Companion thread tothis thread.
Going to the bathroom occasionally happens but is orders of magnitude shown less on the big or small screen. That’s probably a good thing.
Ragtag group of misfit underdogs beats establishment at its own game.
My post in the “mother” thread:
Sounds like somebody failed to actually read the OP & title.
Which is also stunningly common in real life but very rarely happens in the movies; messageboards being nearly absent from modern entertainment. 
Yep even spending time on a computer is rarely seen. A quick, and always successful, google-ish search is pretty much all that you get.
…I suspect that this is going to be a tricky thread without some ground rules. There’s obviously a plethora of totally mundane things rarely shown on TV, and it’s also tempting to give examples that are really talking about TV tropes, but negated.
Being on your cellphone while walking and talking at the same time, and another call comes in; you inevitably bungle putting the first caller on hold while simultaneously hanging up on both callers. Hollywood never has this problem–they switch between calls with ease.
Tripler
I do this constantly–stoopid iPhone.
I feel like this must have happened to Larry on Curb Your Enthusiasm at some point.
When people talk in real life, there are often lots of “uhs”, “ums”, “ya knows”, and so on. You rarely see this on TV or in the movies - dialog is always smooth and continuous… and unrealistic.
Masterbation. Unless you count porn movies, obviously. Then its really common, but still not as common as real life.
Saying “goodbye” before hanging up the phone.
I never even try to switch and honestly have no clue how to do so. I’m an Android user.
If you look at the screen while the second call is ringing / beeping you’ll see some new buttons / words have appeared. On my Samsung Android it looks about like
- Answer [name of new caller] & put [name of old caller] on hold
- Answer [name of new caller] & hang up on [name of old caller]
- Merge the two calls together.
With the invisible implied “do nothing” fourth option being
- Ignore [name of new caller] and they’ll be sent to voicemail soon.
That’s fairly idiot-proof. Except if …
- You tap one of those buttons with your cheek unwittingly and unnoticed.
- You tap the button to change calls just as the incoming call jumps to voicemail and disappears from your phone.
- You tell the first person “Oh, I’ve got a call I need to take; I’ll be right back”, and they unexpectedly hang up and the first call disappears from your phone just as you’re tapping one of the three new buttons.
- You’re still reading your screen and considering your choices when the incoming call jumps to voicemail and disappears from your phone.
In my personal case …
Very often my phone only rings twice before the call jumps to voicemail, rather than the 4 or 5 rings I’d prefer. Suggesting the system thinks my phone is actually making noise a few seconds before it is. Or maybe the world has just gotten less patient & the phone carriers know it and have programmed the forward-to-VM timer appropriately short.
As such, unless my phone is sitting out next to me while I’m seated with a free hand, I often cannot answer it before the call jumps to VM a moment too soon. That same effect applies to a second call while I’m on a call. By the time I can notice the sounds of a second call coming in, look at the phone, make a decision, and get my grubby finger pointed at the desired button, the second call is about to disappear, or just did.
And no, I’m not a slow-moving geezer. Yet.
I don’t know what’s common for everyone but for me…
Around the house, people don’t wear shoes, people wear comfy clothes - they don’t look like they just came off the shelf. Hair and stuff isn’t perfect. People scratch, cough, etc. from time to time. There are occasional short side conversations - oh, Sally called…
But…if you leave out mundane stuff and negated tropes, what’s left? When I half-jokingly suggested starting a thread like this in the other, ‘mother’ thread, I used a couple negated tropes:
Well there might be some interesting parts of the human experience that have been relatively neglected, possibly due to the difficulty in trying to convey them in visual media, or just for no particular reason.
I thought the minor illness was a good example; it’s a PITA thing (sometimes literally) that even young and fit people will experience once or twice a year. But it’s hard to make that into anything meaningful in a story. Whereas a character suffering a life-threatening illness, alien parasite etc is. So Chekov’s cough is rarely just the common cold (especially now that the meme of getting drunk on cough medicine is a tired trope).
Especially after getting up after a good night’s sleep. People in movies do all kinds of things immediately after getting up, from cooking breakfast, having sex up to fighting baddies, but no one ever takes a pee first thing in the morning, like everybody in real life does.
You know how you can be walking down a familiar staircase, think you have one more riser to go but you don’t and you try walking through the floor or end up hitting the deck? Never see that in a movie.
Jim Carrey’s character did in Me, Myself & Irene; but you’re right that it’s rare.
I seem to recall an episode of Law & Order: SVU in which Det. Olivia Benson was struggling with a bad case of the flu. As far as I recall the main import of that was simply that Benson was having to defend herself against Internal Affairs when not at her best.
ETA: it was a bit more than that; the fact that Benson had been home sick without seeing anyone left her with no alibi for a murder IAD pegged her for.
Will Smith’s character did so in Independence Day as well.