For me, it was being suspected to a homophobic diatribe at the grocery store.
Mrs. Rhymer and I were in line, idly canoodling, when the man behind us said “Look at this!” Foolishly turning, I saw that he was holding up a magazine article about some apparently not-quite-in-the-closet redheaded starlet whose name I should know, but don’t. The fellow then began inveighing against dykes, fags, and he-shes (his words, not mine), whose growing visibility in society, he felt, was a sure harbinger of the swiftly appraching apocalypse.
Why he felt the need to point this out to the heterosexual couple not-quite making out in front of him I don’t know. I almost wished either Mrs. Rhymer or I was the other gender so we could go on to full-bore making out and thus offend him properly. Mrs. Rhymer, on the other hand, simply said to him, “Get therapy, sir. Or a boyfriend. I don’t think it matters which.”
Technically last week, but it still hurts. I was opening a beer bottle, and hit myself in the eye, scratching my cornea in the process. Although, that might be under the “dumbest thing you’ve done this week” entry. There’s one every week!
I was at the hardware store, buying a gallon of paint. While it was in the shaker, I noticed the name tag of the guy who was helping me. This guy was probably in his mid-late '60s. He apparently had not taken very good care of himself. He sort of sagged all over, and his head was slid forward, like it was drooping off his neck. He looked like a melting ice cream cone.
I nodded toward his name tag. “You have the same first name as my dad,” I said casually.
“No kidding?” he replied. “You don’t see that name much anymore.” His voice was gravelly and slow.
“No,” I agreed.
“I remember once I met this gal in [local neighborhood], and she asked me my name, and I told her, uh, what was the name of the guy, uh, the Hunchback of Notre Dame?”
I thought maybe he meant the writer. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“Quasimodo!” He exclaimed. “I told her my name was Quasimodo. She said, ‘That’s a interesting name. What kind of name is it?’ I told her ‘French’!” He laughed. “I dated her for about two weeks and never told her my real name. She’d call my place and ask, ‘Is Quasimodo there?’” He laughed some more. His laughter slowed and became wistful. “Ah, of course that was back in the days of …” he paused thoughtfully and held his hands out like he was about to catch something, “great sex. You could get laid without worrying about dying the next day.”
OK. Well, I’ll just be taking the paint, then, nicetalkingtoyou.
That was just a very odd monologue. I have no idea why the paint guy wanted to share that with a stranger.
We’re in the middle of office expansions, and a contractor is in to install additional network cabling.
Yesterday, he said “We’ve worked together before.”
“Sorry, I don’t remember.” [redacted exegesis on various places we may have crossed paths]
“Sure, I did a job at Benndorf-Verster, back when they were on Boundary road. I talked to you then.”
“Oh.”
“Sure, I remember what we talked about: You were playing Duke Nukem at the time, and really into it.”
I don’t remember this conversation at all. Who the hell remembers details about random conversations with random people they had thirteen years ago? :eek:
Added weird: I had just thought of Duke Nukem that morning, after seeing the thread here titled “Best threats in…[entertainment that isn’t video games]”
There is a long story about an electrician who was supposed to come and rewire my garage a month and a half ago and who, for one reason or another, kept failing to show up as promised. Last week, he finally got around to showing up, and then didn’t finish. On Monday, he was supposed to finish, and when I got home from work, I discovered he hadn’t.
For once, he actually called to let me know why he didn’t show, and he was very grouchy as he told me his latest tale of woe. He told me my job is “the bane of his existence.” That was the last straw. I told him I’m not exactly happy with any of this either, and if he finds it so difficult to work on my house, I’ll make it easy for him and won’t ever hire him again. We got into it on the phone.
Five minutes later, he shows up at my house. That scared me a little. Was he pissed off and coming to continue the fight in person or something? Nope. He decided to come finish that night.
He starts working and tells me how stressed out he is, about all the problems he’s got, how tired he is, etc. And then all of a sudden he says, “And now I’m grouchy, and I’m saying things that make me sound like an asshole!”
I burst out laughing, it was so funny when he said that. I’ve been laughing about it all week every time I tell the story. When I laughed, he suddenly calmed down and became a lot nicer. He finished up the project, and we were chatting and joking around by the time he left.
There are these weird ads appearing everywhere–on buses, in subway stations… They’re basically blue and white, mostly blank, with maybe two inches of a big letter showing from one side. Some of them have a tiny ‘er’ printed in the middle.
The place I had to go to update one of my certifications was only accessible through a coffee shop. Now, Boulder is an unusual place, but this was an engineering firm with badge-key security and their main entrance was in a coffee shop. It wasn’t like the coffee place was there to provide for the building or anything, just your run-of-the-mill sidewalk cafe with a secure door off to the side. And it didn’t feel anything like I was a spy meeting my contact in their secret office.
That’s not a very good story, but it’s the best I got right now. I’ll make up something interesting later.
I was going to add a story, but I realized it was too disgusting to just stick in a thread along with nondisgusting stories, so I started a new thread with a warning at the top. My story of how my day was like a horror movie is [thread=477963]here[/thread]
Wait, what!? And are you implying that there was something nonrandom that was even stranger? I believe more details are required. Or is there a thread on this that I missed?
My strangest things sucks in comparison. The guy who came out to fix my phone line noticed that I used to work for the company and we got to chatting. Turned out that when he started back in 1981, he worked in the same office for the same woman who was my first boss at the company in 1974. But, back to the marbles…WHAT!?
This morning I went out to get my newspaper and there was a large orange traffic cone sitting in the exact center of the entrance to my driveway, between the sidewalk and the street. There is no road construction going on in my neighborhood, and I know for a fact that it was not there at six o’clock last night, when a friend parked in my driveway.
I moved it to the side so we could go out and get breakfast and it’s still sitting there. I wonder if I’ll ever find out who put it there, and why.
