Posts tagged tmi
n.e.i.t. because i’m contrary
Mar 4th
I know Thursdays are usually reserved for Too Much Information Thursdays hosted by LiLu. But today I just can’t think of a story for that would entertain you enough to actually write about, so I’m changing it up. No offense to LiLu, because she’s awesome and has Oprah-like power in the blagonets, and I’m sure I’ll be back with more TMIT’s at a later time.
Today, I am going to tell you a NEIT story. That’s right, a “Not Enough Information Thursday” story.
This story takes place when I was younger. My family was on a vacation to someplace. We had dinner at a restaurant. One of my sisters had food. In the food, we found a foreign object. Someone complained to someone who worked there. Then another someone gave us some free food. It was gross but we were happy. The restaurant went out of business much later.
The next day we kept driving. We drove through some mountains where some hillfolk lived. They kept trying to sell us things. Eventually we made it to a beach somewhere. There were a lot of people at the beach, including a lot of the hillfolk. They said words that weren’t really words and I couldn’t understand them.
Then we went to this other city with big buildings. We saw this guy who worked in government but used to be a singer. Oh, and it was hot.
There’s my story of the time we did things. It’s surprising hard to tell any sort of story without details. Bonus points will be awarded if you can guess the guy we saw. Mad bonus points if you can guess what the hillfolk were trying to sell us, the name of the restaurant, or what the foreign object was; in this case, you are probably psychic.
now boarding, flight to revolting
Feb 18th
Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets reverberate with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors. Hip hip!
I don’t even remember which city I was flying back from, but the horror of this flight will stick with me forever.
I do remember that this was my connecting flight, and I had to run from one part of the airport to the other. When I got to the right gate, I found that our flight had changed to a later flight, and that our largish jet was being downgraded to a smallish propeller plane. Not that big of a deal, that kind of thing happens all the time. I had to change my seat number, but also not that big of a deal because I don’t request certain seats when I fly alone.
Or so I thought.
So our plane finally shows up at the gate, and it’s one of those flights where some people don’t even get off because they’re just going on to the next destination. By this time it’s night, and most of the people in the airport and plane are sleeping or napping or trying to. As I’m getting on the plane, I’m pass a couple rows of folks with blankets and pillows and such. As I’m walking by the row numbers, I groan because I realize that my seat is in the very last row.
I hate the last row. You can’t recline at all, and it’s always right next to the bathroom, so every person on the flight gets to bang into your elbow as they use the facilities. The big bonus is I also get the olfactory delight of being less than a foot away from the door to the bathroom, which as we know doesn’t have the best ventilation in the world.
The rows are three seats on one side of the aisle and two seats on the other. I’m going to be on the three seat side, which means I get to sit next to two strangers.
And as I approach my seat, I see the people I will be sitting with. And I’m playing it pretty fast and loose with the word “people.”
In the middle seat, there is the mom. The mom weighs about 300 or so pounds, all of which are brought into sharp relief by her lime green, spandex stretchy shirt and her neon pink, spandex stretchy pants. Strapped to the mom’s chest is a baby in one of those harness carrier thingies, and before I even get close it’s obvious that the baby has made doody and has not been changed for some time. The baby is bawling, with snot running down its face and onto the lime green spandex shirt.
You might be thinking, “well why isn’t the mom attending to the baby?” The answer is in the window seat next to her in the form of a four year old jumping up and down in his seat and screaming some incomprehensible gibberish in between crying as well. Snot and tears on his face have mixed with what appears to be chocolate and/or other food from a previous meal and never cleaned up. The mom is trying to get him to stop jumping up and down in the seat, but not doing a very good job of it.
And right next to this display is my aisle seat. I sit down with my book hoping to escape into a literary happy place. Upon sitting, I realized that this woman was too large for me to put the armrest down. A couple of her fat rolls were actually spilling over onto my thigh. The poopybaby was screaming in my face and smelling better than ever.
