Mortification Week: the wrong translation, the Oompa Loompa, and other stories to cringe over

by Alison Green on July 31, 2024

It’s Mortification Week at Ask a Manager and all week long we’ll be revisiting ways we’ve mortified ourselves at work. Here are 12 mortifying stories to kick off today.

1. The socks

I had to go into site one weekend and found the security officer doing his rounds while wearing socks but no shoes. This is not considered safe behavior (risk of slipping) so I politely reminded him he needed to wear shoes, and also, as required, entered it as a quick observation in the on-line site safety log.

Monday comes around and we start our daily management meeting at 9am with the usual review of any new safety issues in the log. We get to mine, and rather to my surprise the entire team look at me in shock. A very concerned HSE manager speaks for all of them: “Was the security officer really walking round site naked?” she asked, sounding horrified.

“What?!? NO, why would you think that?” I responded, equally horrified.

At which point I reread the observation I’d input: ‘Security officer walking round site in just his socks’ and realized that perhaps this was not quite as clearly worded as it might have been.

2. The insult

I had a new client I had just started working with text me asking me a question about his job. I was working out of the office that day, and didn’t have access to his information to answer. So I texted back, “I’m not in the office today, but will get you the answer first thing tomorrow morning.” Unfortunately, I didn’t proofread before I hit send. Autocorrect changed morning to moron. I immediately saw it and texted “Morning, not moron! I’m so sorry. Stupid autocorrect!” He replied with a laughing emoji and said that I had caught it too fast, as he was just about to reply, “That will be fine, idiot.” (So glad he had a good sense of humor!)

3. The invitation

I once texted and asked my boss to attend my next OB-GYN appointment with me. Yes, I thought I sent it to my husband. Fortunately, he replied back before I sent text number two which would have gone into a lot more detail.

4. The neighbor

Working at a bank where the breakroom was on the second floor, we typically took the stairs from the first floor at lunchtime. It was faster. Invariably one coworker would take the elevator. Jokingly, one day I asked if she was too good for the stairs. Her response? “I have an artificial leg and can’t climb stairs.” I was mortified.

Then, to compound my careless insults, another day the same employee was sitting outside the bank waiting for her afterwork ride. He didn’t show up, and there were no cell phones back them. She said she lived in the same adjacent town I did, so I gave her a ride. During the drive, as she was giving me directions, it was fun to realize we must live very close to each other. In the conversation, I mentioned that we have the very worst neighbors. They continually drive across our acreage when their driveway is too muddy to navigate. We went to the expense of putting in a culvert and gravel and hate that these rude people are putting ruts in our property to use our driveway. And, to make matters worse, they have no control over their vicious dog that lunged at my husband while he was working on our property. Yup, you guessed it, she and her husband were those neighbors. My mouth gets me into lots of mortifying trouble.

5. The lost bag

Not 10 minutes ago, I texted a coworker who I do not know well that the airline lost my vag and I couldn’t enjoy the conference until they returned it.

The “b” key and the “v” key should not be so close together on the keyboard.

6. The aggression

I called a company help line recently, and the customer service rep on the other end of the line greeted me with “Back off, asshole!”

Her dog was stealing her snack just as the line connected. Pretty hilarious.

7. The phone number

I worked in an emergency department as a receptionist. A lot of my job was passing on phone calls from nursing homes wanting updates from doctors about patients they had sent us. I got one such call, wrote down the contact information, and gave it to the doctor (a very serious man), who comes back to me a few minutes later, red in the face, fuming, asking if I thought wasting his time was funny. It turns out I had switched two of the digits in the phone number, which resulted in him calling a sex toy and lingerie chain instead of a nursing home! To top it off, it happened to be Valentine’s Day so it was very easily misconstrued as a prank instead of a harmless mistake, with the additional implication that I thought he needed to spice up his sex life.

He avoided eye contact with me for 3 years until I left the job, but I always triple check phone numbers now.

8. The overhead page

I am an MD and split my time doing informatics and hospitalist. At the hospital, we gets texts, messages in the computer and rarely overhead pages. We still have overhead paging for codes and typical stuff like fire alarms, system downtimes, etc. Our operator accesses the overheads with a secret code. This code is guarded for obvious reasons (immature humor is more prevalent in medical professions compared to “civilians”).

On to the hospital telephone system. Our phone system is similar to a hotel. Patients enter a code and then the number when calling out. Their families similarly call the hospital and enter a code to reach a specific patient room. Most people now have cell phones, but a few folks still use the traditional room phones.

How are these related, you ask? In theory, not at all. But when one patient’s wife dialed the code to call her friend from the hospital phone, she unwittingly hacked into the overhead speaker line. With her husband was under anesthesia for some procedure, she caught up with her friend – and everyone in The House. Due to the nature of the overhead, we only heard the wife’s part of the conversation, and that was more than enough. And it was juicy.

We heard all the juicy details:
1. Hubby was having an affair.
2. He spent a lot on “that tart” insert many f bombs and descriptions.
3. Yes, we have a pediatric wing.
4. Her scheduled bank transfers from the joint accounts were happening “as we speak.”
5. “Oh he will be a different man after this.” He — the patient — had no idea she knew.

This is all going on on the OVERHEAD. The operator could not break into the “announcement” and kick her off the line or shut it down. They also could not track who was doing it.

Now, in the hospital we are held to some important, and sometimes impossible, standards. Protecting PHI — private health information — is a big one. Any time we inappropriately share or give out PHI the hospital is at risk for fines. The fine is per breach. If ANY medical information got out, the hospital would be liable for a huge fine. The leaders and CEO (and then everyone) were all racing around trying to find who was talking and from what room, looking for the wife. Luckily, the conversations ended without any PHI. We never found the room or the wife or the patient.

The last thing she said before getting off the phone: “BTW, the new car is only in my name. I’m taking the Benz. Elvis has left the building.”

9. The inappropriate rephrasing

I once worked at a very prestigious mergers and acquisition firm. This was in the early 90’s. I had become familiar in my role as EA to the owner of the firm, a little too familiar. My boss asked me to get a file for a company we had just pitched. I asked why. He said the firm that had initially gotten the business had to back out and we were being given another “bite at the apple.” I do not know why I said what I said, but I replied, “Kinda like sloppy seconds?” WTF???? Whyyyyyyy??? I am currently getting hives just thinking about this then.

10. The training notice

Several years ago, we received a mandatory training notice. It was for human trafficking awareness. But for some reason, the person who sent out the email made the subject line: UPCOMING HUMAN TRAFFICKING EVENT. It definitely was attention grabbing, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

11. The wrong translation

I (an American) was working in Germany. One of the Germans I worked with told me about a local insect pest that fell from trees, and the home remedy they used to drive it away. Their home remedy was to use the seeds from a plant that repelled the pest. Rub ’em on your nose and you’ll apparently ward off the bugs from dropping on you, presumably due to some chemical, like a seed oil, that’s not obvious or offensive to humans.

This German colleague did not know that there are some subtleties to terms for various gametes in English. So he offered to rub sperm on my nose for me, to ward off local bugs.

And then we had a very awkward chat to sort out what he really meant.

12. The Oompa Loompa

In a previous job, I had to call a prison and spell out a name, and somehow my brain refused that day to find “O for Oscar” and instead I said “O for Oompa Loompa.” The prison officer on the other end of the line had to put the phone down and in the end get a colleague over to finish my call, as she just burst into laughter and couldn’t calm herself down.

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  1. No Tribble At All*

    #10 – we always have Human Trafficking Training as well (:

    Say PREVENTION y’all. PREVENTION.

    1. Guacamole Bob*

      Sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation trainings are brought up regularly at my office.

      1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        Yep, annual sexual harassment training — two years ago the training video was so bad, I felt harassed, and at the end no one in the video was shown being punished so it very much felt like, “see this is how to do it properly.”

      2. bamcheeks*

        We had a “people with lived experience of mental health” just yesterday. Literally the opposite of what you mean!

        1. Genevieve*

          Oooh that’s also some nonsensical person-first language just run amok. (And I say this as the person in my family who tends to be the source for “what is the current preferred term for X?”)

          1. Arrietty*

            Well, with the missing noun it can be more accurate – for instance, “lived experience of mental health treatment” or “lived experience of mental health services” doesn’t necessarily mean current mental health problems.

          2. MigraineMonth*

            I don’t think it’s the person-first language that’s the issue, it’s the missing word: people with mental health [missing word]. Mental health issues, mental health problems, mental health struggles…

            1. Worldwalker*

              Everyone has mental health, just like everyone has physical health. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s still there.

