Small Talk: Ughngnggh! Ugghhnnn!

[CarpeDiem54]

I went to a proctologist once named Dr. Greer. My Dad (who drove me for my outpatient procedure - don't ask), burst out laughing. He thought his name was Dr. Rear.

[nachomama]

My computer is dying! I just looked for a previously app because I might go poof. My boss is supposedly looking for a replacement but I got scary message this morning and my nerd friend says "not long now, start the vigil". My boss is looking for used. so cheap! omg just spent the weekend in New York and he's a 3 mercedes household (plus the credenza, donchaknow) and he'll be skiing in Park City over New Years. the man can afford to pay me better and get a decent computer.

 

I had Mrs. Yip for music. I grew up in New Mexico and we had plenty of odd names but can't think of really appropriate job names, Harry Larry. not that isn't a joke. Tom Joe and Joe Tom, Jimson Jim they had a thing of first names being last names cuz when the gubment went and snatched the kids from the reservation they demanded an english name of them and would give them the name Harry or Tom or Joe and then the next kid in line would repeat it. Basically assigned names on them.

[kikismom]

 they had a thing of first names being last names cuz when the gubment went and snatched the kids from the reservation they demanded an english name of them

I'm so ashamed of myself, but I wish that guy would be a trial witness just so they could say

Please state your name for the court.

"Harry Larry".

 

Some network exec should read your post and create a sitcom with Mrs Yip, Mrs.Yup, Mrs.Yep, and Mrs.Yap. (With some crazy, mixed-up Ivy League young doctor working in the Southwest and romancing a chick helicopter pilot. Now he could be a proctologist---- it could be called Southern Exposure.) Zany, madcap hilarity ensues. Or not.

[Nashville]

My high school computer math teacher was Mrs. Keese.

And (swear to god) my father and I use the same urologist - Dr. Dickinson. ;>

[nachomama]

Could those aliens from sesame Street who say YIP YIP YIP YIP  be in the show?

 

I demand a doctor with a special name!

 

We also had a Pete Reader in my class. So the lady is on the intercom "Mr. Peacock (drafting so does no good that he has funny name) would you please send Peter Reader to the office" then you hear the microphone back feed noise and muffling. Then "Mr. Peacock will you send PETE...long pause...Reader to the office".

 

Say Peter Reader out loud. Its fun :D

[kikismom]

I demand a doctor with a special name!

Will this help? :

https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=HN.608006196570230406&pid=15.1&P=0

[nachomama]

First name Haywood J.? ;)

 

We had a computer teacher in high school who the big rumor was she did cocaine. (Bunk I'm sure) But she was showing my friend Robert something and when she had left I pointed to the powder on the desk and his face went all =0 ( It was chalk people! How dumb was robert?) Anywho My first joke, we were typing random garbage for our typing skills and one of the sentences had the word "thespian" so I raised my hand and asked cocaine teacher "what's a thespian? A lesbian with a lisp?" (Which makes no sense but I got to ask a teacher a question that made her face go =O )

[walnutqueen]

(With some crazy, mixed-up Ivy League young doctor working in the Southwest and romancing a chick helicopter pilot. Now he could be a proctologist---- it could be called Southern Exposure.)

 

There MUST be a Chris In The Evening, then.  :-)

 

One of my earliest jobs was Directory Assistance Operator (we were thrilled to get rid of those boards with the weird plug-in cables we started out using - watch a really old movie to see what those were), and one of my favorite calls asked for the number of a Mr. Rection, first name Hugh, middle initial G.  heh

[Nashville]

First name Haywood J.? ;)

 

I thought his middle name was Ulysses....

[nachomama]

Ulysses is better! I'm still not the brightest bulb.

 

They do that on the news now, like Bart Simpson they write in for birthday shout outs or new baby names and see if they get past the little midwest news team. First baby of the New Year Peter Reader! Little MIchael Hunt turns 2 today.

 

I used to be so fascinated by the plug wire telephone board thingys. And I loved the punch game on the Price is Right. You get 3 punches and pull out the slips to see what you won. Something about holes and stuff you stick in them.