I’m leaning as far as I possible can into the aisle, and just praying that we take off soon so I can get out of my godforsaken seat. Every time the flight attendant comes down the aisle, she either bangs into me or has to ask me to move. This is still a preferable alternative to moving my sensory organs towards the wreck on my right.
About an hour into the flight, the attendant sneaks up behind me and whispers in my ear, “There is an available seat in the front row if you want.”
If I want?! I couldn’t want that seat any more if it was a massage chair at Brookstone and came with free bacon. I thank the flight attendant profusely and grab all of my things in a mad dash to the front of the plane.
I felt bad for the new people I was sitting next to, as I’m certain I had absorbed some of the wonderful smells from my old seat. My right thigh was still hot and sweaty from her stomach’s intrusion into my personal space. I had a wild look in my eyes that declared “back off” to all those around me.
I showered as soon as I possibly could upon getting home. Twice.
the cure to what ails you
Jan 21st
Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets reverberate with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors. Hip hip!
Back in college, one of the most important aspects for the first two years was of course who your roommate was. Some folks roomed with a friend from high school and prayed that their friend didn’t end up turning into their worst enemy due to an unfortunately fight involving who drank the last Fresca and didn’t get more or who slept with who’s boyfriend even though you two totally had a fight and LOOKED like you were broken up, gawd. Some folks took the chance on the random roommate assignment and hoped that the stranger liked to do their laundry and didn’t shave their armpits over the futon every Wednesday because the shower was scary and full of other people and they have “trust issues.”
And then there were the folks who tried method number two and ended up with an incompatible roommate and tried to change roommates during semester break.
This typically involved getting the consent of the RA and the student life office, all sorts of paperwork, mediation classes, etc. The easiest way was for both roommates to go to the RA’s office and say, “We hate each other, and you need to move us before someone gets stabbed with a ruler.”
I had a friend who we’ll call Pez because she was about as big as a Pez dispenser. Anyway, Pez had a roommate that she hated, but their feud was to the point where rather than change rooms, the roommate wanted to stay in the same room in order to make Pez’s life even more hellish. So when the RA asked if she wanted to change roommates, she refused and made Pez stay with her.
Pez came by one day while I had some other friends in my dorm room and was once again livid with her roommate. ”How the hell should I get this chick to want to move out? How do I get her to leave?” she asked us.
Of course this generated an entire list of terrible things to do to the roommate, but the catch was that most of these suggestions would somehow result in Pez being discovered as the culprit behind the fiendish prank. Even if it couldn’t be proven that Pez was the evildoer, she didn’t even want to have it be assumed she was the evildoer.
Finally, one of my friends exclaimed, “I’ve got it! You should crap in a sock and leave it in her drawer! What’s she going to do, accuse you of crapping a sock and leaving it in her drawer? Only a crazy person would accuse someone of that!”
This little bit of advice has come in handy more times than you’d think. Have a cranky coworker? Crapsock on their desk. Neighbor always mowing the lawn at 10pm? Crapsock in the mailbox. Kids won’t shut up about some stupid cartoon or toy that somebody stole from them? Crapsock in their breakfast cereal. The crapsock will probably not fix any of these situations, but it would make you feel better.
I’m trying to get a trademark and a patent on the crapsock so I can begin selling it on late night infomercials, but until then, feel free to make and utilize your own crapsock.
friends of friends who nobody knows
Jan 14th
Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets hum with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors. Hip hip!
In my junior year of college, my friends and I rented both floors of this large old house on campus. We had ten people living in this place, which basically turned it into…well you can probably imagine. I lived down on the first floor, which usually had the most people hanging out in it because we actually kept it clean (the upstairs was only safe for those with prior immunizations for tropical diseases and a cannabis immunity). We even hung a pretend fraternity sign on our porch with Delta Tau Chi, and if you don’t know what that means, I have pity on you.
