When I was about 10, my parents had a good friend who we saw a lot. One weekend, he was over for dinner, and I was really into telling very bad jokes. So I turned to him and said “Hey, Gene! How do you get a one-armed idiot out of a tree?” (Actually, I had used a not-so-nice ethnic slur…not proud of that…)
He very nicely smiled, and said “How?”
“Wave!”
Meanwhile, my parents looked absolutely horrified. Mortified.
I forgot that Gene’s right arm was missing below the elbow.
I still feel horrible when I think about that now.
My wife has a real nice cousin who lives in NYC. We see her 2 or 3 times a year. I introduced myself politely when I first met her. And have continued to do so, ever since. For some reason I just can’t remember her and I always introduce myself when I see her. Even if she comes with her mom and sister whom we see regularly. It is kind of a family joke now.
Oh, man that totally reminds me of my other social faux-pas. My husband’s Dad’s side of the family is humongous and wealthy and Italian-Catholic, and they intimidate the HELL out of me. Shortly after we got married, Mr. Olives and I went to attend the wedding of his Uncle Frank. I was SO determined to be beautiful and gracious and fit in as best as I possibly could with all of these people who live a lifestyle totally alien to mine. We get to the hotel and are being ushered into the seating room for the ceremony. As the usual round of “uncomfortably kissing every person I don’t know on the cheek” began, I found Mr. Olives’ Uncle, grabbed his hand, and beaming declared, “Congratulations!”
It would have been all well and fine… except I was congratulating his Uncle Mario. As soon as I realized what I had done, I made things worse by announcing, “Never mind! I’m an idiot!” in the same obnoxious tone.
I was at a rugby tournament in Colorado this weekend, and since my knee is still busted, I was drinking on the sidelines. One of my buddies, J, from near there showed up with his new girlfriend. He was standing about 2 meters away, while I was talking with some guys on my team that had just got off the pitch. They asked if I wanted to go with them to the strip club that night.
I said “I don’t really like strip clubs.” remembering a story J told me the night before “BUT J JUST HAD A THREESOME WITH TWO STRIPPERS!” I was so excited to recount the story that I nearly yelled it at the top of my lungs. It happened before they had gotten together, so it’s not like he had cheated, but she still wasn’t too happy about it. About 5 other people, including myself (but not including J) were laughing so hard we almost couldn’t breath! “Shutup Rugger (I go by my last name with most of my buddies)” was all he could say, but that just made us laugh harder.
Re: Wedding gifts. When I was in college I gave my roommate a fancy cut glass liquor decanter for his wedding gift. It drew odd looks from his family. Later someone pointed out that the couple were under the drinking age. That had never stopped them.
slight hijack:
I’m participating in this thread at the same time (olives, I see you!). I’m bouncing between “Oh, the memories!” and “Ohhhhh, the memories!”
Could go in a bad date thread too, but here we go.
I took a friend of a friend that I was interested in to a business Christmas party. She was a reporter for a local newspaper, and while I knew how to spell her last name, I had never actually heard it pronounced.
It was Italian, and the nuances escaped me. I asked her - “Is this how you pronounce your name [pretty much imitating the sound of a cat getting sick])?
Umm… I was quite far off. It was a very, very pretty name. It was a song to the ears.
Then, before dinner, I ran into a fellow that I barely knew. We made small talk while I desperately tried to remember his name so I could introduce him to my date.
I finally remembered it. And promptly forgot my dates FIRST name when I introduced him.
“Oh, Jim (phew) this is my friend…. Ummm. this is ummmm.”
Brain fart. Total and complete lock up.
To make things worse, when we went into the hall for dinner, there was nowhere to sit with another group. My date and I ate alone at an 8 place table surrounded by hundreds of people.
When I was about 4 my parents were having a little get together at our house with some friends and their friends kids…one of the older girls, 13 or so, was helping watch the younger ones outside. I needed to use the bathroom so she took me in to the house and went in with me and used it too. I noticed that when she finished there was blood in the commode. I said something about it and she said something to the affect of “its no big deal…”. Afterward we went in to where the adults were and I announced to everyone in the room what I had seen in the toilett. The girl was mortifyed of course and I was clueless. I have never said anything about this to anyone and it didn’t dawn on me until sex ed class what I had seen and what a social gaff I had made.
The last one reminds me of the time I was little (4 or 5) maybe, and my Aunt took me into the store. I was quite the little reader so I was reading off the names of all the signs in a half-to myself kind of way. Then I came to the sign marked “Yeast” in the baking aisle.
I watched a lot of television at that age. The first thing that popped into mind was those feminine hygiene commercials I had seen (though I had no idea what they were all about.)
“Yeast. Yeast… Yeast infections! YEAST INFECTIONS!!! ** YEEEEAAST INFECTIONS!!!**” at the top of my lungs in the grocery store.
I was invited to a friends’ wedding, one of the first of my peers to get marries. I paid no attention to the invitation or how it was addressed–I simply didn’t understand the significance of it. I immediately asked my boyfriend to go along, and he came, and I went through the whole day showing him off, hanging out with her other friends, thinking it was really weird that none of them bothered to bring dates.
It was probably a couple of YEARS later that I did any reading about etiquette and weddings, and realized that we were probably all invited as singles, and were not asked to bring a guest, and I was the only idiot who didn’t know. I am so humiliated to remember this.