 

Plinko is a rip off though, nobody ever wins the big prize! People just get excited to see the thing bounce off the pegs. I liked the scrambled number game where you get 6 numbers and have 10 chances to scramble the numbers for the price of the car. But you gotta get through the 3 digit prize first, then 4 and you run out of chances by the time you get to the car.

 

We were watching Bob Barker (that was the name of the show not Price is right) and my sister was pushing an empty rocking chair behind me. Turned it over and it smacked me in the head, I saw the tv go off with a little white circle going smaller smaller bloop. And I'm thinking HEY!  >=(  WHO TURNED OFF BOB BARKER! She knocked me out cold. ( I also thought the Carol Burnett show was just the cartoon janitor at the beginning)

[walnutqueen]

Forgot to mention that my Directory Assistance job was also on the cusp of changing it's name from "Information" to "Directory Assistance", because people would call us and ask the strangest non-telephonic questions, from cooking to childhood diseases.  I was lucky enough to miss the era of wearing crinolines, heels and pearls to work.  But my workplace technology was a phone book, small ruler, and eraser head pencil (to flip through the pages more quickly).  :-)

 

When I was a kid, we had a 4 digit phone number, prefix codes like "Regent", and at least 3 other people on our Party Line.  No wonder my poor old head spins off at all this new-fangled technology!

 

Lest you kiddos think I'm 100 years old, I am approaching 60.  Shit has changed very quickly this past half century.

[kikismom]

  I was lucky enough to miss the era of wearing crinolines, heels and pearls to work.  But my workplace technology was a phone book, small ruler, and eraser head pencil (to flip through the pages more quickly).  :-)

 

When I was a kid, we had a 4 digit phone number, prefix codes like "Regent", and at least 3 other people on our Party Line.  No wonder my poor old head spins off at all this new-fangled technology!

 

Lest you kiddos think I'm 100 years old, I am approaching 60.  Shit has changed very quickly this past half century.

Yes, my folks still referred to the phone number that way. I think it was something like "Keystone -----. A lot of younger people wouldn't get what "Butterfield 8" meant.

 

My mother gave me a small metal toy telephone operator workstation (complete with cloth cords to plug in) as a "fun toy". This is a woman who once confessed to me that her little-girl ambition was to be an air-traffic controller. That's when they should have had her head read.

[walnutqueen]

kikismom - Switchboards!  That was the term I was searching for.  And all our phones used to have those cloth covered cords.  I have a big old black dusty ("decorative") phone sitting on my desk, and that fucking cloth-cord catches clumps of cat hair like nobody's business.  :-)

 

nachomama - I saw that little white circle when I was running around the back yard and stepped on a rake.  Nearly broke my nose and blackened both eyes, but I was only out for a short while, and wasn't even checked out by a doctor.  I've been suffering from post-concussion syndrome ever since.  (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)   :-D 

[nachomama]

We had a party line but it was because we lived way out in bfe* and my dad's company provided the phone line to the houses. My mother was totally the person who listened on the party line. And then we moved to a small town where you just dialed the last 4 digits and if you gave up your phone number you had to wait until a number was available cuz they weren't adding any, then cell phones took over and no one has a land line.

 

* We were so far out of town that we only went grocery shopping once  a month and it was all canned, frozen (you packed in dry ice), or dried. Any fresh fruit or perishables were gone within the first week and it was frozen milk, canned veggies and thaw some hamburger. And I'm sure this was not good for us but we sucked the smoke from the dry ice. Run water over it and smoke up the house and use a straw to inhale (its frikkin carbon dioxide-bye bye brain cells) and if you stuck a fork on the ice it squealed. Oh and the smoke tastes like root beer :D or dying brain cells do.

[walnutqueen]

So, carbon dioxide brain is YOUR excuse, then, nachomama?   :-D

[AngelaHunter]

I must say:

 

1 - Thank you, mods, for moving all this stuff here.

 

2 - nachomama, I love your stories. I'm sure they weren't funny at the time, but they're quite entertaining now.

 

3 - I finally remembered the name of my friend's gyno. It was Dr. Nudick, which made me snicker whenever my friend mentioned it.

[Nashville]

Want to confuse the younger set REAL quick?

