As I kid I wondered how those guys with the flat top hair cuts were able to keep the hair standing straight up. My dad always cut my hair and all I got was something that looked like a peach …
Well, my 6 year brain stormed and I decided the try Elmores glue… It did work in that my hair stood straight up, but there was down side was every time I scratched my head it snowed the worst case of dandruff.
Dear Tom and Ray,
I went with some college friends up to Lyons, New York to visit a buddy who had dropped out and joined the work world. (This seemed a much more admirable thing than being a student.) We went night fishing on the Erie Canal and consumed far too much beer and "green" tobacco. I was really gone. I wasn't getting any bites for a long time and complained about this until someone pointed out that my lure was hanging three feet in front of me.
Anyway, at some point, I decided to go for a swim, stripped off my clothes and jumped in the canal. Of course, I hadn’t thought about how I was going to get out. When I was done swimming, I tried to get out by clawing my way up the sides of the canal. I was like a rat trapped in a tank. My friends were doubled over laughing. Finally, someone took pity and directed me to a ladder built into the wall.
On solid ground, I realized that both my forearms where shredded and bloody from trying to claw my way up the sides. We all stumbled back to my friend’s house. He had neither alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. (Why would he?)
Resigned to non-sterilization, I opened his fridge for another beer. There I saw a bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce and swaggeringly announced my intentions. Over the sink, I liberally spread the brown liquid over both arms. It took a while for the sensation to reach my brain. Then, from my bowels rose a scream worthy of any soy sauce-weilding samuri. (Of course, we all know from Rambo and other action-packed movies that a scream is the best way to conquer pain.)
I hope you have enjoyed my tale.
Best to you and your readers,
Macho EricThe very last camping trip I’ll ever take.
It wasn’t just the fact that during the night the rain got in the tent, or that my 10 year old daughter kept rolling into me all night, or hearing animals outside the tent that got to me most, but by the morning, hungry, wet and cold, when I was looking forward to the pancakes did I experience the straw that broke the camel’s back. As I grabbed for the can to spray oil on the frying pan, I inadvertently grabbed the can of bug spray and coated the frying pan instead.
Raechel Hackney
Dear Tom and Ray;
Your “misapplication” story reminded me of a golfing trip I took several years ago with some buddies.
We rented two houses in Pinehurst, NC for two days of golf, and a night of fun. I drove down by myself, and arrived at one of the rented houses. As no one was there, I dumped my suitcase in an empty bedroom and headed to the course.
After the round, I came back with some buddies to take showers and dress for dinner in a local seedy joint. We all had to share bedrooms, and a friend had also left his suitcase, dop kit, etc in the room, but he hadn’t returned from the course.
Unpacking, I realized I had forgotten my shampoo, so I looked in my friend’s kit in the bathroom and found one of those small plastic hotel shampoo bottles.
I showered, shampoo’ed (thanks to my friend)brushed my hair and dressed. Several of us jumped into a car and drove to the resturant. I didn’t see my roomate until we arrived, and confessed to him that I had “borrowed” his shampoo.
“I don’t have any shampoo” he remarked. I explained that I had found a hotel bottle in his toiletries. “I don’t think so.” he said.
We visited several establishments that evening and about 11:00, while sitting at table with some of the guys, I brushed my fingers through my hair. Instead of the “soft tresses” I expected, I had a pretty stiff (very stiff) coif that I frankly couldn’t get my fingers through.
I asked my friend “If you didn’t have shampoo, did you happen to have any body lotion?” Sure enough, my head spent the evening in a body lotion mud pack, getting dry and thick, and gathering sawdust, lint, and maybe a couple of flies during the evening.
You should have seen the pillow the next morning.
Best;
Tim May
Greensboro, NC
This story happened when I was in high school and living with my parents. I had noticed that the bottle of shampoo in our shower was getting low. As I was taking a shower, I removed the cap from the bottle and held the bottle up to my face to peer inside and see just how much shampoo was left. Unbeknownst to me, my parents (being the cheapskates that they are) had added a bit of water to the bottle and shaken it to get the last little smears of shampoo out. So as I tilted the bottle into my face, a slug of shampoo-water poured out of the bottle and directly into my partly-open mouth. It poured in so quickly that I reflexively swallowed the liquid (but not for long). I was coughing bubbles of Pantene for hours.
Don’t worry–if we judged you all by Bill and Hillary, we’d think you were smart.
#1: When my cousin was a kid, one day he was eating lunch at our grandparents’ house. They were having a little picnic, eating hamburgers outside at the picnic table. He, being a kid, had doused his hamburger liberally with ketsup. As he took a big bite, he felt some ketsup squirt out onto his hand, so he quickly licked it off.
Bird shit.
#2: My co-worker used an old empty Frangelico bottle as a vase. Over a course of days, the flowers gradually died, became a bit rotten, and she finally tossed them. She hadn’t gotten around to dumping out the old nasty water, though, when her husband-to-be came for a visit. He picked up the bottle, looked at the lable, and never having had Frangelico, asked her, “Is this stuff any good?” She replied, “Yeah! It’s great!” So he took a swig. (She claims she didn’t know he was about to drink it and that he did it so fast she couldn’t stop him in time. He has never believed her.)