We had a friend, Joel, that was going to spend the second semester abroad, so he didn’t want to rent an apartment that he’d have to sublet after a couple months. We didn’t have any more bedrooms available for him, but we did have a closet under the stairs. For a visual, picture the Harry Potter closet, because thats exactly what it looked like. His “room” was about 6′x3′ with a slanted ceiling. He just threw an air mattress and sleeping bag in there, and was pretty content. We called him “The Little Jew Under The Stairs.”
One weekend, it was roommate Chris’ birthday. He invited a couple friends from his hometown that nobody else knew to come on over, and they brought their other friends, and we had our regular weekend party on top of that.
Fast forward to the background of drinking and revelry that you’ve seen in every teen comedy movie since the 80′s. The house was full of people, and the party was in full swing. Over the next couple hours, it becomes apparent that these extra friends are kinda sketchy. People actually start closing and locking doors just so their belongings don’t walk away, women are afraid to stand to close to them, general skeeviness, that sort of thing.
Birthday boy Chris is made to drink too much, and calls it a night before the end of the party, so now there is no buffer between us and his vagrant acquaintances. The party is pretty much winding down anyway, so everyone clears out and head off to various bedrooms, and the degenerates disappear to the upstairs.
I’m sitting on the couch winding down with two of the other roommates from my floor, Sahil and Hamil, when the front doorbell rings. We look at each other, because nobody ever rang the doorbell there; the front door was perpetually unlocked. Hamil gets up to answer the door, and we hear this exchange:
Hamil: “Can I help you?”
Large African American Lady: “Yeah, I got a call…”
Hamil: “A what?”
LAAL: “A call, I got a call for Chris.”
Hamil: “…Excuse me, what? A call? Call for what?”
LAAL: “I…GOT…A…CALL.”
Hamil: “oh…OH! Hang on a minute.”
Hamil wisely leaves the woman at the door, and comes back into the living room with a look of horror on his face.
“Guys, there’s a fat, ugly prostitute on our front step asking for Chris.”
Roommate Sahil and I just start laughing, because that sentence is awesome, and I mean gut busting, rolling on the floor laughter at the absurdity of the situation. This is clearly the work of Chris’ miscreant friends, so Hamil goes upstairs to wake one of the culprits and make them deal with the situation. As he walks up the stairs, his footsteps and our laughter is enough to wake Joel from under the staircase. He rolls out from his little cubbyhole, and wanders into the living room all sleepyfaced.
“Guys, what the hell is going on?”
“Dude! There’s a prostitute on our front steps!”
“What? For real?”
“Yeah!”
He kind of nods, walks over and opens the door, and says to the lady very politely, “Excuse me…shoo. Shoo! Get out! Out, out! Shoo!”
Our own little Harry Potterstein shooed the hooker away from the house like he was getting rid of the neighbors cat.
i am a highly trained computer technician
Dec 17th
Every single day, I work with people who make mistakes on the computer because they just don’t know better. I have very little issue with this type of problem because nobody is born knowing everything about computers; it’s a learning process and hopefully the user won’t make the same mistake again next time. I’d say about 95% of the people I talk to have simple issues that they just haven’t learned how to fix yet, and thus are exempt from my scorn and ridicule.
I have a few exceptions to this rule:
1. The person who calls in three times a week with the exact same problem. This person is refusing to tread upon the path of knowledge and should be mocked.
2. People who really should know better; if you’ve been hired as a network engineer, you should know how to fix a Page Cannot Be Displayed error.
This story falls into category number two, and stars myself as the idiot who really should have known better.
Last winter, I was building a new computer. I had just finished and was hooking everything back up. When I hooked up my old keyboard to my brand new shiny computer, it made me sad. The keyboard had started life as beige, but had turned the corner to gray/yellow. I’m not sure how all that crap builds up on mice and keyboards, but next time you’re at yours, just look closely and try not to dry heave.