Try describing a party line.

The concept is incomprehensible to the cell phone set.

My grandmother's ring was one long and two short, BTW. :)

[ghoulina]

I feel very disadvantaged that I never had a teacher, doctor, dentist, etc. with an ironic name. This might explain so many things about me. 

[nachomama]

Explain to a kid that you couldn't watch anything anytime you wanted. You had to be there at the time the show aired. What a concept! Or watch pretty princess ponies endlessly over and over and over. We got the Wizard of Oz once a year or The Sound of Music or The Grinch. (original, I spit on Jim Carrey version, ptooey)

 

We lived in bfe Utah for a while and had 1 channel. just the one. On the day the Wizard of Oz was coming on the channel went kerblewy. Apparently we were quite traumatized because my dad loaded us up and we drove 90 miles to a motel that had cable so we could watch. He liked to tell me that story when I was a sullen teenager and he said "don't say I never did anything for you" I threw back that I didn't remember it so I probably would have survived and thus I owed him nothing for this gesture. Regular barrel of sunshine I was.

[kikismom]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/virals/11299164/What-happens-when-men-design-a-tampon-advert.html

[walnutqueen]

This is beginning to sound like that Monty Python bit about how bad we had it as kids: "... lick the road clean with our tongue"

[AngelaHunter]

Explain to a kid that you couldn't watch anything anytime you wanted. You had to be there at the time the show aired. What a concept!

 

I was telling all this to my niece the other day. Yeah, if you missed something you wanted to see, you had to hope it would be aired again...one day.

 

AND when you wanted to change the channel, you had to GET UP and walk to the TV to do so, and may have to stand there a minute or so to adust the vertical and horizontal or the rabbit ears.

 

I also told her that every single program was safe for everyone to watch, even young children, and that although we had maybe five channels, we loved every single thing that aired.

 

Her eyes glazed over, as I'm sure mine did when I was young and my mother described the - to me - hilarious fuck ups of living through the Great Depression.

[Nashville]

Just tell the kids, "We didn't have home computers of ANY kind. At all. No PCs, no laptops, no game decks, no tablets, no smartphones - heck, no portable phones AT ALL. Not even a microwave - or anything else that needs a computer to run."."

Then watch their brains shut down.

ETA: Whoops. Forgot the internet.

Edited December 18, 2014 by Nashville

[walnutqueen]

Remember the nightly sign off, when TV went OFF, as in, stopped airing altogether?  Every night?  Yup, we started out with only a few hours of TV a day, and that wasn't a "parental choice".

[AngelaHunter]

Quote

Just tell the kids, "We didn't have home computers of ANY kind. At all.

 

We actually had to read BOOKS!

 

The other day I was in a large eletronics store to try to buy an alarm clock ( yeah, good luck with that. The boy who worked there had one old dusty model he dug up and when I hesitated he helpfully pointed out that it had REALLY big numbers. Fuck you, kid!)

 

But I digress...I stopped and really looked around and I realized this store couldn't have existed when I was a kid because nothing in it had been invented at that time. 

 

Talk about feeling antediluvian.

Edited December 18, 2014 by AngelaHunter

[BrokenRemote]

My old vet was Dr Shakespeare. Obviously in the way wrong line of work!

[Portia]

although awe had maybe five channels, we loved every single thing that aired.

Sure we liked it all; we had no choice! My kids can't believe all the dumb and age-inappropriate stuff I sat through as a little kid with three channels. Dragnet. Hee Haw. 60 Minutes. The Three Stooges. My answer to them is always the same: "Of course I watched it. There was nothing else ON."

[CarpeDiem54]

Want to confuse the younger set REAL quick?

Try describing a party line.

The concept is incomprehensible to the cell phone set.

My grandmother's ring was one long and two short, BTW. :)

My best friend lived next door and we shared a party line. To call her, I had to dial her number, hang up and then it would ring back when she answered.

I didn't realize that the Oz part of the Wizard of Oz was in color until after I was married and bought a color TV. When the yearly showing came on, I was blown away. This was in 1973.

[Nashville]

I didn't realize that the Oz part of the Wizard of Oz was in color until after I was married and bought a color TV. When the yearly showing came on, I was blown away. This was in 1973.

