(I am a customer, shopping for a new shirt. I’ve picked up a few to try on, but I can’t see one of the ones I want in my size.)

Me: “Excuse me, but do you have this shirt in a large?”

Employee: “Let me go check in the back.”

(She goes to the stockroom and returned a moment later with a shirt.)

Employee: “It was the brown, right? Here you go!”

Me: “Oh, great! Can I steal that from you?”

(Then I realize what I said.)

Me: “Oh, my gosh! I mean, ‘buy!’ ‘Can I buy that from you?’”

(I did end up buying the shirt.)

(I am a Canadian on a tour of a plantation house in Louisiana. There is a man on the tour who keeps interrupting the guide with questions that are actually designed to show off his knowledge. The guide just gets a rousing story going and the man cuts him off, ruining the pace and throwing off the guide. Four rooms in, and this interrupter will not stop. Even his wife is uncomfortable with his actions.)

Guide: *low, under his breath, in French* “Oh, my God. Shut up.”

(I gasp, and he looks at me with an expression that says he’s even more shocked than I am.)

Guide: “Oh. Oh! You’re Canadian!’

(He knows this because he asked where everyone was from at the beginning of the tour.)

Me: *in French* “Don’t worry. It’s fine.”

(No one else knew what was going on for this tiny exchange, so we continued — the interrupter still showing off as best he could — but there was some French thrown in for me after some of the halting stories were done.)

Related:
No One Insults Quite Like The French

(I teach Sunday School to a group of seven- to nine-year-olds, so there is plenty of squirming and giggling to go around. Today’s lesson calls for me to teach a few words in sign language — “love,” etc. — and I’m going over them, when one of the boys raises his hand.)

Boy: “What does this sign mean? I always have to hold my hand up like this when I need to use the bathroom at school.”

(I recognize he’s making the sign for the letter T, which also means “toilet” or “bathroom” if you shake your hand. I explain it, and the boy thinks for a moment.)

Boy: “What’s the sign for the letter O?”

(I demonstrated, realizing we were getting a little off track, but happy that he was engaged and interested. The boy giggled and immediately began fingerspelling “T-O-O-T.” With only two letters I managed to give an eight-year-old’s sense of humor all the ammo it needed.)

(I read a story about Japan on this site and I remember a story a coworker once told me.)

Coworker: “I was in Japan for a business trip and we went to a cafe of some sort. It was quite noisy, and I thought one of the Japanese businessmen asked me what I thought about Japanese cows. I thought it was weird, but since I was just served steak, I just went with it. I told them I thought their cows were nice and firm, having good meat on them. As a response, the businessmen started laughing. It turns out they asked what I thought about Japanese girls.”

(I need to make a revision to a work document. Revisions are assigned the original document number and a sequential letter of the alphabet. The most recent revision was N, so I am on letter O.)

Me: “Hey, [Manager #1], are we using Oscar, or skipping it to avoid confusion?”

Manager #1: *looks at me like I’ve grown a second head* “What? Why would we not use Oscar?”

Me: “On some projects we skip letters O and I because they can be misread as zero and one.”

Manager #1: “That’s stupid. Why would we ever do that? I’ve never heard of that!”

Me: “Okay, just checking. Revision Oscar it is.”

(Two hours later, my other, more immediate manager is reading a note I’ve written referencing the document, and:)

Manager #2: “Revision Zero?”

Me: *sigh* “Revision O.”