Years ago (1989 through 1990) I was a flight attendant for American Airlines. One of my biggest fears (had many nightmares about this for some reason) was oversleeping and missing my pickup and flight for the next day. I have no idea why this bothered me so much.
We had landed in LAX around 8 PM and I was exhausted. I got to my room, ate dinner and went to bed early. The particularly wonderful room I was staying in didn’t have a bedside clock so I called the front desk to request a 4:30 AM wake-up call. The van would be picking up the flight crew at 6 AM for our return trip to the airport.
I had left my watch on the bedside table within easy reach before drifting off to sleep around 9:30 PM. A loud noise woke me up and I felt like I’d been asleep forever. I reached over to look at my watch, squinting to read the numbers. It was 5:15! Oh my God, what happened to my wake-up call? My heart started pounding with fear and I shot out of bed to run to the shower, adrenaline surging through my veins. I hurriedly showered and washed my hair, feeling awful the whole time, repeating to myself over and over, “They’re gonna leave without me, they’re gonna leave without me!!!”.
With my wet hair in a towel, I sat back down on the bed to turn the TV on expecting to watch the early morning news. I stared stupidly at the TV, not grasping at first what I was actually seeing. Guess what was on? Freaking Johnny Carson!!! I grabbed my watch to look again, realizing that it had been upside down the first time I had looked at it. It was really only about 11 PM! :smack:
I was so upset that I couldn’t get back to sleep, more worried than ever that I was gonna over sleep and get left behind. After this, I never traveled again without my very own alarm clock AND a wake-up call!
I don’t really blame myself but . . .
Customer comes in claiming he has a floppy disk his computer won’t read. I try it on a couple computers and use a few oldtime tricks I learned back before you young’uns had this here Windows thingy. This disk was dead.
Ok, time to reformat it. I ask the customer THREE TIMES is there anything on this disk you need to keep? Three times the answer is no.
format a:
Ahh good, it’s formatting.
Customer: Good thing. My wife’s thesis that she’s been working on for three years is on that disk.
I don’t know if it’s worse if these were all different times or all at once. No offense, but all at once would be pretty damn funny, especially if it resulted in a “Need answers fast” thread.
but please not one of the those “Ask the guy who . . .”
Just a couple of stupid but annoying little things. I had to set my alarm clock for 9 a.m. … 9 A.M. …A.M. STUPID, NOT P.M.
I usually drink my wakeup coffee before 8 a.m. every day. Today I didn’t get my wakeup coffee until 1 p.m. It is now 10 p.m. and I am still wired with caffeine :mad: - I am an idiot. Instead of winding down to go to sleep, I’m mopping the floor.
We got a Frydaddy as a wedding gift from friends. It’s basically a little bucket with a heating element on the bottom. There’s a plastic lid you put on between uses, so you can reuse the oil. It is important to remove the lid before you begin heating the oil, as it is made of entirely ordinary plastic, which melts when heated. I didn’t have any trouble with this the first 25 times I used it.
Deep fried plastic is not good on tater tots. And the frydaddy was totally destroyed.
No, the idiot thing is that they designed a Fry Daddy with a plastic lid. I mean, any fool could see that people will eventually forget, and leave the lid on while it’s heating, and melt the lid, and then they’ll have to buy a new Fry Daddy . . . Oh . . . wait . . .
Hey, my first revived zombie thread! Remarkably, I haven’t done anything totally stupid since my last post back in October. I mean besides transfering money to a China mutual fund just before it lost me $8K.
Delicious chicken dish in oven is ready for dinner. Scramble around for for oven gloves and remove dish from oven and place on stand on dining table. Return oven gloves to kitchen.
Sit down to dinner and remove lid from casserole with bare hand. OUCH. Two burned fingers.
A good mate of mine had this problem while mowing. He had a total brain fade and reached down to flip the mower over before the blades had stopped spinning. He was very lucky that just the tips of two fingers skimmed the ends of the blades and after micro surgery he is still able to play piano.
To be honest, I’m really embarrassed by some of the threads that I start on this board. I would say that about a fifth of the threads that I start leave me thinking “God, I’m a fucking dolt!” not too long after. God couldn’t explain why I start threads like these:
Looking over the threads that I have started, I can see, thankfully, that most of them actually make sense in some way. But I do think I need to think a lot more before I start threads. Some of these just make me want to stick my head in the sand.
Very similar to my fears (my most frequent recurring dream is that I’ll be late for work, and, like your revelation, mine ties in nicely). Since I have to get up at 5am to go to work (start at 6:15, catch the first bus of the day at 5:45) it’s a justifiable fear (even though I’m not late nearly as often as some of my cow-orkers).
So, one day, I wake up and look at the alarm clock in horror, it was already half past! I’ve slept throught he alarm before, and knew what to do in such an emergency: no time for shower or breakfast, just dress quickly and rush out the door to make the bus. All my clean pants were in the dryer, noticed it was still on even though I started the thing at 11pm last night. Odd, but we were having problems with the dryer not turning off back then (since fixed). Likewise my iPod wasn’t fully charged from last night either. Again, odd.
Anyways, ran out of the house at 40 past and got to the bus stop 2 minutes later, but somethign was wrong. The peopel who normally catch the bus with me weren’t there! This must mean the bus already picked them up! I looked down the street to see if I could see the tail end of the bus. No dice. I then thoguht something was wrong with the time when I looked at my watch, so I did one of those classic cartoon double-takes and looked again. 12:42. I had awoken at 12:30 and only paid attention to the last two digits of the time when I checked the time on the alarm clock, on the clock in the kitchen, and my watch. Sheepishly made my way back home, got undressed and back in bed, only to do it all over again 5 hours later.