 

Our TVs in the late 60s were all B&W as well; I don't think we got a color set until around '70 or '71. 

 

I remember several of my favorite shows - Batman and Land Of The Giants specifically - whose opening credits all prominently displayed "IN COLOR"in distinct block lettering.  I was just a little kid at the time - around age 6-8 - but even then I remember thinking, "What idiot put THAT on there?  If you have a color TV, you already KNOW whether or not it's in color - and if you DON'T have a color TV, what good does it do you to know the show's being broadcast in color?"

 

Yes, the snark was strong with this one at an early age.

[kikismom]

Yes! I also didn't know the Wizard Of Oz went from b/w to color: I still remember the shock.

I remember how after the last program, the National Anthem was played over a picture of a flag. Were we supposed to stand and salute before bed?

 

I never saw anything Disney till I was an adult. I still haven't seen most of it. I didn't see Bambi till I was in my 30s. Never have seen Peter Pan or Mary Poppins or Song of the South etc.My parents would not take us to Disney movies; they said 'it will turn your mind to mush'.

They took us kids to see their movies; from the time I was a toddler all through my childhood I just saw Westerns and crime movies, I saw every James Bond movie and Dirty Harry and Magnum Force; my favorite movie as a kid (and I still love it today) was Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I fell asleep at lots of horror movies.Even when I got bigger, I fell asleep at The Exorcist (talk talk talk when is the Devil gonna show up?!). The exception was Rosemary's Baby, which I thought was a laugh riot.

(Still do.)

There was some thing the other day where people were talking about kids in this era; one lady said her daughter kept losing her phone and suggested someone invent a phone with some kind of cord so it wouldn't get lost. Then they read from an office worker who had to shut down all the computers during a heat wave and her 18 year old summer temp said "How did they keep the computers cool before air-conditioning was invented?"

Edited December 18, 2014 by kikismom

[nachomama]

Apparently Dirty Harry was my favorite movie when I was like 3 cuz yeah you watched what they watched. I hated Mash because it meant my dad took over the tv and I couldn't watch Gilligan after school. It blew my mind when I found out that all those "after school" tv shows, Brady Bunch, Gilligan, Beverly Hillbilly's used to be prime time tv.

 

We went to the drive in and I was supposed to go to sleep after the cartoon. (Movies used to show cartoons before the main feature!) And my parents were watching some horror movie and the man gets out of the tent in the middle of the night and the monster grabs him. Instead of being scared I shouted "Dont forget the toilet paper"

 

I had a friend who didn't know until college that Bambi's mom got shot, or that the Von Trapp's were escaping Nazi's her mom didn't only let her watch the parts of Bambi where he's hanging out with Friends and stopped the Sound of Music after they won the singing competition.

[ghoulina]

I was telling all this to my niece the other day. Yeah, if you missed something you wanted to see, you had to hope it would be aired again...one day.

 

LOL, those days were only 2 years ago for me. I was very late in the getting of a DVR. 

 

They took us kids to see their movies; from the time I was a toddler all through my childhood I just saw Westerns and crime movies, I saw every James Bond movie and Dirty Harry and Magnum Force; my favorite movie as a kid (and I still love it today) was Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I fell asleep at lots of horror movies.Even when I got bigger, I fell asleep at The Exorcist (talk talk talk when is the Devil gonna show up?!). The exception was Rosemary's Baby, which I thought was a laugh riot.

 

My dad let me watch Fatal Attraction when I was 8. For the longest time I was afraid to look in the bathroom mirror, as I expected Glenn Close to rear her psycho head behind me. To this day he claims he does not remember allowing me to watch it - I'm guessing he was drunk?

[kikismom]

I was in first grade when they made us all go to the auditorium and watch a movie called The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T.

It was about a boy whose father was dead and he dreams he is imprisoned in an institution with an electrified fence, where 500 little boys are kept locked up in cells except when the Institution Guards make them play the evil dictator's snakelike piano with so many keys it takes all 500 children to play it, 24 hours a day until they drop. The dictator Dr. T. hypnotizes the little boy's mother and makes her be his unwilling bride.