I decided that a thorough keyboard cleaning was in order so that my shiny new computer would have a shiny keyboard to match it. I’ve done this before in the past, and the only way to really do it right is to pop every key off, clean them all individually, and then pop them all back on, all without forgetting where the ALT and CTRL keys are.
This sounded like to much work. Instead, I recalled an article I had read wherein the author had cleaned his keyboard by putting it in a dishwasher. The article said that as long as the keyboard was fully dried out before you plugged it back in, it should function normally. I don’t know what fully possessed me to trust this advice, but into the dishwasher it went. I even remember to take it off of “Heat Dry” so that I wouldn’t slag it down.
Guess how well this went.
My keyboard never typed again, as any intelligent person would expect. I had to get a new keyboard, and this one is never going in the dishwasher.
However, I did find a type of keyboard that you can do this with, and I’m tempted to get one just because it looks really cool. The description of the item does not say if it’s hand-wash only or dishwasher safe, so err on the side of caution and tongue-bathe it.
its not an accident if you do it on purpose
Oct 29th
Since it seemed to go so well last week, I will share with you another TMI from Wife the Teacher. Seriously, she should just have an entire blog herself entitled “Disgusting Thing I Had to Touch Today”. It would be epic, and nobody would want to read it, because it would make their soul sad.
On this particular day, Wife didn’t have her classroom aide with her (she has 27 four year olds, she’s the only teacher. Technically, she has a “full-time” aide, but the phrase “full-time” is up for debate.) She gets the kids to line up along the wall by the door so they can go to lunch. Kids are holding their lunch boxes and things. As she walks down the line, she sees a large puddle on the floor by one of the boys.
“Teacher, I had an accident.”
She looks at his pants and sees that they’re NOT wet, so she’s kind of confused as to what made the puddle.
“Did you spill your juice?”
“No, I had an accident. My mom gave me orange juice in the car this morning.”
“Is that…orange juice that you spilled?”
“No, I had an accident.”
“Are you wet?”
“….A little.”
She looks again at the puddle and sees that its making a fairly large splatter pattern, as if something was poured out.
And then it dawns on her: this little kid whipped it out and pissed on the floor in the classroom.
After talking to the parents later that day about the incident, she learned that apparently he is scared of bathrooms and doesn’t like to go in a toilet. Since he had to pee, the floor of the classroom seemed like a reasonable alternative.
Anyone who’s been around a four or five year old knows their favorite hobby is tattling. However, not one kid said anything to her; there was not one “TEACHER! HE’S PEEING ON THE FLOOR!” yelled from the line. I think it was because even the other kids were shocked and doing the kindergarten version of “What the hell?”
is that dirt? no it’s not
Oct 15th
I haven’t had a good one of these for awhile, but this one is short and sweet and got me to laugh. It actually comes from Wife, who for those who don’t know is a kindergarten teacher at a public school. On a daily basis, she has more TMI-type stories than I get in a month. On a somewhat related note, before you send your kids to school, actually make sure they’re potty trained. Seriously. The teachers thank you in advance.
On this particular day she’s out doing recess duty, and one of her kids comes running up.
“Teacher, look what I found?” as he holds out his finger with a goopy glob of something on the tip of it.
She takes the glob off of the student’s hand with her finger and holds it close to examine it, and she says, “Hmm, I don’t know what that is, it’s probably just a clump of dirt, let me just get rid of that.”
“Yeah, I found it in my nose!”
Cue the gag reflex.
worst part of the best time
Aug 26th
Ah yes TMI, we meet again. I wish better circumstances could bring us together, but yet we always seem to meet this way.
I’m going to keep this as short as possible. I don’t think you need me to fill in all the details of how this went down.
My last post was about how awesome my honeymoon was, and indeed it was as awesome, if not more so, than I described.
Our room was really, really nice; marble everything and a great view. As you can see in this picture of our four-post bed with the balcony in the background, they even made us swans out of towels.
The only odd thing was the bathroom.