            2. londonedit*

              It always irks me when I hear people say things like ‘Oh, he suffers with mental health’. No, he suffers with mental illness, or suffers with poor mental health, or suffers with mental ill-health. Some people seem to be using ‘mental health’ as a synonym for depression or mental illness, when in fact everyone has ‘mental health’, it’s whether it’s good or not that’s the issue!

              1. Vio*

                That one’s not quite so bad though, as “suffers” does give the contextual implication. It does still sound better as “he suffers with his mental health” rather than “he suffers with mental health”. Weirdly it would be more accurate to say “from” rather than “with” but sounds worse. Kind of like how a better abbreviation of “will not” would be “willn’t” instead of “won’t” but, largely because we’re used to it (and partly because it’s genuinely shorter), the latter sounds and looks best.

    2. PotatoRock*

      I giggle every time HR reminds us to do our annual Corruption and Insider Trading training. And promises it will have practical, real world examples relevant to our everyday work!

    3. Roy Donk*

      I can’t count the number of times I’ve been informed of a corporate sexual harassment training. Ooh, I’d love to learn how to do that better!

    5. Nonny mouse*

      My workplace recently put on an elder abuse awareness event that was referred to in all of the internal emails as “elder abuse celebration”

      1. Quill*

        Celebration is what puts it over the line for me. I can see grabbing the first two relevant words in the title and slapping training on, but celebration?

        2. Vio*

          “Stop singing Happy Birthday! I’m 97 years old, I don’t want to be reminded of it! No, stop offering me cake! Help me!”

    6. Seashell*

      I had an internship with a non-profit whose name was something like Jackson County Organization Against Domestic Violence. When discussing it with a subsequent employer, he said Jackson County Organization For Domestic Violence, but he caught his mistake about a minute later.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        For a while my local progressive group handed out fliers declaring that we supported “voting rights; reproductive rights; and climate change”.

      2. MBK*

        The local supermarket’s checkout system asks if you want to round up or donate a dollar or two to a particular charity just before you pay. One of the recent prompts said, “Would you like to donate to support pediatric cancer?”

        No! Absolutely not! I am completely and incontrovertibly opposed to pediatric cancer!

    7. Butterfly Counter*

      I teach Human Trafficking. That’s what I tell people: “I teach Human Trafficking.”

      Only one person has been like, “You teach how to prevent it, right?”

      Ultimately, yes. But I also tell my students the nuts and bolts of exactly what we know is going on and how traffickers operate because it’s exactly that knowledge that helps stop it happening as well as prevent victimization.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        My Computer and Network Security class was like that. “We’re going to teach you how to exploit vulnerabilities so that you can spot them before anyone else does. Please do not abuse this knowledge.”

        I did once have a bizarre conversation with someone trying to design a course on Computer Ethics who tried to convince me that computer security was useless because hackers would just try something else, so we should just give up and let them win.

        1. Vio*

          Kind of like leaving the bank vaults wide open and unguarded because somebody is going to manage to steal something from somebody somewhere eventually so you might as well just let it happen.

    8. Lexi Vipond*

      For some reason my brain is convinced that the RSPB is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds. Not that I ever actually need to spell it out, but it would be a sad world…

      1. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        I had to read this a couple of times before I got it. The brain does love to insert what it expects to be there instead of what’s actually on the page/screen!

      2. N C Kiddle*

        Presumably doesn’t help that the parallel animal charity is for the Prevention of Cruelty

    10. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

      Oh, I just took my company’s annual training on harassment (I think the word anti is in the title but I wouldn’t swear to it). One of my favorite bits is that my company forbids unwarranted sabotage and hostility. So apparently if it’s warranted, I’m good.

    11. Margaret*

      I once applied for a job whose title was “Head of Violence Against Women And Girls.”

      1. Vio*

        Is it wrong that I’m imagining them as a still-living severed head that’s frustrated by having no limbs to actually commit violence with?

    12. Cat Lady*

      At my international organization (3,000 plus people) , our ethics office was hiring an officer presumably to work on preventing unethical behavior. Due to space restrictions or perhaps not being native speakers of english, the job posting was listed as “ethics prevention officer” for weeks. Hilarious! I thought about saying something but then was like no that is too funny. Inagine having that job!

    13. pandop*

      I work in a library, when you see a title like this you have to wonder how many people looked at it along it’s journey to publication, and didn’t realise how it might sound:

      Domestic violence : a handbook for health professionals

    14. umami*

      We once posted a ‘Happy Memorial Day’ message on our social media with our closure announcement. Just … no.

  2. Martine*

    Nr. 11 – Oh the joys of German. I once remarked that people prefer their jam without condoms, “Präservative” being the German word for condoms. “Konservierungsmittel” would have been the correct word for “preservatives”.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      You should have gotten a clue it wasn’t the right word because it was too easy. It is never that easy! /s And mad respect to German for having a word for everything. Love that about German.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        German does not have a word for everything; they don’t even have that many words compared with English. They just hate putting spaces between them.

        ;-p

    2. Germish*

      #11 Yes. This is exactly how German/English translations go. If there were a ranking for Most Awkward Translations, German English would be high on the list. Forget a single umlaut or transpose a couple of letters, and you end up with a VERY different message; eg, “I’m good sexually” in response to “How are you?” or “I went sh*tting in the woods today” (the words for sh*t and shoot are almost identical). Also remarkably easy to become a cannibal, streaker, or swinger depending on how much you’re paying attention to verbs/word order.

      1. Roy G. Biv*

        “Also remarkably easy to become a cannibal, streaker, or swinger depending on how much you’re paying attention to verbs/word order.”

        Thank you for the hearty guffaws on a Wednesday!

        1. Vio*

          A German friend once told me that anybody who thinks Germans have no sense of humour has never tried to learn the German language.

    3. Anon123*

      I worked for a German company for years. Once a German colleague was late to a meeting and explained that he got caught in a “traffic marmalade.” We all had a great laugh at that one.

      1. Panicked*

        Well isn’t that just the sweetest mix up! (Pun intended)

        As a native English speaker learning German, this thread only confirms why I’m terrified to speak it!

      2. Worldwalker*

        I’m going to remember that one for the next time I’m stuck in the linear parking lot that the signs call I-85 around Atlanta.

      1. Vio*

        Honestly I’ve never tried jam with them but I’m confident that I’d also prefer without.

    5. alle*

      Reminds me of this joke:
      A German is at a restaurant in London and wants to order a steak.
      German: “I’d like a bloody steak!”
      Waiter: ” Would you like some fucking potatoes with that?”

    6. Anonfornow*

      That reminds me of a mistake a friend made in French. We were exchange students and at dinner she tried to tell her host family I’m full, please pass the preserves. Unfortunately what she actually said was I am pregnant please pass the condoms. Pleine means full but in reference to a person means pregnant, and while preservatifs sounds like preserves it means condoms.

      2. Chickadee*

        My grandmother made the same mistake! Fortunately there weren’t any preserves, so she stopped at “No thank you I’m pregnant like an animal.” (“Pleine” isn’t used for humans, unless it’s to indicate someone is drunk.)

        The worst I’ve seen was a college student with a shirt that said “Baise moi.” I don’t know what’s worse – if she knew what it meant, or if she thought it meant “kiss me.”

  3. Phony Genius*

    On #8, the numbered list is missing item 2. I wonder if something was omitted, or if it was just mis-numbered.

    2. No Longer Working*

      OMG, this one had me hysterical. I appreciate Alison not using the punchline as the title. Solid gold! This one is going to go viral and be reposted everywhere.

  4. FashionablyEvil*

    #4–on the plus side, maybe the neighbors stopped driving on your property and/or got their dog under control?

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I mean, that was pretty awkward, it’s true, but you’d think that the fact that they worked together would mean that eventually the neighbors started to become better neighbors. Unless the woman held a grudge because OP made fun of her for needing to take the elevator.

    2. Elle*

      I would think #4 would be more awkward for the bad neighbors than the OP. It’s not as if the complaints were petty.

      1. ferrina*

        One would hope. Those seem like pretty justified complaints. I would be mortified if I had been cutting across my neighbors yard and assuming they hadn’t noticed, and they very much had.

        1. KateM*

          I think that in the past, when I backed out of our driveway, I too often ended up on the front laws on our neighbours on the other side of street, anyway they have put a concrete flower pot on the corner of their lawn. I am mortified each time I look out of my front window and see their flower pot! I swear I have been very careful for last couple of years and also I am now backing *into* our driveway not out!

