Back in the pawn shop days, I worked with a guy who, shall we say, wasn’t the brightest penny in the roll. One day I find him attempting to cut through a golf ball with a dull pocket knife. The blade hit a nicked part of the ball and glanced off the first knuckle of the index finger of his left hand.
Cost: 9 stitches and the loss of feeling in that part of his hand for almost a year.
I told him afterwards, “You know, one day, you’re going to be doing something more stupid and it’s going to cost you a vital bodily function.” He laughed and even agreed with me.
Cut to one year later. He’s working at another store location. For some reason, he, the GM (you’ll remember him from a previous thread), and another employee (a police officer who worked for the county) are upstairs shooting 9mm pistols into the concrete walls (don’t ask, I still don’t get it). He fires a shot and somehow the round hits a piece of metal, fragments and hits him in the right eye.
Cost: 95% loss of sight in that eye. He just sees light and shadows now.
The GM’s story was that he hit his eye on the corner of a safe :rolleyes: and paid the entire bill for the surgery (over $10,000).
I didn’t work with him for a few weeks, but the minute he saw me, he said, “You were right.”
A friend and I were opening a shop in a flea market. After painting a wall red (you want to draw attention) I began putting up the shelves…you know the ones…vertical strips on the wall then the metal pieces to hold the shelves. After trying to do the job properly, measuring everything and using a level, I gave up and just eye-balled the whole job. Never been good with the ‘technical’ stuff.
Friend’s boyfriend/future husband/ex-husband and I didn’t really care for each other and he constantly looked for ways to denigate anything I said or did.
They came by the shop after I finished and he looked at the shelving. He, being the ass he was, told me it was not level. I told him I eye-balled it to put it up and said it couldn’t be off by more than a quarter inch. Again, being the ass, he measured it…my leveling was off by only a sixteenth of an inch.
Hmm. I think probably when my best friend came out after years in denial. I remember at one point hearing the words ‘I’m glad you’re in a relationship because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple anymore, but I hate it too because you don’t spend as much time with me anymore’ and being able to say nothing in response but ‘Listen to yourself! You are not straight!’
We’d make a terrible couple, but I do get to say ‘Oh, and I told you so’ every six months or so.
When I was ten years old, my parents instituted what I think of as the “Ferris Bueller Rule”: if you asked to stay home from school and yet had no tangible signs of illness, you had to stay in your room all day, no television, no radio (books were allowed–which is odd, as I would rather read than watch TV at that age, anyway).
One Monday morning, I didn’t feel well. Mom gave me the once-over and decided that there was nothing wrong with me, so I was sent to my room–and I went happily. Tuesday rolled around, I still didn’t feel good, and Mom didn’t want to hear it. She packed me off to school amid many complaints, but I still wasn’t quantitatively ill, so I had to go. I came home for lunch that day (my school allowed it until I was in the fifth grade or so) and told Mom I still wasn’t feeling well, but she just gave me my mac & cheese and sent me back.
That afternoon, I walked in the door from school, still feeling awful, opened my mouth to say “I’m home,” and instead vomited half-digested macaroni and cheese all over the new baby-blue carpet.
Approximately an hour later, when the doctor diagnosed me with scarlet frickin’ fever, I looked at Mom and said “Toldja I didn’t feel good.” And then passed out.
I have almost the same story as Draelin. (Stop being me!)
Went to India in my 15th summer. I had a great time, and when I came back, started feeling sick on the first day of school.
My mom believed my default state was lying, and never believed me no matter what. So she packed me off to school. In the middle of the day I started feeling feverish, light-headed, and miserable. By the time I got home, though, it was all gone.
Next day, same thing. Packed me off to school, and gave me to Advils in case I got sick. And when I got back, nothing.
Third day, woke up, and threw up in the toilet. Then began a week of hitting all kinds of American doctors, with my fever rocketing up to 103 with chills, then down with intense sweats and throwing up everything but plain water, even Sprite.
Finally we went to a Indian doctor who diagnosed me correctly with malaria, gave me quinine. I lost 20 pounds in those two weeks, and was sick as a dog. To this day I only have fuzzy memories of those two days, and barely remember my dad being around at all, though I know he was.
When I got better I did manage to say “Told you I was sick.”
A story I enjoy retelling from my days working in a shopping mall.
It was around xmas, and the place was packed. I was on my lunch break, and I’m munching a burger in the food court. I see this toddler walking along with a guy that’s probably grandpa. Toddler sees something in a shop window and starts hauling towards it. Grandpa says, “Wait. Don’t run, you’ll slip and fall.”
Toddler stops. Just then, another toddler hauls by them at top speed, slips, and face-plants right on the floor.
Second toddler is howling in tears, first toddler looks up at Grandpa, who simply says, “Just like that.”
The look on the first toddler’s face was as if his grandpa was some sort of holy man.
When I was about twelve I fell off my bike and landed squarely on my chin. Huge cut and a lot of pain. Mom butterfly bandaged the cut, but I still felt like something else was wrong. I wasn’t able to open and close my jaw much. I told my dad (who was a dentist!) and he didn’t believe me. He thought I was just being dramatic. A few hours later I finally convinced him to take me to the doctor, where they found I had fractured my jaw.
I slipped on a jungle gym at the neighbor’s house at about age 9 or so, and the first thing to hit the ground was my left thumb. Hurt like hell.
Ran home to tell Mom. She looked at it, saw my grubby little paw, and told me to wash it, seeing a small scrape on the palm. I argued a bit, but to no avail.