Everyone went back to the classroom and cried.

 

 

These lyrics to "The Dungeon Song" are really nice for children.

 

http://q7.com/~vvv/fingers/dungeon.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045464/trivia

Edited December 18, 2014 by kikismom

[AngelaHunter]

Then they read from an office worker who had to shut down all the computers during a heat wave and her 18 year old summer temp said "How did they keep the computers cool before air-conditioning was invented?"

 

The worst part of that sad tale is that it doesn't surprise me at all.

 

Ever see Jay Leno's "Street Walking"? I caught it once by accident and he was asking a COLLEGE student, "What was between East and West Berlin?"

 

"Ahhhh....a lake?"

 

As for old TV shows, yeah, some of them make me ill now, but a lot hold up surprisingly well with good stories, acting, and actors who did not show us their butts on a regular basis. And comedies were actually funny, not a collection of smarmy locker room jokes. I will never not laugh at Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi.

[Nashville]

I was in first grade when they made us all go to the auditorium and watch a movie called The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T.

It was about a boy whose father was dead and he dreams he is imprisoned in an institution with an electrified fence, where 500 little boys are kept locked up in cells except when the Institution Guards make them play the evil dictator's snakelike piano with so many keys it takes all 500 children to play it, 24 hours a day until they drop. The dictator Dr. T. hypnotizes the little boy's mother and makes her be his unwilling bride.

Everyone went back to the classroom and cried.

 

 

These lyrics to "The Dungeon Song" are really nice for children.

 

http://q7.com/~vvv/fingers/dungeon.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045464/trivia

WOW. This was a total jump in the Wayback Machine, Sherman. I also remember seeing this in one of those herd-the-whole-grade-into-the-auditorium showings. Three others pop to mind:

1. The Red Balloon

2. The Point

3. Paddle-To-the-Sea

[AngelaHunter]

I also remember seeing this in one of those herd-the-whole-grade-into-the-auditorium showings.

 

We were herded in (to the gym) to watch "Old Yeller"! Thanks for permanently traumatizing a whole generation of children, TPTB.

[nachomama]

We always watched "That Darn Cat" and "Pete's Dragon" but thank you jeebus I've never heard of the 5000 fingers of Dr. T

 

I somehow never ever saw Willy Wonka til I went to college. The childcatcher in Chitty Bang Bang petrified me.

 

Not only did my parents let me watch Horror movies or whatever was on tv I also had some seriously inappropriate books from a very young age. I had Mistral's daughter when I was like 8-9, I had some book about Cynthia Parker (kidnapped white child from Texas who was raised as an Indian) It was a true story so I'm sure my mom thought it was history but it had pretty graphic sex and violence. Do not ask me how or why but my sister had "The Happy Hooker" and Scruples<-- if you've read that IT'S A DIRTY BOOK! =O

 

I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Diary of Anne Frank" when I was like 8 which these are not bad books but the meaning went compleeeeeetely over my head. I thought tkam was funny, because Scout dresses up in a ham costume and Atticus says to the old lady "You look as pretty as a picture" and scout whisper "a picture of what?" totally missed the whole racism, faux rape (THIS IS WHERE I LEARNED THE WORD CHIFFOROBE!!!!!!) and Anne Frank I was all giddy that they got to live in an attic. Nazis and the fact that THE WHOLE FAMILY DIED were lost on me. My bulb, she are not lit well. :D

 

I re read them obviously  and I love love love to kill a mockingbird to this day.

[AngelaHunter]

Do not ask me how or why but my sister had "The Happy Hooker"

 

Ah, memories, of when this book was on the "Must Read" list. I've forgotten everything in it except for one passage. The HH is talking about a friend who just moved and needed furniture, so she had sex in exchange for men buying her sofas, beds, dishes, etc. The HH concluded by saying, "She literally fucked her apartment together."

 

Yeah, I have no idea why I found that so funny.

 

 

[nachomama]

The Scruples book stands out in my mind as dirtier than HH but maybe I didn't know most of the stuff she was up to?? I only remember her peeing on someone and being super grossed out.