          1. Orv*

            This reminds me that a neighbor across the street once backed directly into the driver’s side door of my car. They were kind enough to leave a note. The car was a 20-year-old, *very* rusty Volvo 240; I got their insurance to pay out a $700 estimate for the repair, pocketed the money, and then contentedly drove the car with the dented door for the remaining two years of its life. This was an era of my life where $700 was a lot of money for me and I had only paid $2000 for the car, so I was secretly quite pleased with the situation.

            1. Jay (no, the other one)*

              The first car I bought for myself was a used Toyota Corolla sport model. The previous owner had installed a VERY fancy sound system complete with tape deck (it was the 80s), upgraded speakers, and an equalizer. When I acquired the car the only part that worked was the AM tuner. Somebody stole the system from my car one night. My insurance company told me to go to the audio dealer they contracted with and pick out the components I’d lost from a catalog. The dealer asked me if I wanted them to install it right away or if I wanted the check myself. Um, I’ll take the check. It was almost 1k worth of equipment. I took the money, went to Radio Shack (it was the 80s), bought a perfectly serviceable AM/FM cassette deck, and came out over $500 richer in the days when that was a LOT of money for me.

      2. e271828*

        Yeah, I think #4’s neighbor needed to hear the unvarnished truth. Driving over someone else’s property to the extent that you damage it, just because you don’t maintain your own driveway, and letting your vicious dog run off-leash are extremely un-neighborly behavior. The artificial leg is an excuse for neither.

        The driving across the property thing is especially bad for #4, because it’s the sort of encroachment that can become an easement if #4 didn’t’t put the kibosh on it.

    3. Anon for this*

      I once encountered my next-door neighbor at work (to my surprise – she was working part-time and I hadn’t realized) and it was awkward on my end mostly because I *did not know her name* and we’d been living next door to each other for five years by that point. So, hello out-of-context neighbor whom I have failed to even have one conversation with in five years!

      I had to get someone else I work with to track her down in the directory for me after all my efforts failed. Sorry, Neighbor N!

      (In my defense I’d filed for divorce and my ex moved out the same week they moved in and I was not in any shape to be making new social connections and by the time I was it seemed like a lot to go into and so I just never did. Equally, she never introduced herself but in the moment that did not occur to me.)

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        This summer I was pulling into my driveway after work. I saw the neighbor in her yard next door and asked if she knew if the garbage pick up was off this week because of the Monday holiday.
        She apologized as she got in her car saying she doesn’t know because she was just visiting friends.

        I’ve lived next door to that family for five years.

        1. AnReAr*

          I would not be able to pick out my one next door neighbor’s current partner or kids. Nor the ex partner and her kids, even though one was my sister’s friend. And yet I know all the drama about them being common law and the new one being the mistress during the previous relationship…

      2. My job is finding you a job!*

        I bought a house and moved in during Covid Times, so I think a lot of the traditional niceties were lost.
        Never was a problem until they came into my office and I had no idea what their name was…

      3. Alan*

        I don’t know that this experience is unusual anymore. We used to know our neighbors. But we don’t lately. No one comes outside much, some people don’t speak English, people are more transient than they used to be. Every so often we’ll meet someone and they’ll ask when we moved in and we’ll say in 1995 and it’s clear that they don’t know their neighbors either :-).

      4. Meep*

        Almost three weeks ago, I accidentally hit my neighbor’s already totaled, brand-new-to-him truck (he had it towed right in front of my house that morning and I wasn’t expecting it and was trying to avoid hitting the car on the other side – we live on a corner btw). You would think I would know his name. But nope!

        When I tried to knock on his door, he completely ignored me and then drove away in another vehicle 5 minutes later (never heard of the victim flee the scene of an accident before!). His daughter was the one who came over and took my insurance information hours later.

        Some people just don’t want to know their neighbors outside acknowledgement they exist.

      5. Not A Girl Boss*

        We have lived at our house for three years, and just last week found out that my husband’s boss’ boss’ boss lives a few houses down. The way we panic-whispered for the rest of the walk to rehash every embarrassing or inconsiderate thing we may potentially ever have committed in his vicinity, woof. I mean, we are pretty considerate neighbors but nothing like that news to make you re-evaluate.

    5. SpringIsForPlanting!*

      The driving on property thing is not great but maybe sympathetic given the disability. The dog thing…. yeah. The happy ending here is that the neighbors were mortified, and learned to control their dog.

      1. Meep*

        I am kind of assuming its her husband doing the driving through the yard, considering he is also the one who never picked her up. I also imagine she knows him and his dog aren’t the nicest.

      2. KateM*

        If you absolutely need to drive over neighbour’s property, then you talk to them, and maybe offer some solution on your part so that you don’t ruin their property (maybe that reinforcement stuff for grass that I have seen that is like huge honeycombs). All embarrassment here should rightfully be on neighbours’ side, and they should consider themselves lucky that they got to learn about it in a relatively neutral way.

      3. Orv*

        Having lived in a rural area where muddy driveways can be a problem, the solution to the muddy driveway problem is generally just to have a dumptruck load of pea gravel dumped on the driveway every time it starts to get mushy. Eventually there’s enough gravel packed into the topsoil that it stays firm.

        I do remember a time a neighbor down the street, who had just moved into a brand new house, had their first big rainstorm and got three vehicles stuck up to the axles at various distances up the driveway — a car, a pickup, *and* a tractor they’d tried to use to rescue the car and pickup. I did feel bad for them.

        1. ArcticFoxy*

          That reminds me of the time my dad (we live in the country) got his lawnmower stuck in the mud. He tried to tow it out with his tractor, which also got stuck. So he tried to tow the tractor out with his truck…and he had to call the neighbor who owns a backhoe to come rescue all three vehicles.

        2. Worldwalker*

          I knew a guy in college who had a solution for that! He was quite well off, and his family owned a farm. Which was where he kept his Sherman tank. (he collected military vehicles, and Shermans were cheaper back then)

          He said he’d almost caused some crashes on the highway as people rubbernecked at the sight of the tank pulling the tractor out of the mud in one of the fields.

          1. Orv*

            Nice. My school district had an old deuce-and-a-half 6×6 military truck for pulling school buses out of the ditches in the winter.

    6. WellRed*

      I’d live to know how the work relations after this. And no, there is no possibility that neighbors won’t notice if you drive over their property no agree thats a reasonable accommodation for your leg.

    7. Stipes*

      I NEED to know the neighbor’s immediate reaction. She was there in the car with you as you told her about your awful neighbor — did she say anything? When you pulled up to her house?

    8. Worldwalker*

      It sounds like that was something the neighbors needed to be told. And maybe getting it in a candid form like that got through to them.

      1. allathian*

        I hope so. Off the leash pet dogs don’t belong in urban areas, period. I don’t want to see any pet dogs off the leash unless they’re in the dog park. I don’t trust strange dogs much and I trust the owners who keep their dogs off the leash even less. And I really don’t care what people who insist on keeping their dogs off the leash say about this.

        Working dogs are different, a sheepdog can’t herd sheep and a SAR dog can’t go looking for humans in a collapsed building or in the woods on the leash.

  5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    Do I know the military call signs for letters so that I can spell out words over the phone? Yeppers. Do I purposely use different words for my own amusement? Sure do. It’s also helpful to use food when talking to people whose first language isn’t English. Sierra is up for grabs; spaghetti is pretty well known, if you live in America.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Sierra can easily be spelled Cierra or some other variant with a C instead of an S, so it should be retired as a military call sign, IMHO. Can someone alert the military for me?

        1. Orv*

          Is “Zuzu” a recent change? I remember learning it as “Zulu” when I took the ham radio exams. In my experience most people just say “Zed” though.

          1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

            I think that graphic is a bit wonky- if you scroll down, it’s still listed as “Zulu” in the table.

      2. Admin of Sys*

        Similarly, quebec is a weird choice for q, since it’s pronounced with a k sound? (kay-beck).

        1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          I’m from the Midwest- I know that that is an acceptable pronunciation of Quebec but it’s not how I’d pronounce it.

          3. Phony Genius*

            NATO requires it be pronounced keh-BECK. They have several other specific pronunciations that differ slightly from what you might expect.

          1. Cardboard Marmalade*

            Omg, is this true? I’ve never heard anyone say it that way. To be fair, I’ve mostly lived in the Northeast of the US, so maybe it’s a skewed data set?

