A woman recently said to me “I didn’t see you flashing over here.”
I once had a job wherein my boss’s title was Regional Inventory Manager. It was a fairly high-stress position, and I don’t think he liked it very much.
One day I was talking with a female salesperson about our respective prospects for career advancement and I said, “Well, I really don’t want the RIM job.” I immediately realized what I’d just said, but she didn’t react so I just let it go.
When I took a Group Theory class a few years back, English was the instructor’s second language. He spoke very good English, mind you, I never had problems understanding him or anything; but apparently he wasn’t so hip on slang.
After introducing the concept of homomorphisms to the class, he quickly got sick of writing that word on the blackboard. So, he announced to the class that from then on he would just refer to a homomorphism as a “homo.” And that’s what he did, for the rest of the quarter. I don’t think the poor guy ever figured out what the constant snickering was all about in his classroom.
How about “dirty girls soap” – wait, nevermind.
My wife and I were at Home Depot one time and I had to ask a guy in the paint department, “Where do you keep your caulk?” He looked at me and his face twitched, but he did a good job of not laughing out loud. My wife said, “You know, dear, you really need to emphasize the ‘L’ in that word.” I realized what I had said, at which point all three of us just started laughing.
I was giving my business partner (a particularly attractive young lady) a hug goodbye in the parking lot of our favorite tea house the other night, when she blurted out her best gaffe to date:
“So… [Budista]… are we going to do it?”
I was absolutely stunned for a few seconds before she tried to recover with “Open the shop! The shop!!!”.
Damage done.
I teach science to high school kids, and I constantly have to be careful about saying inadvertant double entendres because they will twist any innocent statement they can into something perverse. Balls, friction, lubricant, probes, etc. Lots of hazards. I once was drawing a free-body diagram (on the whiteboard) of a person, so I drew a stick figure and then drew a long arrow downward from the middle of the figure, to represent weight. The kids started snickering and I realized why right away, but I tried to ignore it and keep going. But they kept laughing and then I couldn’t help laughing, too, so eventually I accepted defeat and erased the stick figure and started over with a square to represent the person.
I used to keep this little “dynoball” on my desk. It’s like a heavy gyroscope inside a plastic ball about the size of a tennis ball. When you get it spinning and hold the ball and rotate it around, the gyroscope inside speeds up and it becomes more difficult to rotate, but if you’re good you can get it going *really *fast. Neat little toy, sold in fitness stores as a wrist exercise. Anyhow, one of my students–I’ll call her “Amy”-- always liked to get the dynoball from my desk when she was done with the day’s work and get it spinning. The toy was tricky to use, and she was the only person in the class (other than me) who could make it work, and she was kinda proud of that. One day, after I had cleaned off my desk and put the toy in a drawer, Amy looked over my desk and when she didn’t see the toy she said, quite loudly, “Mr. Tangent, can I play with your thingy?” The room got deathly quiet for a couple of seconds, a horrified expression came over Amy’s face, and then everybody burst out laughing, including Amy and myself. As the laughter died down, Amy was blushing and I thought I’d make her feel better by commiserating that I often say stupid things, too. I said, “Oh, I do that all the time.” So in response to her asking “Can I play with your thingy?” I had replied, “Oh, I do that all the time.” :smack: She grinned and said, “Oh, you DO, do you?” and now I was the one blushing and that set the whole class to laughing again.
Back in the 60’s, my mother once answered the door on Halloween to several smiling black families and their costumed children, trick-or-treating, causing her to happily exclaim “Oh, my, look at all the little spooks!”
:eek:
…and then her blood ran cold as she realized what she’d said. They either didn’t notice or very politely pretended not to.
Nice surprise ending. I predicted that she was going to ask to play with your ball(s).
Not said by me, but I was in the class when it happened.
Back in college, there was a biology professor who used to call his weekly quiz a “little quizzie”. As in, “OK, class … you’re going to love today’s little quizzie!” One day, the quiz about 3 pages long, instead of the usual 1 page. One girl in the class complained and said,
“If this is one of your little quizzies, I’d love to see one of your little testies.”
She got a horrid look on her face and ran out of the room. The professor didn’t have the heart to give her a failing grade for the quiz.
When we were kids my brother and I were at a local park walking the heavily wooded trails with our mother. My brother and I liked to scout ahead around the bends usually out of sight from mom pretending we were exploring a jungle.
We came across a rather heavy set couple walking the opposite direction. My brother and I smiled and nodded when we suddenly heard our mother call out from out of view “You boys look out for those elephants!”
We put our embarassed heads down and passed them. As the couple went around the bend out of our sight to where our mother was we heard her call out a second time, “And the giraffes and lions too!”
Once my boss asked me do someone else’s work in addition to my own, and I almost said “Blow me while I shit, you rancid sack of anchovy assholes”.
At an old job, my boss at the time (whose name was Eileen) informed me that later that week she was going to move me onto a different project from the one I was on.
Later that day, at a status meeting, I innocently uttered the line:
“I need to get this finished up pretty quickly because Eileen’s pulling me off on Wednesday”
I used to work doing database transformations which could mostly be automated, but not all. We were on a conference call with a client and there were probably 15 people involved in the call. The lead on the client side was a VP or something and he was insistent on a few of the items needing to be automated because otherwise they would be a “huge handjob”. Both sides of the call went dead silent for about 5 seconds.
Not an unintentional one, this, but I was at a singing class recently and the tutor placed another pupil in chair opposite me, about 5 feet away, so I could sing to her (I was practising a love song). The tutor, in explaining this procedure, announced in a joking way “you don’t need to get too into it, no exchanging of bodily fluids”, to which I could not resist replying “I’d struggle to reach from here!”.
Working in a Meijer’s(midwestern Walmart-like chain) I’m on a break. So I go look at the magazine rack in the Health & Beauty Aids department. Last month’s magazines are still on the shelf. The new magazines are in totes ready to be stocked.
So I say to the two ladies in HBA, “When are you putting out the new magazines? You girls are in charge of putting out, aren’t ya?”
/me thinks for a second, “What’s so funny about that? …Ohhhhh!” :eek: :smack:
Aw, Revtim beat me to it. 
When I did support for Windows, a guy called in to complain that his system kept hanging. We tried a few things and I asked him to reboot. After a few minutes I asked “Are you hung?”
A few seconds later, he replied “Like a racehorse, man.”
A similar thing happened to my husband. our daughter went through a phase during which she was extremely particular about the style of underwear she wanted (no pink, no princesses, no pastel colors, etc). We were getting pretty frustrated with trying to find these elusive plain underwear, and one day he almost Googled “little girl’s underwear” at work.
Yeah, I still have trouble taming mt inner 13-year-old boy when my son talks about his Woody and what he’s going to do with it.
Some years back I was thinking about purchasing a deli slicer, but I didn’t know what they were called. So I tried Googling “shaving meat.” I didn’t get the results I was expecting, at all.
You can do that search today, and actually get some hits pertaining to slicing deli meat. But back in 2003… no.