, but I didn’t notice yet. This was also the one day a month the owner had a mini meeting with the employees to tell us any news or such. Guess who noticed first?
Now I own my own shop so Nyeah! Go to hell Bill for sending me home, I’m going to put you out of buisness.
More because they are incompetent idiots, but I’ll stick with the shoe story.
This is probably more of a Fear of a Large Repair Bill story than out-and-out ignorance … well, it’s pretty stupid, too. I drove around for more than an year – which included two blazing hot summers – without air-conditioning in my van. I was positive the a/c had “gone out” and would have to be replaced. Why I was so certain, I have no idea. Mostly likely a Murphy’s Law sort of fatalism. People even told me, “it probably just needs coolant” (or whatever it is). Yeah, probably. Most likely the entire engine needs to be replaced.
I finally took it in. Of course it just needed coolant. The $1 gazillion repair I’d imagined cost … $40. :smack: You don’t know hot until you’ve driven around in a van with no a/c with all the windows rolled up, trying to talk on the cell phone. Not to mention the new stinky vinyl floor mats.
I have also arrived at work in gorgeous summer dresses and skirts … and old comfy soccer-type slides. Stunning. :rolleyes:
This wasn’t me. Honest.
My mother walked out of the store one time and pressed the button to unlock her car. Nothing happened. She kept trying and it didn’t work. She called AAA to tell them she couldn’t get into her car. They AAA guy arrived about 30 minutes later, took the key ring from my mother, stuck the key in the door and opened it up. He told her to just replace the battery in the remote and then drove off.
She learned her lesson because any time that she couldn’t get the car remote to work she would try using the key. Well, a few months later it happened again. She tried to put the key in the door and it wouldn’t go in. She kept struggling with it but it didn’t work. She called my father up and told him what was happening. He said, “What color car are you looking at?”
You see, my parents had matching Honda Accords but in different colors and my mother forgot she was driving my fathers car (black) that day instead of her own (white). She had been trying to open up some stranger’s white Honda Accord with my father’s car keys.
A couple of months ago, I walked out the front door of my house, getting ready to leave for work.
I notice, along the street, the neighbors’ garbage cans, and I remember that today is trash day but I neglected to take the cans down to the curb the night before.
I go back into the house, wrap up the kitchen trash, and take it out the side door, which is where the cans live. I dump the trash bag and haul the can down to the street. Then I go to work.
And I come home from work ten hours later and discover my front door wide open.
Which I had done, exactly the same way, a month before.
I’ve found myself confused when I’ve taken my wife’s car (we both have Civics; hers is black, mine is silver).
Another (far worse) car confusion story (not me):
This happened to my brother-in-law’s sister. My sister and her husband live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in central NH. It’s the sort of place where no one thinks twice about leaving their house unlocked, or leaving the car running while they run into the grocery store. BIL’s sister and her husband came to visit, and the two of them decided to run to the store. They took BIL’s truck. When they came back, BIL asked his sister where the keys were.
“I left them in the truck.”
“Shit. I wish you hadn’t done that. The truck locks automatically after twenty seconds. I don’t have a spare.”
“Well, that’s weird. I left them in the truck at the store. I didn’t think I had, but I must have, 'cause when I got in, there they were.”
So they ran out to the truck, to find good news and bad news.
The good news: the keys were not locked in the truck.
The bad news: it wasn’t his truck.
They had managed to get into and drive home somebody else’s truck, not noticing that not only was the truck a different make and model, but it wasn’t even the same color.
Fortunately, whoever owned the truck was apparently a slow shopper, as they were able to drive back to the store, drop off the truck (nobody there looking bewildered, no cops taking statements), and drive back in BIL’s truck. The keys were in his sister’s purse where she had put them when she went the first time.
I was walking and chatting with a co-worker and they got their keys out, unlocked the vehicle and got in. Once in they looked around, looked at me and said, “this is not my car.”
Same make, same model, same mall parking lot.
It was weird.