            1. Freelance Editor*

              So weird! I grew up in NY and my extended family is mostly in PA and MA. Nearly everyone I know says “Kwuh-beck” and I always thought people saying it in a more authentic French pronunciation were being pretentious (unless they actually spoke French).

        3. Roland*

          As a military call sign and for other professional situations, the point is that no 2 words sound the same as the others. It’s more important that they be distinct than anything else because a radio operator is expected to know that Sierra means S and Quebec means Q. Obviously conditions are different in customer service situations.

          1. Orv*

            And part of learning the phonetic spelling alphabet is you learn the preferred pronunciations for those words, to make sure they’re clear over noisy radio links.

            1. RC*

              I’m thinking of a bit on Archer where he used “M as in Mancy” because of course he did

        4. Panicked*

          I was recently in Canada and was completed flabbergasted that Calgary is pronounced “Cal-gare-ee” and not “Cal-guh-ree.” Same thing with Toronto being “tronno” or “tronto.” My Canadian friends tell me that having someone pronounce those two places is the quickest way to out them as an American.

          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            Interesting. I’m from Boston and have always said Tronno for Toronto because we similarly like to drop consonants, but I didn’t know that about Calgary. I also once met someone from Baltimore and the way she said it (“Balmer”) made sense to me but a lot of other people from around the country/world at the event we were at couldn’t make heads or tails of what the heck she’d said.

            I’m also realizing that we Bostonians do pronounce the T in our city’s name but another town close by is Newton and I was totally weirded out by the way a non-native resident (from the midwest, maybe?) pronounced the T. My dude, it’s totally said New-un, with a glottal stop in the middle in place of the T.

            1. Phony Genius*

              I can’t remember which state, but there is a Newton somewhere in the US where they make it a point to pronounce the T.

              1. Nightengale*

                There is a Worcester Pennsylvania that pronounces it War – sess – ter. Ya know, like it’s spelled but definitely not how pronounced in other places of that name. I spent a summer there and was corrected pretty quickly when I said the usual “Wuss-ster.

          2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

            I wonder what getting Toronto right and Calgary wrong would mean to them. (Right answer, in my case, is an American with friends from Toronto and none from Calgary.)

            1. fran*

              Calgarians say Calgree. If you say it differently, it’s how we know you’re not from here. Same with saying Toronto instead of Tronno. Or Qwe-bec instead of Keh-Bec
              (signed, someone who has lived or has relatives in all places. But also who had relatives from Maryland who cringed when other Canadians called it Merry-land. Ugh)

          4. whimbrel*

            Even in Canada it varies! I am from the east coast and say CAL-gehr-ee, and my Prairies-born-and-raised coworker says CAHL-gary.

            1. Bluenoser*

              Thank you! I read this post and got all confused (I say CAL-gehr-ee but I do pronounce Toronto Tuhronno). Then again, I come from the province with about a hundred ‘no-one who hasn’t lived here knows how to pronounce it’ place names (see Musquodoboit).

              1. AF Vet*

                I have to take a whack at it…
                Musk-uh-dough-bit?

                I hope this slaughtering of your town’s name gave you a giggle.

                1. Humble Schoolmarm*

                  Congrats! You’re pretty close! Musk-uh-DOB-it (or Mosquito Bite if you’re local enough to tease the residents of that fine valley)

                2. Carpool mom*

                  Huzzah!!! The mosquito must be lovely this time of year.

                  I did have an advantage, though… I have friends from Muskogee, OK. (mus-Ko-ghee)

          5. Good Lord Ratty*

            It is not pronounced Cal-GARE-ee. It’s CAL-guh-ree or CAL-gree.

            You also don’t pronounce the second “t” in Toronto. It’s Tuh-RONN-no or TRON-no.

      3. ferrina*

        Ciara would like words with the military, please.
        For her, changing the phonetic alphabet is should be a 1,2 step.

    2. Diatryma*

      S, stegosaurus
      P, potato
      T, tyrannosaur
      F, frank/foxtrot (I haven’t found one I remember more readily)
      C, chocolate
      M is Mother even though I try to make it Monkey, N is Nancy because I cannot think of anything more entertaining.

      S/F and P/T are two of the pairs I need disambiguated I need most often, with M/N a close third. We have the NATO alphabet posted, but I often need a word faster than I remember to look. O for Oompa-loompa is excellent and I will try to remember it.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        I use “Noodle” a lot for N and once had a truck driver thank me because everyone else uses Nancy and that’s his ex-wife’s name.

        1. bob dole*

          Sterling Archer : And M and in mancy.
          Ray Gillette : What?
          Lana Kane : M as in what?
          Sterling Archer : Mancy. What did you think I said?
          Ray Gillette : Nancy! You idiot!

        2. Carpool mom*

          I see you’ve heard the Barenaked Ladies’ “Crazy ABCs.” It’s my favorite song on Kids Place Live on Sirius.

        3. Madame Arcati*

          Conductor of my amateur orchestra always does this for rehearsal letters – such as “ok tutti from letter K please, that’s k for knitting”.

      3. LaFramboise, academic librarian*

        Totally
        b as in butter
        s as in sugar
        ss as in strawberry shortcake

      4. Jay (no, the other one)*

        There’s a V in my last name. I learned as a child that any time I had to give someone my name over the phone, I had to spell it – like R-A-V-as-in-victory-I It’s so ingrained that when I had to give my husband’s name to someone I automatically spelled it out.

        His name is Smith.

        1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          My last name has 2 D’s, a B, and an E all fairly close together. D-as-in-David D-as-in-David is ingrained in my memory, as is the B-as-in-boy. It’s still automatic.

      5. Worldwalker*

        I once wrote up the world’s worst phonetic alphabet, with words like “knight” and “quay.” I’ve seen several similar ones.

    3. Combinatorialist*

      As an alternative, I recommend looking up “Crazy ABC’s by Barenaked Ladies”. Not for actual words to use but just because its very funny.

      1. SunriseRuby*

        The same could be said for Edward Gorey’s deliciously dark take on ABC books, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies”. “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears…”

          1. whimbrel*

            N is for Neville, who died of ennui.

            (My sibling and I got a poster version of the Gashleycrumb alphabet plaque-mounted for our mom for her birthday one year. She had it hanging on the wall in her hallway until she passed away. I’m planning on hanging it in our bathroom. :D )

    4. SheLooksFamiliar*

      I had to learn the military phonetic alphabet when I worked in the defense industry, but change things around for my own amusement, My favorites?

      A as in Aisle
      I as in Isle
      P as in Pneumonia
      G as in Gnat

      I get ‘huh?’ and ‘what?’ a lot, and yes. It will still be funny when I’m in hell.

      3. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        I have an L in both first and last names, which occasionally necessitated the following explanation when spelling them out to Japanese-speakers when I was living in Japan:
        Eru (L) as in Rondon (London).

    5. Jackalope*

      I worked at a zoo for awhile and so I always try to give animal names (p as in porcupine, r as in raccoon or raven, etc.). I still feel like s for snake is easier than a for Sierra for reasons listed below. On the other hand, I may sound like an alphabet book for small children at times.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        Animals work too! A lot of ESL people know animals as well as food, so I’ll use animals too. Usually I’m mixing and matching, so a conversation will sound like this, “R as in Robot; E as in Egg; S as in Snake; I as in…ice cream; D as in Dog; E as in…(insert pause while I try to remember if I used “egg” and be consistent) Egg; N as in Noodle; T as in tele-vi-sion (deciding on the fly between “telephone” and “television”)?”

    6. BikeWalkBarb*

      The replies to this are reminding me of a course in my bachelor’s in linguistics. The instructor wrote GHOTI and asked us how it was pronounced.

      It’s pronounced FISH.

      GH as in Enough
      O as in women
      TI as in nutritious (or any other word where TI takes the SH pronunciation)

      English is so weird.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I didn’t realize how weird until I started helping out with ESL classes and had to learn a lot of rules I did not realize existed. For example, we change the way “ed” at the end of a verb is pronounced to “d”, “t” or “ed” based on the preceding sound.

        I never noticed before, and now I’m weirdly self-conscious about it.

        1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          In college when I was a writing tutor, I was wholly unprepared for a very sincere conversation with an ESL student as to why the light coming from a lamp is singular but the “lights” in the ceiling are plural. I think I stammered something about quantities and being able to count something as opposed to conglomerates. I also remember prepositions and which to use in which situation being a struggle.

          Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with pronunciation. I’m never pronouncing “ghoti” as fish though. ;)

          1. Worldwalker*

            Countable objects versus mass objects.