 

And last night I noticed our weatherman is named Weatherbee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

and and I thought I was a frikkin genius when I read an article about Harper Lee that said "childhood friend's with Truman Capote" I slapped my hand down on the desk and scared the bejeebus out of my roommate and hollered "TRUMAN CAPOTE IS DILL!"

Edited December 18, 2014 by nachomama

[kikismom]

In 6th grade I did my book report on A Clockwork Orange.

That was after the summer my dad taught me to shoot by putting up big pictures of Richard Nixon, from Time and Newsweek covers, on a hay bale as targets

.

From a very early age he would buy me toy machine guns and tanks and bought me a set of pens (ink pens:-D) for school that were shaped like a .22long.

A bit of the old ultraviolence indeed.

[kikismom]

 thank you jeebus I've never heard of the 5000 fingers of Dr. T

Supposedly it has now become a cult classic. It's also quite popular in Germany. No comment.

[nachomama]

Wow, you know how quickly we would be hauled into the counselor's office for all our whacky hijinks? We'd be having some serious psych evaluations based on the stuff we got up to as kids.

 

The only thing my parents were ever called in about was they asked us to draw a picture of our family in kindergarden. I drew everyone, ev.reeee.one! siblings, grandparents, cousins, the dog, the cat, neice, aunts the goldfish you name it, I drew them. I did NOT draw my dad. Teacher came around and labeled everyone for you so I definitely didn't list him. Now it was very small town, people did know my parents were not divorced and daddy hadn't died or nothing (as you know Mrs. Funk was at church and most of the teachers had my sister just the year before) so they called a meeting to see if there was a nefarious reason I didn't draw pops.

 

My explanation is this, my dad was the guy who lived in the room at the end of the hall. He worked swing shift so he sometimes slept during the day and and went to work at midnight or 4 pm not 9 to 5 like other people's dads. So he was the mean guy if you woke him up during the day and he took his meals in the bedroom etc etc. There was nothing squirrelly about the situation but to my (dimly lit) mind he lived in that room, not in our whole house. But there were serious talks about why I left my dad out of the picture. OOOPSY

[Nashville]

Wow, you know how quickly we would be hauled into the counselor's office for all our whacky hijinks? We'd be having some serious psych evaluations based on the stuff we got up to as kids.

Psych evals? Try criminal charges, these days. The current crop of Zero Tolerance/No Test Score Left Behind school administrators have no discernible sense of humor whatsoever.

ETA: ZT

Edited December 18, 2014 by Nashville

[editorgrrl]

Psych evals? Try criminal charges, these days. The current crop of Zero Tolerance/No Test Score Left Behind school administrators have no discernible sense of humor whatsoever.

ETA: ZT

 

I read this as "zombie tools," but Google suggests you mean "zero tolerance."

[kikismom]

[nachomama]

I saw someone post on facebook that they took a blind kid's cane away at school because it could be classified a weapon and gave him a pool noodle to lean on (could be internet hoax but some people are that stupid) and I've heard of kids getting into trouble with zero tolerance because of butter knives in lunch boxes.

 

I'm from such a rural place that kids drove their trucks to school with loaded shotguns in gun racks. Obviously pre-Columbine but no one thought anything of it and every boy had at least a pocket knife if not an actual hunting knife that they carried on them.

[Nashville]

I saw someone post on facebook that they took a blind kid's cane away at school because it could be classified a weapon and gave him a pool noodle to lean on (could be internet hoax but some people are that stupid) and I've heard of kids getting into trouble with zero tolerance because of butter knives in lunch boxes.

 

I'm from such a rural place that kids drove their trucks to school with loaded shotguns in gun racks. Obviously pre-Columbine but no one thought anything of it and every boy had at least a pocket knife if not an actual hunting knife that they carried on them.

Same way when I went to school back in the 70s. These days? Not so much.

[Nashville]

I read this as "zombie tools," but Google suggests you mean "zero tolerance."

Google is correct, unfortunately. At least zombie tools would be useful. In its current incarnation, Zero Tolerance is not much more than a way for bureaucrats to use regulations as an alternative to using their brain.

[AngelaHunter]

OMG, I love twisted shit like this! Hahaha!!

[editorgrrl]