A day or two ago, a woman called the NDP Quebec office in a blue rage, complaining that our brochures were in English only, tabarnac, and did we know what an insult this was, etc., etc.
She left this as a message on the machine with no phone number, unfortunately, so we were unable to explain to her that had she happened to turn the brochure over at any point, she would have found that the brochure was printed with one side in English and one side in French. Wow - paper has two sides!
“There is no such thing as a stupid question”
THAT is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Whenever a professor completes his orientation day speech with this mamby-pamby-feel-good bull shit, I generally pipe up with something like “How many miles are there in the ocean?” or " How tall is a gallon" just to make a point. It usually elicits a chuckle or two and gets the professor to remember me.
Once, taking it too far, I asked my new math professor something to the effect of “How many green ones in a half empty bucket if you’re out of chocolate on a Tuesday?”
Not picking up on my sarcasm he replied, “To what are you referring?”
I answered, “Hang on I’ll have to ask them” …pause and stare questioningly at the ceiling…“probably by noon if you start in Memphis”
Never getting my joke about the ‘No Stupid Questions’ line, he must have had some serious doubts about my mental stability.
I know it’s a joke, John. I know it’s supposed to be along the lines of “Ban Dihydrogen Oxide!”.
This is not important enough to pursue further. I have nothing against you, and I don’t want to have a war over this. I’m sorry I pressed it this far, in fact.
If it makes you feel better, I have a joke that no one ever gets, even though I’ve always thought it was simple.
Me: I heard about this guy who bowled three hundred and won (one).
Them: You can’t bowl three hundred and one; it’s impossible.
Me: Ever see a guy bowl three hundred and lose?
Them: You can’t bowl three hundred and one. Three hundred is a perfect game.
Me: No, it’s a pun. He bowled three hundred and he won.
Them: I don’t get it. How could he bowl three hundred and one.
Me: :::sigh:::
Rilchiam, the joke is that 40% sounds way too high to most people, so they assume there must be fraud going on. Upon examination, 40% is exactly what you would expect it to be, al things being equal, so is not, in and of it self, evidence of fraud on the part of your employees. A manager using the fact that 40% of sick days are on Mondays and Fridays as a basis for accusing his/her employees of dishonesty is making a fool of himself.
This isn’t really a joke: it’s an illustration of hte fact that we humans do not really do statistics and probablity instinctvly: we tend to exagerrate differences and to overestimate things that confirm our expectations.
Oh. Okay, I get it.
Hey, I just thought of some more.
One time my uncle told me "All the companies that make radar detectors also make the radar guns police use. They have both sides of the market cornered."
Once we had a neighbor whose young son really was a black belt in karate. But at a lawn party she told everyone "I don’t know where to get the forms to register his hands as lethal weapons. I don’t want to get into trouble for not doing so."
:rolleyes:
Walking through the city with a freind the other day we stopped outside of tacky little tourist trap called Ye Olde Shoppe. It was built in the English Tudor style.
My freind described it as "An example of traditional Australian architecture."
It was just one of things that seemed so obviously incorrect to me that I wondered if I was the one that was wrong. My head’s still spinning.
I’ve posted this before, but I once heard a guy say “I’m a Creationist because no animal on earth coexists with the species it supposedly evolved up from. You don’t see any land whales walking around.”
I’m pretty sure that sentence made the Baby Jesus cry.
I have 2 -
The first is from a friend who sat through the whole of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch without cracking a smile (not a crime in itself, I accept), and then asked, “But how do they get the parrot to stay so still?”
The second is from a friend’s girlfriend, who recently stated, “Muslims only eat animals that have been killed whilst they are still alive!”
A long pause followed thereafter…
This is a little OT, but yesterday I saw a loaf of bread, the package of which proclaimed it to be "Fresh… …from the Past!"
What the hell?
Regarding the 40% of sick days issue, at my previous job I programmed the leave tracking system. The HR director asked for a report breaking down the sick days by day of week, and she was scandalized that nearly half of the sick days taken (41% or so, well within spitting distance of the expected 40%) were on Mondays and Fridays. Fortunately, her boss was an ex-techie and stopped her before she made a complete fool of herself. Note that this was in about 1987, so it predated Dilbert by a number of years.