            Glasses of water are countable objects; water coming out of the faucet is a mass object.

            1. Phony Genius*

              Don’t get me started on collective nouns and how the British and Americans differ on the grammatical rules for them.

      2. Tongue Cluckin' Grammarian*

        That’s a common fun joke, but it also doesn’t work. The pronunciation of letters depends on their position in the word.

        GH sounds like F at the end of a word (laugh, cough, etc), but at the beginning of a word, it’s a hard G sound (ghost, gherkin, etc).
        O is rarely pronounced like it is in women except in the middle of a syllable.
        TI is not pronounced SH ever. TIOUS is a complete syllable that sounds like SHUS. It requires the whole bit to make that sound, not just the TI.

        It’s supposed to make fun of the weird rules of English pronunciation, but it ignores the actual rules of pronunciation.

    7. OP #12*

      I am not a native English speaker and in my private life also use different words for instance when spelling my name. Still, prison officers are often quite…conservative and do not enjoy solicitors being lighthearted (or even friendly) on the phone. The Oompa Loompa came as a shock to both of us. I even had a printout of the words taped to my monitor! But that day my brain just gave up.

    8. Tiny Soprano*

      One of my colleagues is studying linguistics, and made a facetious version of the phonetic alphabet for fun a while back. It included such gems as “O for oestrogen”, “J for jalapeno” and “W for why”.

      1. Madame Arcati*

        There’s another fun one that I think is really old but hilarious; I must look it up but example include:

        A for ‘orses
        B for mutton
        C for miles
        I for one
        O for god’s sake
        R for mo

    9. Ally McBeal*

      I know about half of the military call signs, so I have a lot of fun making up the rest, and generally the person I’m talking to also gets a giggle out of it. I might actually use Oompa Loompa in the future.

  6. Susan Calvin*

    As a German, I’m desperate to know what kind of bug is repelled specifically but putting the repellant somewhere *you* can smell it – like what’s the logic? How does it work? Why have I never heard of this??

    Regarding the linguistic issue at hand, presumably the (reasonable, suitable for all kinds of gametes) word he was looking for was “seed”, unfortunately the German equivalent of that would be Samen, which. Yeah. False friends which *do* share etymology are the worst!

    1. OP #11*

      I never managed to figure out the name of the bug, but he described it as a caterpillar with bristles that caused unpleasant skin reactions if they fell on you. It was near Darmstadt. I think the logic was to put the “bug repellent” on a prominent place on your face, to deter the bug from dropping down on you from trees above.

      I am sure that my German colleague believed this whole thing, but I’m skeptical of his grasp of essential entomology details.

      1. Martine*

        The Eichenprozessionsspinner (engl. “oak processionary moth” according to Google Translate) is becoming more widespread and can cause allergic reactions. On bike and hiking paths in the forests there are warnings when the area is infested. I have no idea how much of a problem they are in the area around Darmstadt. But: I can’t find any recommendation to use any kind of seed as a repellent. Some recommend aloe vera products to soothe skin.
        The Buchsbaumzünsler (box tree moth) befalls box trees and bushes. Some recommend products made of seeds from the Neembaum (which seems to be a kind of mahogony). But these products are used on the plant, not preventively on people’s noses. And most box trees and bushes are not tall enough to walk under.
        Alles sehr merkwürdig! Very strange.

        1. Genevieve*

          Neem oil is a common organic pest repellent – we use it in our garden sometimes. Not sure if you’re supposed to put it on yourself, though!

        2. Quill*

          I would imagine a wide brimmed hat for them to fall on would be better.

          Although that’s not a great option when biking with a helmet.

        1. Lizzie (with the deaf cat)*

          They are called Processionary Caterpillars and have even appeared on Bluey

      3. Teaching teacher*

        I lived in Babenhausen twenty years ago and will never forget those caterpillars! although I never knew any tips to avoid them.

  7. melissa*

    I can NEVER remember the words that go with the alphabet letters. I’m going to start using Oompa Loompa.

        1. Kendall^2*

          There’s an abecedarium kid book called “P Is for Pterodactyl”, subtitled “The Worst Alphabet Book Ever”….

          1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

            I have that book! “Ptolemy the psychic pterodactyl has psoriasis”

        2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          K as in knight
          M as in mnemonic
          T as in tsunami
          H as in herb (does not work in all pronunciations)
          G as in gnome
          J as in jalapeno

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      You could almost do the whole alphabet. Augustus, Bucket, Chocolate, Delicious, Everlasting Gobstopper, Fizzy Lifting Drink…

      Vermicious Knid, of course.

    3. High Score!*

      I always make up my words to go with the letters. Drives my husband nuts. For awhile he tried to teach me but I like my own words better.

      1. Coffee*

        If I spell aloud words like “Jazz” I specifically say”Zeus, Zachary” to make sure they write down same letter twice

    4. UKDancer*

      I was working at a major event looking after a particular delegation and I needed to know which member of the delegation the big cheese wanted with him at dinner (the others being put on a lower table).

      I had to ring my boss and spell out the surname of the individual (say it was Burroughs) and my mind blanked on what the word was for the letter “r” and the only r word I could find was rhubarb.

      So I finished spelling it out and there was a long pause then my boss said “thanks Ukdancer. R is for Romeo incidentally.”

    5. bamcheeks*

      For some reason nearly everyone uses “F for Freddie or S for Sugar” in England rather than the “real” alphabet words. At this point I can’t spell my surname WITHOUT specifying F-for-Freddie.

      1. It's Suzy now*

        My last name has a V in it. The other letters are unambiguous so I don’t use the NATO alphabet for them, but I do always say “V for victory” to avoid confusion with B. Since the actual NATO code is “V for Victor”, this sometimes results in an extra E in my name. Totally my fault and I’m trying to switch, but habits are hard to break.

        2. Butterfly Counter*

          I have a “Z” in my last name that I always clarify with, “Z as in Zebra,” because when I don’t, my very-long last name gets ridiculous! And I’m from the US, so we say “zee” and not “zed” here, which would be much more helpful, actually.

        3. Pitter Patter, Puppers*

          That is 100% not your fault, unless you’re somehow over-pronouncing the last syllable and even then it’s hard to imagine. Fwiw, I use ‘victory’ also, because winning.

          1. whimbrel*

            Whenever my husband and I are spelling stuff out phonetically, one of us will say “M! As in Mancy!”

            We watched A LOT of Archer when our kid was a newborn, lol, and that particular bit lives rent free in both our heads.

      2. Audrey Puffins*

        I use those, I got them from Wheel Of Fortune. I don’t know if they had an in-studio list of suggested words to make sure no one came across as too high-brow by using the NATO alphabet, or if Wheel Of Fortune contestants just organically developed their own self-perpetuating phonetic alphabet, but you can really see the generational divide in my office based on whether we use the WoF alphabet or the real one

    6. Corvus Corvidae*

      I once said “M as in Mayonnaise” and my husband overheard. He’s never let me live it down.

  8. Casual Observer*

    I can totally relate to #2. I am terrible at putting my foot in my mouth ALL THE TIME. I remember when I was getting my degree I worked at a Starbucks in the core of a major city. Our location got a lot of celebrities that came for their java fix. On one occasion, I referred to Channing Tatum as a “wannabe actor”, while he was standing right behind me. A second instance I made a comment that I was surprised Katy Holmes hadn’t left Tom Cruise yet since he was “obviously gay”, again while they were standing within earshot of me. Both incidents happened close to 15 years ago and I still cringe. The good thing, I am sure they have long since forgotten about me!

  9. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

    Okay, finally, FINALLY, I don’t have to feel quite so bad about what I once said when Sandra Bernhardt was within earshot! I wasn’t at work, just having lunch with my husband. He could see her; I couldn’t, until we got up to leave.

      1. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

        Oh, it wasn’t about her, specifically. What I said…I don’t want to get into details, but I was using politically incorrect language. Repeatedly, even though my husband was shushing me. Well, I was only in my late twenties, so the incident shamed me into using that as a caution: “What if someone’s listening who might take this personally?” Also it tipped me off that working with mostly guys who were also in their twenties was skewing my perception of appropriateness.

    3. Aneurin*

      I misread the name as “Sarah Bernhardt” and was briefly convinced you were a time traveller…

      1. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

        Dang autocorrect! Yes, Sandra Bernhard, no T. This happened in the late 1990s, not 1890s.

        In fact, I also have an anecdote about someone thinking I was talking about the American comedic actress, when I was talking about the French stage actress. But it’s only funny, not embarrassing, so I’ll save it for the weekend thread.

