He Thought HE Was The Pregnancy Expert
He said, ‘You young girls can’t even figure out when you got pregnant, and expect the baby to come when you want it to!’
I just stood there kinda dumbfounded, and said ‘Well, my OBGYN told me he’s due then,’ and the guy said, ‘Well your doctor is a quack, you aren’t that pregnant!’ Ok…”
In This Industry, You Can’t Slack Off
“There used to be a guy at my work who was a real sloth. For months, he made stupid mistakes that basically boiled down to a single root cause: he didn’t care. He didn’t care about what he was doing, he was there just to punch a clock.
Maybe that’s good enough if you just want to work at a Walmart or something, but we make structural steel and buildings. Like the office building you’re sitting in right now, or that bridge you drove over to get there. So you can imagine there needs to be a certain level of care and quality in what you do.
Anyway, I’d found some more of his mistakes (part of my job is to find issues before they become expensive problems) and showed the guy so we could fix them, and I try to be real nice about it.
I try not to make him feel stupid, but he gives me this huge attitude and tells me not to check his work. I tell him, ‘it’s my job and quality is everyone’s business here, we’re a small shop and our clients give us repeat business because we output quality parts’.
He’s almost fifty years old and hasn’t held a job longer than two years in his entire adult life. How am I the one who’s got to have this conversation with him? How has he made it this far? He spent the next two hours of the day trying to ‘bad mouth’ me to the other guys in the shop. Someone complained to the general manager, who promptly fired the guy.”
Denial Of Entropy
“I was 22, my brother 24. He asked if he could borrow my battery charger. I said it was broken, and I’d thrown it out. Cue an escalating argument that ‘things don’t just break’, and that I had to have broken it somehow (not that it was even any of his business, given that the item had been mine).
As the argument escalated, it became obvious that, at 24, he hadn’t heard of, say, metal corrosion, or heat cycles, wear and tear, or component life. He insisted, to the point of shouting and fury, that things only break because a person inflicts damage on them e.g. vandalism or carelessness.
He seemed to believe that if you don’t drop an electronic item, get it wet, or otherwise damage it, then it will last forever. We’d argued about many things over the years, but the denial of entropy was a new one on me.”
A Disturbing Debate
“In history class my junior year of high school, the teacher told us we were going to practice debating that day. Another kid and I were picked to go first, and this is how the exchange went.
Teacher: ‘Ok so the topic here is slavery, and is it good or bad. Tommy, you go first.’
Tommy: ‘I think slavery is bad because it killed a lot of people.’
Me: ‘Well, I also think slavery is bad.’
Teacher: ‘You can’t have the same side as your opponent.’
I proceeded to make the best argument I could debating FOR slavery, and was then sent to the principal’s office for my ‘racist remarks.’ I loathe that teacher.”
The Stuff Of Feuds
“My mother and her four sisters had two feuds that each lasted for over a year, all about the stupidest stuff.
The first was whether Yoohoo, the chocolate milk drink, was really Yoohoo, or, as my aunt demanded, was Yahoo. The second was about one of Sheryl Crow’s songs, where the lyrics go, ‘All I wanna do is have some fun,’ or, according to that same aunt, was ‘All I wanna do is chew some gum.'”
She Was Not Army Strong
“I had a fight with my husband while he was training me during our workout. We had just begun exercising and I’m NOT an athlete, and would never describe myself as ‘athletic,’ if you catch my drift.
My husband, on the other hand, was a personal trainer and is an Army Vet. During our workout, he tried to make me do push-ups. I told him I literally CANNOT do a push-up. My twiggy weeny weakling arms and crappy core muscles would literally not let me do a push-up if my life depended on it.
He did not understand this. He just did not understand that someone could be so weak and not be able to do the exercises he could do. It was very frustrating. And yes, if anyone is curious, I can now do push-ups. I’m very proud of my 10 in a row.”
Sounds Like A Personal Opinion
“In 4th grade, we had a test on ‘fact or opinion.’ One of the questions was: ‘The chocolate cake is delicious. Fact or opinion?’ I marked opinion. I was marked wrong.
When I asked my teacher about it, she said, ‘Well, it’s a fact that the cake is delicious.’ I asked, ‘What if I don’t like chocolate cake?’ It’s been 30 years and I still can’t believe what her reasoning was!