This happened long ago, when I was still a teenager. I lived in South Florida, and was going with my first love . . . Bill. He was out on a boat with friends and got a horrific sunburn on his back. He came to my house in agony, and - - always wanting to help - - I told him I had just the remedy. I had him to lie stomach down on the couch and I got a tube of what I knew would have a great analgesic effect on his pain - - Ben Gay! I smeared it on his back and waited for his sigh of relief. Within minutes, he was screaming holy murder! It just goes to show you, labels can be misleading! Needless to say, I’ve never lived that down, even after 42 years of marriage to the guy. Love conquers all, doesn’t it?
Joyce Taaffe (Bill’s wife)
One night I wearily stumbled to the bathom searching for relief for my stuffed up sinuses. Believing I had located my bottle of Afrin, I purged my lungs and took a great big wiff of the spray through my nose. HOLY FLAMIN’ SCHNOZOLA!! In my drowsy state I had accidently picked up my daughter’s swim ear medicine.
This would be a good safety technique if you needed to wake someone to a fully alert status instataneously, like if you’re a passenger in their car.
Ron from Defiance, Ohio
Nothing I ever did compares to the woman across the street who found a small package of chocolates hanging off of her front doorknob back in the days when free samples of things were attached to doorknobs. She swiftly ran around the neighborhood swiping chocolates and scarfing them down.
Turns out she was newly arrived in this country from some place in Europe that had never heard of Ex-Lax.
I remember waking up with a horrible hangover after a raucus new years eve celebration. What I didn’t understand was the awful burning sensation on my privates until I lifted the covers and smelled Vicks Vaporub. My wife had decided we needed some vaseline that night but used Vicks instead!
In 1954 I got my head stuck in the side compartment of our kitchen stove. The fire department had to come and use their brand new hydraulic machine (now commonly called the “Jaws of Life”) to bend the parts of the stove open and free me.
The picture of the firemen freeing me from the stove along with an article were on the front page of the newspaper. My dad called the paper and got the original photograph. When my mom passed away (my dad was already gone) I inherited the photo and the article. I have them in a scrapbook at home.
The last thing to do before walking down the aisle was to apply the finishing hairspray. My mother (the mother of the bride my sister) reached for the can and sprayed with her eyes closed so not to get it in her eyes. When she opened her eyes her hair was covered with white foam. She had grabbed the tub cleaner!
I was listening to your puzzeler and knew the answer because it happened to me.
I had just bought my 1956 Chevy and was taking an Automechanics for Women Course at our local Tade School. I ran out of gas on my way home after the third class. I called my father to bring me some gas, which he did. We both walked around the car and could not find the gas cap. My father had to go to the closest gas station and ask the guys where the heck the gas cap was on the '56 Chevy. It’s in the bullet-shaped light on the right side and there is a switch under the light that opens it up. The light folds down and there is the gas cap. When I went back to class the next week I told my teacher that the first thing you should teach us is where the gas cap is located.
Susan Kelleher Trelease, Springfield, MA
When I was a college student, one morning while sleepily getting ready for class, I sprayed deodorant all over my hair. That gave my roommate a good chuckle, until I exclaimed, “At least I didn’t spray hairspray under my arms!” reminding her of a similar mistake that she had made.
I was visiting my cousin and inquired how her brother, whom I had not seen in many years, was doing. As we chatted, she shared this story …
Gene was entertaining friends and one of them complained, “There’s no coffee in the pot.” He replied, “I don’t drink coffee, but you are welcome to make some.” He showed her where to find everything and the evening progressed.
Six months later, friends were over again, and a lady came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. He asked her where she got the coffee, and she replied, that she had helped herself to a cup out of the pot. You guessed it! It was the coffee left over from her previous visit 6 months earlier!!
I was listening to this week’s (week of July 21) show, and when Tom shared his story about turning on the wipers instead of shifting into park because of the difference in location of the gear shift, it reminded me of what used to happen to my mom when she was driving my grandmother’s car.
Back in the mid 1990s we had a 1994 Nissan Quest minivan, which had the gearshift on the steering column and a foot parking brake (you depress the brake lever with your foot to engage it, and pull on the release lever down on the lower left below the steering wheel to disengage it). Anyway, when my mom had to drive my grandmother’s car, a 1994 Toyota Corolla, she would go to shift from park into reverse and turn on the wipers, and/or go to release the parking brake and end up popping the hood because of the difference in location of the gear shift and the parking brake. (The 1994 Corolla has a floor gear shift and a hand parking brake.
As a sidenote to my earlier post (and I’m not sure if anyone is going to believe this), but my grandmother still has her 1994 Corolla, and it has maybe 30,000 miles on it, because she only drives maybe a couple miles a day to the Wal Mart down the street and back.
I had a similar problem when I was driving a tow motor(fork lift, or whatever you call it). The gear selection for the TM was on the left side of the steering wheel. Well, I leave to go home, put the car in reverse to back out of the parking spot, and turn on my right turn signal, because I was used to the TM’s gear shift(forward, neutral, reverse)
Dear Tom & Ray,
Well, I had this '63 rambler that did not have windshield washers (It was an option back then) so I took the washer set-up off a Dodge Dart that was sitting around behind the shop. It worked great!! Wanting to keep the windshield extra clean I decided to fill he reservoir with ammonia (that’s what we used to clean the mirrors in the glass shop). All was well untill I drove home one day in a snow storm. I hit the button. The windshield washers sprayed the amonia. The heater pulled in the fumes at the base of the windshield. I started to gag and just about threw up from the fumes filling the car. A life lesson learned- joel