One day I forgot to turn off the radio when I turned off the car. (Yes, my new car has a CD player, but I keep forgetting to bring CDs with me.)
When I turned it back on again, virtually the first thing I heard was “increased libido.”
I really don’t want to know what they were advertising.
I was in a store that had a pink set of those refrigerator poetry magnets on the register. (Remember those things? No idea why this set was pink, though.)
Someone had aligned a sentence to read “She is very beautiful.”
I put a new magnet over “beautiful” so that it read “She is very bruiser.”
I feel this was a definite improvement.
In the running competition of me vs. dial-up-machines, I have just scored a win. The conversation went like this.
Dial-up-machine: Is this {my-first-name}?
Me: Yes.
Dial-up-machine: Wow, you’re harder to catch than a rabbit on roller skates! (fake laughter)
I am almost always at home, btw, especially in summer.
Dial-up-machine: I’m {so-n-so}, a paid fund-raiser for {such-n-such charity}, and we’re just calling everyone to thank them for their past support.
I had never given that charity any support, particularly not over the phone, because I never do that, as a matter of policy. By now, I was absolutely, 100% positive that this was a machine I was talking to, but I knew that if I just said “so, you’re one of those recordings” it would say “do I really sound that bad?” because that’s the recording that the voice recognition software triggers if you say “recording” or “computer” to them. So instead I decided to confuse it.
Me: Did you know it’s lunchtime?
Dial-up-machine: (dead silence)
Me: Did you know that it’s lunchtime?
Dial-up-machine: (dead silence)
Me: Oh, I’m sorry, did I confuse your voice recognition software? I did, didn’t I?
Dial-up-machine: Now, I know times are tough out there, and–
Only when I said “I’m sorry” did it find any way to respond to me. Wow, did I find a serious hole in their algorithm or what? Imagine if I’d started saying something really off the deep end, like quoting Jabberwocky at it or something!
Dude, I have so got to do that next time.
On the inside of the door of a stall in the ladies’ room at school, someone had written “you are enough.” (Just like that, no caps. Nice handwriting, though.) Now, I’m sure they meant it as a statement of encouragement.
But I’ve read enough about Japanese urban folklore regarding nasty things that lurk in public toilet stalls that I kept wondering what was going to pop out of the walls (or the toilet) to grab, devour or otherwise kill me. (Despite that I do not live in Japan, or anywhere near it.)
This is the way my brain operates.
Seeing as this has been accumulating bit by bit since July 21st, I thought it was high time I hit the publish button on it.
BTW, regarding that dial-up machine thing from earlier? I’ve gone past the stage I was at then: now I just hang up when it gets to the “you’re harder to catch than” line. Last time I snapped “go away, you stupid recording!” at it before I hung up. Not that I think that’d help, mind you. I was just annoyed. What would help would be if I had caller ID and could avoid answering those calls in the first place, but that costs extra, so I don’t have it. (I know, I’m cheap. But I have expensive hobbies, so I have to pinch pennies somewhere!)
Although, speaking of automated dial-up machines, I had a good one not too long ago:
Machine: Hi, this is Tim from the Customer Service Department. Can you hear me okay?
(Minuscule pause in which I had barely contemplated how to answer, let alone said anything.)
Machine: Great!
And then it started its spiel about…something to do with resorts, I think. Thing is, whoever programmed it hadn’t bothered giving it an actual “check for an affirmative answer” routine to the “Can you hear me okay?” question, so not only would it have plowed right on ahead if someone had said “No, I can only barely make you out,” it also would have plowed right on ahead if it had been talking to my answering machine. Pathetic.
Anyway, sorry about this lame and random post.
I’ll try to post something interesting tomorrow. Or, failing that, whenever I next make a non-scheduled post.
Ack, speaking of which, I haven’t even thought about Monday’s post yet. Ugh…what letter am I up to? P, right? Well, that’s not nearly so difficult as some of the earlier ones have been…