About 30 minutes later, I decided something wasn’t right, since now my thumb was badly swollen. Figuring Mom wouldn’t be much help, since she wasn’t the first time around, I went to Dad. He took one look at my hideously mangled hand, asked me what happened. I told him that Mom told me to “wash it”. The look on both their faces was priceless, for different reasons.
I got back at her though. Once we got to the doctor’s, I proceeded to throw up on her as she helped me out of the car.
To this day, I still tease Mom about it (she rolls her eyes every time), and now I have taken to telling my kids her advice for just about anything: scrapes, hurt feelings, lost items, broken relationships, etc.
“Grandma told me to just go wash my broken thumb, and I turned out OK. Maybe you should try washing it*”
I remembered another one. I repeatedly told my mother I thought I needed glasses. She thought I just wanted glasses to “look cool”. (Yes, let’s not go into how glasses are the opposite of looking cool in the fourth grade.) I recall bringing a note home from the school nurse that suggested I get an eye exam. Mom has no memory of that. What she does remember is that around Christmastime that year, she said “Hey, look at that pretty wreath on the door!” To which I responded “What door?”
It was amazing how much my general coordination improved once I could see more than two feet in front of my face.
Then there was the time when my brother sprained his ankle, and got all crutchified and babied for a day or two. Shortly thereafter, I fell off a jungle gym and hurt my foot. It wasn’t horrible, I could still limp along, but Mom thought I was just trying to get crutches like my big brother had. Until my foot swelled up to twice it’s size and she took me to the doctor–who was very, very nice and did not mention this incident at the Scarlet Fever Revelation a month later.
And yes, in all fairness, I was a ten-year-old drama queen who felt abandoned when Mom went back to school for her Master’s degree and therefore tried to get as much attention as humanly possible. These stories make her sound like a monster (or at the very least, unfit). I swear, she wasn’t.
My ex is a big biker. One day he came home after falling off his bike, complaining that his hand hurt. I thought it could be broken (because people just guard broken bones differently than they do other injuries), and told him to go to the doctor to get it checked out. He insisted that it was not broken, and spent a day complaining/whining about his sore hand while all the time refusing to go to the doctor. I finally insisted that he get an X-ray. He went to the local doc-in-the-box and had it radiographed. The doctor said “No break, must be a sprain.” For a day he told me what an idiot I was (“You can’t just tell that a bone is broken.” I wasted all that money" ) etc. He even mocked me to a few of his friends - “Long Time First Time just knew it was broken, but she was wrong.”
The next day the doctor’s office called. A real radiologist read the film - there was a break and it needed to be casted ASAP. Damn that felt good.
My almost-always-right friend swore there was no such term as “cherry-picker” for the telephone truck buckets folks ride in. Boy, it felt good to show her the dictionary entry.
My father is afraid of hospitals and believes in just walking off whatever the trouble is. I had two painful fingers after tossing the football with him and he wanted to just ignore it. After I got my mom to walk me to the hospital I could return and say “jokes on you, they’re both broken”.
My best friend, a trained psychologist to boot, was letting his 10-YO daughter do hurtful thngs to him, no respect, no response to discipline, etc.
And he ALLOWED it.
I told him, “Don, if you don’t get some kind of control of your daughter, your life’s gonna be a living hell.” He just laughed.
Fast-forward 11 years. While her boyfriend died of a drug overdose, she somehow managed to survive(took 8 days in hospital). Today, she’s married to a numb-nuts with no visible means of support. My friend Don is now supporting TWO children(adults).
It’s just a personal thing with me, I’d never say it to his face. And, this is one instance where I’d give well, not a limb exactly, but a few fingers, to be wrong.
Post Numbers #26 and #79 and, my only SD ITYS Moment, Post # 100 …
But I had been a LOUD proponent of Felt for Years IRL and once it was confirmed there were many to whom I was able give the Simpson’s Nelson Point and laugh: “HAHA” -
Ain’t it strange how people don’t - quite - recall that you said that or that they argued so hard against you in those situations.
When my brother went into the navy I did my best to dissuade him, but he was determined to sign up. I then told him that if he was smart he would only sign up for two years, see how he liked it, then he could always sign on for more if he wanted. (I knew several guys who had been in the army, navy and marines so I felt like I knew what I was talking about.) He proceded to sign up for a six-year stint. When he finally got out, I very gently told him “I told you so.” But it still felt good to be right.
I’m still in the middle of a huge “I told you so” that I will probably never actually say out loud. When my dad died last April and left a huge mess, I told my mom and sister how things would go, they ignored me (and got mad at me to boot), and things are playing out exactly how I said. Almost a year later, we’re still trying to deal with things, and if they had listened to me, it would have been done with probably before the end of last April.
There’s no sweet sense of righteousness to this, either, because it’s a huge mess that’s affecting all of us. Bah.
I’m sitting on the couch watching TV. My SO comes in from the kitchen where he’s making dinner to catch a news segment. He’s holding an 8" chef’s knife, which he it flipping and twirling around in patented Ninja Style™ hijinks next to his thigh. Dear, I tell him, you should stop flipping that knife around, you’re going to hurt yourself. Pooh pooh, is his rejoinder (probably something a tad more butch, though.) Flippety flippety zoom zip zip the knife goes. I try again–Sweetie, it’s really bugging me, you flipping that knife around right in my field of vision, and it can’t be safe, please stop, 'kay? Sneer, yeah right, don’t tell ME what to do–SCHNICK!
So, as I was saying, SCHNICK! As the knife embeds itself about an inch and a half long, a quarter inch under the skin into his thigh. I wish it to be known that I did NOT crow in victory, nor did I actually voice my ITYS, but I was definitely thinking it, and he knew it, too. He does not play with knives in this manner any longer…