        (I *thought* I was spelling it wrong, but I’m posting from my phone.)

  10. Former Govt Contractor*

    I have 3 – I should have written earlier!

    1. Not me but my husband who owned a retail store. Lady comes in wearing a bright yellow jacket with fringe all over it. My husband thought she was in costume and says, “Oh, are we Big Bird today?” Her friend started laughing and said, “I TOLD you that jacket was fugly!”

    2. Law firm. Client emails me (paralegal) and boss (senior attorney) with some very specific irrelevant crap that his wife was dwelling on. I email my boss “Can we say high maintenance?!?!” You guessed it, copied the client. I could not believe when he LOL’ed and agreed with me that his wife is indeed very high maintenance!!

    3. On a Zoom call with my boss (different boss, different company, still a senior attorney) and our outside defense team (4 more high powered attorneys). I drop my breakfast cereal in my lap and scream “Oh, FUCK ME.” No, I was not on mute.

    2. Orv*

      #1 reminds me of the time I was at Comic Con and a cashier asked me who I was dressed as. I was wearing my street clothes. Admittedly, they were somewhat eccentric (feather-print tee shirt, Hawaiian shirt, jeans) but apparently they went beyond “eccentric nerd” and into “must be a costume.”

  11. Signed In*

    Dang – I just had to spell my name to a person setting up an appointment and missed my chance to say “…like Oompa Loompa!”

  12. EvilQueenRegina*

    And I see this Oompa Loompa story on a day when my Facebook memories include something about going for a meal out with friends where there was a stag party in the restaurant who had dressed the groom up as an Oompa Loompa…

    1. kicking-k*

      My sister once had a guy ask for her phone number while she was making her way to a fancy dress party while dressed as an Oompa-Loompa. Not AT the party. I think it was on the London Underground on the way there. (She was already going out with someone, so this did not turn into a wonderful anecdote of the “how we met” variety.)

  14. Dust Bunny*

    I worked for awhile at a place that, by chance, had a phone number that resembled both the number of the place I had worked previously, which was not a direct competitor because they were pretty far away from each other but was in the same line of work, and my own home phone number (this was before cell phones were common). Not giving people the wrong callback number was a constant struggle.

    1. JLP*

      I feel you! My phone number and Social Security Number start with the same numbers. It’s so hard to give the right number.

    2. Ama*

      I worked at a university many years ago and for some weird reason my direct line was a nice round number (it ended 9000) when the main university phone line was not (something like 9012 ). A lot of people knew all university extensions started with 9 so they just assumed the main line would have to be 9000 and as a result I had to field so many calls for things not even remotely related to my work or department. To make matters worse the university operators were notoriously understaffed so I would transfer people to the main line, they’d get put on hold for a long time, and give up — and then call *me* back. The worst was whatever week the tuition bills got to the parents because there were always a ton of calls and people were often upset. I ended up just memorizing the extension to the bursar’s office and telling the callers what it was before I transferred them so that they at least weren’t getting stuck at the operator and getting more upset.

      As far as I know that issue never got solved — I ended up transferring elsewhere in the university where I had a new extension before leaving for a new employer entirely.

      1. Dust Bunny*

        When I first started at Current Job there was an armed forces recruiter somewhere nearby that had a phone number that was one digit off of mine. I spent a lot of time redirecting those calls.

      2. EvilQueenRegina*

        I had a temp job once where one of the extensions in the team was 0870. For those not in the UK, 0870 is a premium rate number over here and a lot of companies have (certainly had at the time) 0870 phone numbers. A lot of people would forget to dial 9 for the outside line before trying to call these numbers, so I was frequently getting these calls. Quite often I’d just get hangups because people would realise their mistake pretty quickly, but other times I’d get some quite random calls about things like people’s unpaid phone bills.

        It was also quite common to answer the phone and get a fax machine squawking down my ear because people had forgotten the 9 when trying to fax these companies too (this was 2005, so faxes were used a lot more then) – the only thing I could do with those was forward them on to the number of the fax on reception, I hate to think what sort of rubbish they used to get.

        That number for that job eventually got changed and 0870 was retired as an extension.

  15. Library Anoshe*

    I swear that the reason she lost it is because either the inmate attached to the name she was spelling looked TOO much like an Oompa Loompa or exactly the OPPPOSITE of an Oompa Loompa.

  16. drmagoo*

    Back when I was teaching (at the university level), I got sick and ended up in the hospital over the weekend. I needed to message my students to tell them that I wouldn’t be in class on Monday (as it turned out, I missed a lot more than that), and I used the messaging system in our Learning Management System instead of email for some reason. Maybe it was the Dilaudid. Anyway, one thing I didn’t know was that it sent messages out as emails and used the text of the message, up to a certain character count, as the subject line. So when I wrote “Hello all – this weekend, I got myself laid up in the hospital and won’t be in class on Monday…”

    Yep, you guessed it. My students got an email with the subject line:
    “Hello all – this weekend, I got myself laid”.

    Thankfully, it didn’t result in anything other than a couple of snarky comments from students who, also thankfully, did not share any stories about their weekends.

    1. ferrina*

      I feel like this is a valuable lesson that the students will take with them the rest of their lives- you can bet a couple of them made a mental note never to use that particular phrasing in any context where it could be cut off.

    3. allathian*

      I hope the cheating husband was awake at the time and heard all of it, rather than anesthetized for the procedure or still loopy in recovery. He deserved to be publicly humiliated for his behavior.

  19. SpringIsForPlanting!*

    “which would have gone into a lot more detail”. Oh gd. Gods and little fishes. Dying.

      1. whimbrel*

        iirc links are not allowed in comments here, but if you google ‘enron investor conference call’, the story you are looking for will be third or fourth down in your list.

        It’s going to be fairly obvious which link is the correct one, lol.

        1. Hlao-roo*

          Links are allowed! They will go to moderation first so the comment may take a few hours to show up, but many links are approved and will show up eventually.

  21. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

    #7, I feel you. Once upon a time I suddenly sneezed just as I answered the office phone.

    The person at the other end was not as understanding as you.

    1. Expelliarmus*

      Why were they not so understanding? People sneeze. It’s not like you said something offensive or offensive out of context.

  22. Adds*

    #8. Omg.
    Kinda reminds me of when I worked for a company that used WhatsApp groups for company communications. One of our drivers had left his phone at home or something and his Very Angry romance partner started airing ALL of their business in the company chats.

    I don’t think he was even at work that day. I approached one of the managers to see if a group admin could delete those texts, but they could not. The best we could do was boot his number from the chats until he had possession of his phone again.

    The second-hand mortification that day was awful.

  24. uncle bob*

    For Number 8 the person sharing PHI is the wife, not the hospital. Not sure about the legal aspect she is worried about here. It’s not illegal for a wife to share her husband’s health info with an entire hospital.

    1. ferrina*

      It’s on the hospital system- it’s not illegal for civilians to talk about PHI in the hospital, but if the hospital is then amplifying that conversation to the entire hospital, especially without letting the civilian know that they are being broadcast, then yeah, it’s a hospital liability.

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          …. Ok, I was sharing this story (loosely) with some coworkers (also at a hospital, hence the HIPAA team), and one of them goes “There was also the time that (so-and-so) found a deceased body in the closet in our office.” I about fell on my butt backing away from my desk with my mouth hanging open.

            1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

              THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I SAID, since she had just finished telling me that our department used to be located in the hospital basement around the corner from the morgue.

              Apparently long long ago, their office suite was not locked, and they had trouble with homeless folks who had wandered away from the ED looking for someplace inside to hang out finding their break room and raiding their fridge, and then sleeping on their floor. This fellow apparently curled up under some miscellaneous items in the coat closet for a nap, and passed in his sleep, until they found him the next morning. They got locks shortly thereafter.

      2. I strive to Excel*

        What *I* want to know is how did she not notice?? Hospital loudspeakers are not subtle!

        1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          Maybe in one of those privacy rooms where you can tell loved ones bad news? Or in the chapel? I imagine there are at least a few places in the hospital where the speakers aren’t on.

        2. Observer*

          I doubt she was paying attention to what was going on around her, including what’s on the loudspeakers.

          1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

            “Oh my GOD, this person making the announcements will not STOP TALKING. ANYWAY.”

          2. Well-Vented Spleen*

            I wondered if the wife knew EXACTLY what she was doing, and was taking the opportunity to vent her spleen to the biggest audience she could while still maintaining plausible deniability.