Unfortunately I don’t have one good picture that shows the whole room, but I have two pictures that somewhat shows what I’m talking about. This picture is of the bathtub, and you can see this little window above it that opens to the bedroom. I took this picture with my back against the far wall.
Behind me and in this second picture are the doorway to the toilet stall and the doorway to the shower stall. Yes, the room had a shower and a bathtub. If you also look closely in the toilet stall area, you can see a telephone on the wall there. These days with cell phones I guess its easier to talk on a phone whilst on the crapper, but something about having a corded phone installed within arm’s reach of the throne hints at a disturbing amount of foresight.
Now here’s the thing: this is a marble bathroom. Therefore, it echoes and amplifies sound.
The bathroom has a window that opens to the rest of the room.
We are in Mexico, and eating a lot of Mexican food.
What better way to say “I love you, my new spouse” than sharing this arrangement for a week.
If we had a big meal, the next day I used the facilities in the lobby.
big steps
Aug 5th
As part of TMI Thursday, I’m going to be sharing something that I haven’t yet talked about, with anyone actually. I generally don’t talk about this type of thing, because I can never find a good way to describe it, and then all my words just seem useless.
This Saturday, I’m getting married. That part you might know.
Before I asked Fiance to marry me, I called my grandma. My grandma married grandpa back during WWII, and they were married up until last year when he died. I told her I wanted to ask Fiance to marry me, and how did she know that she wanted to be with grandpa.
She thought about it for a beat and said, “You know, he just wasn’t like anyone else I knew. Just talking to him…I just knew. That’s all there is, I just knew.”
From that moment, any fears and doubts I had disappeared. I just knew that she was the one I wanted to be with.
Someone told me recently they hoped that my wedding day will be the happiest day of my life. I sincerely hope that is not true. I want the day after the wedding to be the best day of my life, and I want the day after that to be the best day of my life. I want every day from here forward to be better than the last, for me and for her.
I love you Fiance, and always will.
Now we need to think up a new name for you.
titanic mistake
Jul 30th
After being a fan of TMI Thursday for awhile, I figured it was my turn to bring something to the party. Nobody likes the guy who shows up and eats all the taco dip and doesn’t bring something along (taco dip is awesome, but the person who figured out the taco seasoning and cream cheese combination is freaking insane). So here goes, and hopefully this makes me less of a moocher.
I was the tender age of 16, and at the time I had a couple friends who worked at the local movie theatre. They were able to get us tickets for opening night for this new big movie coming out, “Titanic”. You may have heard of it.
We meet up at the movie theatre, and it’s madhouse. I find my friends, and we go into the theatre, which is one of those huge stadium-seating ones that seats about 300 or so people. It’s packed when we try to find a seat, and we end up sitting in the middle of the very back row, which is located several zip codes away from the screen.
I soon realize that of the 300 or so people there, I am the only guy. While this would be good odds anywhere else, it’s a pretty foreboding sign for the movie we’re about to see.
The movie starts. The movie goes on and on. And on. I do not like this movie, I have never liked this movie, and I am getting more and more annoyed by this movie the longer it goes on. Finally we get to the point where Kate wakes up floating on the door and tries to get Leo’s attention, but he’s a popsicle. I can hear the crying women all around me, the sniffling and the attempting to keep from sobbing noises. Kate is laying on her floating board, crawls to Leo and says:
“I’ll never let go”
Rip. Plunk.
The theatre is dead quiet as every girl tries to contain their tears. I, unable to hold it back any longer, split the silence with my laughter. This was just too much for me, the movie having crossed the line from romantic to corncheesy about 3 hours ago, and my piercing chortling echoes around the room.
All 300 women in the theatre turn to glare at me. I can feel the hate flying out of their eyes like daggers. I try to stop laughing, and mostly succeed, but it is too late, the damage is done. Nobody talks to me on the way home, and I keep getting hateglares from my friends. I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school to begin with, but my stock just plummeted worse than GM.
At least I learned from this experience: I refuse to go see “Twilight”.