To add insult to injury, the song on my iPod while all this was going on? Alice Cooper’s “Hey Stoopid”.
I’m picturing an Inspector Cleauseu-esque situation here …
Back when I worked at a fast food place, we had these large fryers in the kitchen for our french fries and other fried stuff. Each one of them holds a few gallons of oil in it heated up by these long tubes sitting about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom.
I was opening that day and was filling up each of the fryers with fresh oil before turning them on. I was only able to fill up one of them about 1/3 of the way up before I needed to go downstairs to get more oil. Being Mr. Efficient, I decide to turn on the fryer and let the oil heat up as I get more. 15 mins later I get back upstairs and the thing is on fire! Apparently, if the heating rollers are not covered completely by oil, it’ll catch fire on the surface.
Panicking, I did the exact opposite of everything they’ve ever warned you about a grease fire: I got a cup of water and tossed it in. A giant fireball formed, it looked like a mushroom cloud from a nuke detonating and breaking into the air. I don’t know how it didn’t trip the fire alarm, I guess the alarms in the kitchen above the fryers require a little more heat than a freaking fireball.
So I went through a drive-through one evening. After paying for my meal, instead of putting my wallet back in my bag, I put it on my lap – and promptly forgot about it. When I got out of the car in the parking lot of my apartment complex, it must have fallen from my lap onto the pavement beside my car. But it was dark and I didn’t notice.
The next day I went to work, as usual. I guess I assumed my wallet was in my bag, and I didn’t need it all day, so I didn’t even realize it was missing. While I was at work, the maintenance guy plowed the snow in the parking lot outside the apartment. When I arrived home that evening I parked in my usual place. Got out of the car and noticed something brown sticking out of the newly-plowed snow bank. What do you know? It’s my wallet! Slightly frozen, but otherwise completely intact and nothing stolen.
Then there was the time I set my wallet down on the back bumper of the car. I guess I needed a hand free to close the trunk after loading the groceries. It stayed on there a few blocks, apparently. Because a few blocks away from the grocery store is where the nice people who called me about my lost wallet said they found it.
I’ve not done anything stupid lately- but just for lack of opportunity and luck, not any cleverness on my part. But my husband did a monumentally stupid thing that could have ended very badly.
My husband was covering a shift for one of the paramedics under him which put him in a position to fuel the ambulance, something he hadn’t done in quite a while. So he pulled into the gas station, prepared to begin fueling and apparently grabbed the wrong diesel nozzle (the one meant for big rigs I guess…) which did not fit in his gas tank. Instead of replacing the nozzle, moving the truck to the right one, etc. he held the (too large) nozzle over the gas tank and fueled up. Everything was fine until he was finished and needed to remove the nozzle. It had formed a vapor lock and when forced away, diesel fuel sprayed everywhere…all over him, his cell phone, his tools, everything. I had to do an emergency shop for new boots (there was no salvaging them) he had to trash his entire uniform and all his clothes right down to underwear, I got him a new cover for the cell phone (which amazingly is not damaged) but it still smells faintly of diesel, all his tools, flashlights, pocket cards/books etc. had to simply be replaced.
His two minutes or so of laziness cost us hundreds of dollars (the boots that he prefers are not cheap!) and a lifetime of no longer being allowed to fuel the ambulance…so maybe it was worth it.
I once laid mine on top of the car and drove off. It had $250.00, my passport and several credit cards in its plastic sleeves.
Some guy found it on the side of the road, sent me the credit cards, passport, but kept the money, which was money I had saved for one of my germany trips.:smack:
Last winter I decided to let the Focus warm up and to melt the windshield ice in subfreezing weather, while I was eating my breakfast in the kitchen. I always use the keyless entry fob that is on the main ring with the door/ignition key. The spare keyless entry fob had its tab loop broken and had been lost from the spare key ring long ago. (I’ve carried a spare key ring with duplicates of all key keys ever since the last time I locked my only key in the car, years earlier).
Went in the house to finish my raisin bran and the car doors automatically locked, or maybe I locked them either out of habit or to keep the car thieves out.
Well, I called AAA for a service call to unlock the car door. (My slim jim was in the car, of course.) An hour later, the AAA tow truck showed and he slim-jimmed the door open, so I then went to work, an hour late.
Then I realized that the spare car door/ignition key, which I NEVER use, was on my spare keychain in duh pocket.
I once had my wallet with about $400 in it fall out of my back pocket in the restroom of a waffle house. I guess the next guy going in saw me coming out and brought the wallet to our table. As we are leaving the snow covered parking lot my wife goes into a slide and smashes into another car that just happened to belong to the man who brought me back my wallet. :smack:
No good deed goes unpunished, eh CR? Wow. Mine is far simpler:
I’ve shared an apartment with a wonderful woman for ten years, and for the last 119 months I’ve remembered to put the seat down on the toilet, faithfully. Yesterday after working outdoors most of the afternoon, I returned to the office. I was losing some layers by my desk, and felt that tremendous urge to run to the restroom for an immediate number 2. Not even looking in my haste…3…2…1…SPLASHDOWN!:eek:
Not a happy camper here, but only mad at myself.
And the frydaddy was totally destroyed. 