  25. Some Dude*

    What I find most fascinating about #8 is the wife seeming to think that transferring money out of the joint accounts or getting a car in only her name is accomplishing much. If anything, she could be in trouble for trying to hide assets.

  26. Dex*

    Re: number 12: Dara O’Briain has a stand-up bit (I believe it’s part of his “Talks Funny” show) where he talks about a time he was on the phone with a customer service representative, and he had to provide an alpha-numeric ticket number. He completely blanked on the typical words we use to indicate letters, and the only thing he could think of was increasingly naughty words – culminating in the final letter he had to read being “V.” He could imagine the poor operator on the other end of the line furiously hitting the “record this call for training purposes” button.

  27. HSE Compliance*

    The last time I was on the phone with Dispatch I forgot P for Papa and told her P for [very long pause while my brain shorted out] Potato. We spent the rest of the call with her desperately trying to contain her giggles while forwarding me to an officer, who she then told also P for Potato, much to his confusion and amusement (“P for POTATO” … “……….Potatoes?”).

    I have also once fallen off a chair (it’s my fault for sitting weirdly), and of course as soon as the call connected. And on camera. Thankfully (?) it was a large group call and I’m not sure more than a couple people saw me fall off and then heard me swearing under my breath.

  28. Alex*

    I can totally relate to that last one. I don’t often need to spell things over the phone, but when I do, my brain CANNOT find the normal words to associate with letters. It can only find ridiculous and obscure ones.

    1. That Crazy Cat Lady*

      Same. I was once doing this and all I could come up with was “N as in necrophilia.” WHY DOES MY BRAIN HATE ME?!

    2. Chicago Anon*

      In one of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey mysteries, Lord Peter is trying to put a call through to France. “W pour Waterloo, A pour Austerlitz . . .” If he really wanted to get connected, I think he should have done all French victories, but I suppose it’s hard to come up with W words in French.

  29. AnyMouse*

    Anyone know when AAM is going to be back to her “regular scheduled programming”? I am not a fan of these compiled lists. I come here for the work related questions and AAM’s suggested solutions.

    1. Carolina*

      The advice letters haven’t stopped and are still being posted in between the Mortification Week posts. The most recent one was posted the same day as your comment (“is my girlfriend’s boss crossing a line” etc). You can scroll past the fun posts if you don’t like them

    2. lunchtime caller*

      “It’s Mortification Week at Ask a Manager and all week long we’ll be revisiting ways we’ve mortified ourselves at work.” First post in series began on Monday July 29.

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        LOL! I imagined one of her cats saying “No, we’re good with what’s happening right now, thank you very much!”

        I needed that right now; thank you so much.

    4. Ask a Manager* Post author

      From Monday-Thursday of this week, the 11 am and 2 pm ET posts will be mortification posts.

      The midnight and 12:30 pm ET posts remain the usual Q&A content every day.

      1. Melons and pineapples*

        Thanks! I don’t really get Mortification Week, to be honest, but there’s so much other material to read.

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          You may not get it if you’ve never made such an embarrassing mistake at work that you wished the earth would open up and swallow you whole. That’s a good thing! (Or possibly, you just aren’t easily embarrassed, which is also a good thing.)

          But for those of us who have done such things, this is some good therapy. And if you’ve been having a shit week, it’s a welcome respite.

          (Also, it’s very interesting to read ancient posts and see how the advice has changed over the years. Alison has addressed this on occasion; I would love a full post with her reflections about this.)

          1. N C Kiddle*

            I have the opposite problem, which is that I have such strong secondhand embarrassment that other people’s embarrassing moments are absolutely not comforting to me. But I still got a chuckle out of a few of these.

    7. Rosyglasses*

      It’s Mortification Week – which one can assume is a 5 or 7 day period of time. Also, many of us love these on our work breaks. You can probably come back in a week if you prefer to skip these.

  30. NMitford*

    I once worked at a company that offered Weight Watchers meetings at work (it was great, I lost 30 pounds) and, instead of forwarding the information to someone who sat next to me, forwarded the sign-up information to a similarly last named senior vice president. His response? “Did my wife ask you to send that to me, LOL?”

  31. Meep*

    Ok, but I want to know if #4’s neighbors/coworker stopped being jerks after that conversation….

  32. VoPo*

    #11 reminds me of something that happened during an internship I had. I was working at a community center in the West Bank (Palestine) run by a non-profit. One of the programs we ran was a class for local university students to help with their resume writing and interview skills in English. I was chatting with one of the students, and we were talking about tv shows. The Wire was the popular show du jour and she was telling me about why she liked it. At one point when talking about the characters, she referred to them as “those *n-words*”. I could feel the horror spread across my face. We had a conversation about that particular racial slur and how even though the characters on the show use it, it’s very much not a word other people should. She had no idea it was bad to use that word.

    1. allathian*

      Yes, and in her case I can absolutely believe that she was unaware. I don’t buy the excuse of unawareness from anyone in the English-speaking world, though.

  33. ZSD*

    Kind of a (horrible) combination of 10 and 11:
    There’s a pair of false cognates in German and English: “aktuell” doesn’t translate to “actual,” but rather, “contemporary, current, up-to-date.” I suppose this can cause confusion in both directions.
    When I worked at a university, in a department that hosted a fair number of talks by native German speakers, an announcement went out for an event called, “What the Holocaust can Teach Us about Actual Atrocities.”

    Yiiiiikes.

    1. whimbrel*

      Oh nooooooooooooo. And the part where it’s in German makes it exponentially worse.

    2. alle*

      There was once an ad for an English language school in Germany that featured a whole lot of these. It was about someone wanting to make an appointment with the boss of a company. Highlights included:
      “I’d like a date with the chef.”
      (in German, chef is boss, not cook).
      It ended with:
      “What kind of undertaker is he?”
      (Unternehmer= company owner, CEO,not funeral home director :))

  34. Definitely not me*

    My husband was a dentist. He’s also several years my senior and is quite dashing. Early in our marriage, we moved to a very small town and were invited to dinner by the other local dentist and his spouse. We met at a restaurant and engaged in what should have been polite chit-chat to get to know each other. Other Dentist asks me, “Does (my husband’s name) do your dental work for you?” I respond with, “No, he’s never been in my mouth.” I didn’t intend for it to sound… sexual… but I was too young and naive to recover gracefully. Instead, I turned fifty shades of red while Other Dentist and his wife stared at me motionless, obviously trying not to laugh. Blissfully, we only lived in that town for about a year. That was 30 years ago, and to this day I wonder what that couple must have thought of this established professional’s ditzy new wife.

  35. DCBreadBox*

    At an old job I had a fellow manager and, among our staff, a woman whose parents had immigrated from India. She was talking about her parents conversationally one day and the other manager (who honestly was usually a great guy so not sure where the racist pr*ckery came from) said, “Oh, do they own a convenience store?” She quite calmly replied, “Yes.” At least he had the good grace to look mortified.

  36. Content Curator*

    I was a contractor for a Fortune 500 company put in charge of managing a website that provided curated content related to DE&I for employees to explore or access resources to use in their teams. I would search for relevant content and then get it approved by the department director who I worked under. This was about a year after George Floyd was murdered and there was a lot of interest in how we had gotten to a place in the US where we had such notable disparities in things like wealth and education across races and ethnicities. One explanation has to do with the legacy of red lining, so I had found a video produced by PBS that was really well done and had a really clear explanation of red lining. And, as a fun attention grabber it started with a clip from a Chris Rock bit about how if you are on MLK boulevard you are in the wrong neighborhood. I like Chris Rock and had heard the bit before. I sent the video off and didn’t hear anything back, so a few days later I asked her about it in a call we were having. She said, “the thing is mother f$&@er is just really not appropriate language in a corporate setting.” Yikes, so much for her assessment of my judgment about sensitive content—I hadn’t even heard the swearing in the video—I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the Chris Rock bit having heard it before, and I had trusted PBS to be appropriate! Happily she viewed it as a one time oversight and hired me as a full time employee a year and a half later.

  37. Cacofonix*

    Mortification week is the only time I’ll comment without reading. Way too triggering. But then, I’ll skip past those moments in movies and books where it’s obvious that the scene is being set up for some embarrassing situation to laugh at a character’s mistakes. If only ruminating were a superpower. The Ruminator! With sidekick The Rationalist!

    1. Rob aka Mediancat*

      Vicarious embarrassment. It’s lessened a bit by these being mostly folks telling on themselves, but I get where you’re coming from.