I’m sorry. That made me laugh. I’m a bad bad person. :rolleyes:
In college, I was visiting some friends at another University. A big group of people were sitting at a long table at this bar, and everyone kept walking up to one girl, and with no explanation giving her a kiss and a big hug.
I turned to the guy next to me, who I didn’t know, and asked tactfully: “who’s the big ugly girl everyone’s kissing, and why are they kissing her?”
When I was about 10, my mom picked me up from a sleepover at a friend’s house, where we had watched (i think) one of the Police Academy movies. I had picked up the phrase “big fat jigaboo” from the movie, not realizing it was a (truly outdated) racial slur - I just thought it was a funny made-up word. So my Mom’s taking me through the drive-through at McDonalds on the way home, and being 10 and ADHD I start yelling “big fat jigaboo! big fat jigaboo!” as she tries in vain to hush me. Of course the person working at the drive-thru window was black.
The other day I accidentally sent a text message to an ex-girlfriend that I’m still on friendly terms with, making reference to how the spectacular sex we’d had the night before left me shaky-legged until noon, and calling her a “fucking monster.” (Meant for the woman I live with, 'natch. One space away in the address book.)
She e-mailed me today to say that she’d daydreamed that I’d meant to send it to her ex-husband.
Oh, that reminds me of telling this one guy how obnoxious I thought another member of our group was. He smiled weakly and of course I found out they were dating from another friend later.
I was hanging out with a friend and her roommate who I didn’t really know. The roommate was rinsing some tubes so I said “Oh, what is that? Cake decorating equipment?” “Nope, tubes for my breathing machine, for my CF.” :o
But the most public of my humiliations was senior year in high school, when our French class went to the CIA for a French lunch they put on. Now, our family is frugal so I’d never had dessert in a restaurant before. They brought out the dessert tray and someone selected one of the desserts. I wondered to myself “Wow, what if two people want the same dessert? Is it whoever orders first?” That’s bad, but it was silent. What was actually embarrassing was me trying to be helpful and pass the person their plate off the dessert tray. :o :o :o
When I was a teenager, I worked retail. One of my bosses was a very nice guy, older, retired from some other business career and managing this store as a second career. I got along with him fairly well, until the day I came into the store past a woman who was browsing in front, found him in the back, and proceeded to exclaim (quietly, at least) something like, “My gosh, you have got to see the woman up front; she has got to be the ugliest female on the face of the planet!”
He looked over and then said very cuttingly to me, “Actually, that is my wife.”
Now, as I later replayed that incident over and over again in my head, I thought very quickly and rescued myself by looking over and saying something like, “No, not THAT woman - the one behind… oh, she’s gone now.”
Yes, in my mind, every single time, I cleverly saved myself.
Except the actual time it happened. For that one, the one that mattered, I said something like, “Oh. Uh… well, I mean… uh… I’m sorry, I…” or similar brilliant riposte. And felt like a leper. Well-deserved leper.
In high school, I was extremely nervous about asking girls out.
I thought I might have a chance with this girl who was an assistant trainer for the swim team. (I was a senior on the varsity team.)
I was so nervous, that it took me a whole evening to get the courage up to give her a call. After hours of pacing back and forth, I finally made the call.
And…she blew me off. I was actually relieved, after all that anxiety.
The next day at practice, everyone was buzzing with the gossip that this geeky diver (who happened to have the same first name as me) had had the temerity to actually ask out the pretty trainer.
She didn’t even realize that I was the one who called her!
I never bothered to correct her mistake. What a moron I was–why didn’t I just ask her out in person?
I used to work for a family-run business; the boss, his brother and their mother worked there. It so happens that all three of them looked like gorillas. Very broad shoulders, long arms, slightly bow-legged. And they sort of walked like gorillas. This was a constant running joke among the employees, that it was sort of a “Planet of the Apes” situation, with humans working for the apes.
One night, another guy and I were working overtime. This happened a lot, and we were always the only two people around. At one point we were waiting for something to print, so I got up onto a table and did my best gorilla impersonation, mentioning the boss and his brother and his mother. I was jumping up and down, making all sorts of gorilla sounds.
Until I glanced through the doorway and saw the boss working about 6 feet away, in the next room.
To his credit, he never mentioned it to me. And I didn’t get fired.
I overheard two of my students talking about Thai food. One student is Thai and the other was asking her recomendations as to what to order at a local restaurant Y.
So I pop in and say, “Oh restaurant X is much better than Y, blah blah blah” about how much better X was.
Well that saturday I was eating lunch at Y and who was my waitertress? Yup, my Thai student. Oh, and who is that beside her? Her Aunt, who owns the place.
Briefly I blocked what I had said before, I was so surprised to see her. But then the memory hit me like a rush and I almost died.
Well, I gushed about how gerat the food was, she made me a special dessert and I left an outragously large tip.
When I was in Scouts, we used to pretend to “act black” by repeating what they said and do on TV, movies, and rap music. Things like “Bee-yotch, get up off me” “Pop a cap in yo ass” “yo dawg, what it be” etc. I was too young to think it was racist, but more of a black=hip thing (thang?)
So, me and my buddy are doing an exaggerated tilt-shouldered shuffle and I thought I’d outdo them all with my wittiness.
Hand raised high, I said “Yo my nigga, slap me some skiiiin”
To an adult leader from another troop… who was a black man.
:eek:
He didn’t find it particularly witty. I wince every time I remember doing that.