This same cow-orker realized that a number of employees were not aware of some HR policy changes, because they didn’t read their email on a regular basis. At this time not all employees had access to the network, so there were shared computer terminals for them to get to their email; also, this was before the nearly universal use of email, so many people just logged in every couple of weeks to clear out their mailboxes. She decided to implement a new policy requiring all employees to read new emails within no more than 48 hours. How did she alert employees to the new policy? With an email, of course.
In the kitchen of a restaurant I worked at, I heard some employees discussing chicken wings–you know how they take just that one part of the wing, and call them “drumettes” or something like that. Well, one woman says, “How do they get chickens with such small legs?” And after thinking about it for a moment, declares, “I know! They must have amnesia. I mean, polio!”
I had a landlord once who told me his next door neighbor was a symphony repercussionist.
A couple of days ago I was trying to calm our (newly acquired) and VERY feisty kitten down by stroking and crooning at it. My youngest kid, very male and currently in a very macho phase of his life became concerned.
“Muuuum, don’t do THAT. You’ll turn the cat into a PUSSY”.
*Pussy (def): An insipid, cowardly person.
I hesitated a long time before posting this, because the dumbest thing i ever heard, i said it…
I had just finish training for a crisis/referral confidential (thank god for small favors) phone line. On our last night of training, we were taking actual calls. Finally my turn, i sit down and take my first call.
Caller: I want to kill myself
Me: hmmm hmmm hmmm ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, looked around totally panicked… thank god i was coached by someone with experience
I start asking questions, relaxing a little bit THEN… i did it…
Me: have you ever tried to kill youself before?
Caller: yes, three times
Me: oh, and it didn’t work???:eek:
Duh!!! was pretty much the caller’s response…
i turned about 25 shades of red… to this day, i have no words to describe how utterly stupid i felt…
Uttered by a girl in 12th grade history: “Who won the Civil War? Us or the French?”
Exchange between a boy and his social studies teacher:
Boy: “I hate the Supreme Court. They’re taking away my rights!”
Teacher: “Which rights?”
Boy: “Like abortion!”
And, unfortunately, uttered by yours truly: “Don’t you hate it when you’re wearing a watch and it digs into your forehead?”
? What’s wrong with that? My watch digs into my forehead from time to time, when I fall asleep (say) at my desk with my head resting on my wrist.
My boss has a 7 year old who is enrolled in a christian school (my boss is an athiest). Generally, he is getting a good education there however his teacher has her moments. My favorite is when the kids were asked to present questions that the teacher would answer for them.
So the 7 yr old asks: “Why do numbers go on forever?”
The teacher’s response: “Because God made them that way”
Thanks for that enlightenment.
How I could have forgot about this one:
2 summers ago I was having problems with squirrels nawing a hole in my roof and getting into my attic. So I set up one of those “Have-a-Heart” traps, which is just a little cage with a trap door. Anyone with a spoonful of brains can tell that it is an animal trap.
One morning my wife noticed our neighbor, Mauren, on our yard messing with the trap. When asked what the hell she was doing, Mauren said “I noticed those darn greedy squirrels are always trying to eat the food you put out for the birds. I shoo them away so they don’t get it, and wreck your little bird cage. I wish we could do something about these darn squirrels.”:eek:
My wife now refers to Mauren as Moron!
one of my favorites…
Walking to maching practice, in my full band uniform, carrying my saxaphone, with the rest of the band… innocent bystander “Are you guys in band?”
I looked at her with a honest face, and replied “No we like dressing funny and carrying around heavy instruments for fun”
Same thing happened when I was in my track uniform, Written on Uniform "Tiger Track and Field’ “Are you guys the Track team?”
hmmm… and some people don’t think
May 1st, going to town in the morning. A rather intoxicated young lady decides to sit next to me and starts bitching about her boyfriend. Seems they’ve had a fight the previous night, and she’s feeling quite disillusioned about the whole male gender.
“We don’t need men anyway. I mean, we have sperm banks, right?”
Okay… and sperm gets to the sperm bank how, exactly?