      Rob

  38. Hugged the CEO Reboot*

    This is one I posted in an open thread in 2023 and forgot to ever send in for mortification week:

    “I am not the LW who wrote in about hugging her CEO, but I absolutely did something very similar last night with the head of my agency (my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss). We’d never even had a conversation before this. I’m still unsure what he meant with his gesture but it led me to give him the most awkward not-a-side-hug ever.

    It’s fine, but I’ll be thinking about it for a week. Fortunately, knowing I’m not the first takes a lot of the sting out of the embarrassment.”

    My update is that I’ve had several other extremely awkward interactions with the agency head in the time since then, from bothering him on his morning commute when he was deep in his own head about a problem, to letting him know that I only accidentally applied for my job and never would have submitted if I knew what the role was in advance (I was trying to explain that I’m actually quite happy here!)

    Fortunately, he’s ALSO started making a habit of circulating through the offices so we’ve had enough brief, normal “hello”s that he will eventually think of me more as a member of my (high performing, beloved) department than “that woman I need to be deeply wary of.” Maybe in another 5 years?

  39. Shut Up Kevin*

    Similar to the “back off asshole,” one: I was on conference call with our program office and I took myself off mute to ask a question, saying, “Kevin…” and my dog started to growl in the background preparing to bark at the door, so I *thought* I put myself back on mute and said, “shut up or I’ll beat you like a rug!” To which Kevin replied after a second of silence, “What did I do?!”

    P.S. I do not, nor have I ever, beaten my dog.

    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      I have said many times that the biggest advantage to having dogs over children is that when I croon “who’s gonna get beat with the biggest tree in the backyard if they don’t stop caterwauling at 4am” in the “treats and supper time” voice, the dogs aren’t going to rat me out to their kindergarten teacher at the most inopportune moment, and in fact will probably wag so hard they fall over on me and snuggle.

      1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        Ha! I thought I was the only one who made horrible threats to their pet. I used to say to my cat, in a sing-song voice, “If you don’t stop, I’m going to slit your throat and leave you in a dumpster. Yes, I am!”

        1. Giant_Kitty*

          My husband and I used to joke about eating our pets, and then we had a roommate that adopted a dog who was rescued from an overseas meat farm D-:

        2. SimonTheGreyWarden*

          My line to my cats is “I’m going to make you into fuzzy little shoes, yes I am!!”

  40. Callia*

    #3 inviting boss to OB appointment – my former boss and my husband have the same first name. One time I accidentally texted my boss to ask if he needed me to pick up groceries on the way home. He responded helpfully to suggest an app that he and his wife use to coordinate grocery lists.

    I was thankful for his graceful response, but I was embarrassed enough to change his contact name to “Boss” so I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I’m just glad I didn’t send him anything more private!

    1. Carpool mom*

      I had to change my mom’s name in my phone from Mom to Mutti (German for Mommy) for similar reasons. That and I could NOT find her phone amidst all of the “Jane – Kid’s friend’s mom.”

  41. Phony Genius*

    #5 fascinates me because I know of several languages (such as Russian) where the letter that makes the B sound is very similar to the letter that makes the V sounds. In some cases (such as Hebrew), the two sounds share a letter. And in other cases, the letters b and v are both used but may have the same pronunciation (such as Spanish).

    Somehow, these two letters are tied to each other in many languages that don’t even share a common origin.

    1. Rainy*

      It’s because of how the sounds are formed–the B sound is a bilabial fricative and the V sound is a labiodental fricative, meaning that to form a B for an English word, your lips must close completely, while a B sound formed without closing the lips completely sounds to an English speaker like a V. Not all languages conceive of their component sounds in the same way we do, and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with linguistic origin but more with the way that the individual languages understand the phonemes that comprise their pronunciation.

      1. Phony Genius*

        I knew this was the right place to find out more about this.

        Now I need to find a way to work “labiodental fricative” into everyday conversation.

        1. Rainy*

          It is an amazing phrase, isn’t it?!

          I worked for a couple of years on a research project as a grad student that required that I become fluent in brevigraphs, which are a type of scribal abbreviation, and many (maybe most) of the ones that I was deciphering were based not on the spelling of the word but on the sound the word made, and while some of them were specific to a single sound, some of them indicated instead a *class* of phonemes, so the same brevigraph could be used to abbreviate any of several different sounds that could occur. Thus I needed to figure out what would be considered the kind of sound that particular symbol indicated in order to decipher them. When you add in the complication that how a copyist understood the sounds of the words in a Latin text varied by the scribe’s own first language…things got exciting fast sometimes. :)

          Good times!

      2. Evelyn Karnate*

        B is a voiced bilabial plosive (lips close completely) and V is a labiodental fricative (the lower lip touches the teeth but doesn’t block the flow of air completely). English doesn’t have a bilabial fricative… and since the Roman alphabet doesn’t have a letter for the sound a bilabial fricative makes, it gets spelled with B or V in languages that use the Roman alphabet.

        Yes, I am a hardcore nerd.

    2. Orv*

      Spanish has a lot of redundant letters because of the way it evolved before spelling was standardized. For example j, h, and x were once used essentially interchangeably, and today they all have the same sound.

  43. bruh*

    I was just reminded of an incident at my company – last year, on Veteran’s Day, a companywide email was sent out (100k+ employees) to acknowledge and recognize veterans who worked at the company. The message was supposed to say something like –
    “We want to recognize the selfless actions of our veterans – fighting numerous wars, at home and abroad”.
    Instead, they wrote:
    “We want to recognize the selfish actions of our veterans – fighting numerous wars, at home and abroad”.

    That was corrected quickly by hoo boy did it cause a bit of consternation.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I was gonna say, we don’t have any veterans of that one left.

        1. Evan Þ*

          There’re still a few WWII veterans left; maybe someone’s still alive who was fighting to defend Pearl Harbor or the Aleutians?

  44. Brain the Brian*

    The guard in #1 here should team up with yesterday’s LW who wanted to take off shoes while working at a gas station.

  45. mabel pines*

    #10 Not work-related, but in my area the slogan of the public bus/light rail system is “solutions that move you.” They also will wrap busses with advertisements or PSAs.

    A few months ago I spotted a bus wrapped with a PSA that said “HUMAN TRAFFICKING HAPPENS EVERYWHERE” . . . right next to its cheerful slogan spot reading “SOLUTIONS THAT MOVE YOU.”

    1. fellow vta victim*

      Haha I also live in the area and have several photos of that exact unfortunate combination. I think my favorite runner-up is an ad campaign based around emphasizing the faces of human trafficking and “TRAFFICKING MATTERS”… right next to “SOLUTIONS THAT MOVE YOU”

  46. WillowSunstar*

    #4 I wish people wouldn’t make comments on those who take stairs or not. I’m plus-sized and over 40, so back when we were still in the office, the only time I took the elevator was while carrying a lot of stuff. I was so afraid of people making a fatphobic comment to the point I took the stairs way back when my knee was twisted, for 6 months. To this day, I have a pinched nerve in my back. Probably should have taken the elevator.

    WFH and now I take the elevator when carrying a bunch of stuff, and no longer care about what people think.

    1. librarian*

      Agreed. I am relatively young and seemingly “in shape,” but have a chronic illness that makes stairs extremely difficult for me. I spent the first year or so of my job avoiding the elevator because I was afraid of being judged as lazy. “Jokes” like these are extremely un-funny. Now I take the elevator everywhere and couldn’t care less what someone might have to say about it.

    2. Anonny*

      That OP mentioned working in time before cell phones, so I’m guessing my generation (young Gen X) or older. And look, I am NOT saying how it worked back then was right, because it wasn’t, but the facts are disabilities and disabled people were nowhere near as visible then as they are now. Schools had separate classrooms, etc etc. It was sequestered, and that resulted in abled people not having any awareness around the particulars and challenges of disabilities. And if they did, it was almost fetishized to a point (my mom worked with a fellow student who had brittle bone disease, and the fact that she was a really good singer and would do the talent shows was considered “so brave”). And the second fact is, you can only know what you experience. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, you can experience all kinds of different backgrounds and abilities. Back then, the hard reality is if you didn’t know anyone with XYZ disability, you had zero knowledge or awareness of the challenges that might come with it. Like, I don’t think younger gens that grew up with the internet can truly grasp how much we just didn’t and couldn’t possibly know or understand back then. Internet access and social media can be a curse, but the access to different cultures, backgrounds, life experiences, etc is also an incredible gift that a lot of people take for granted now.

    3. LJ*

      I think OP#4 was probably appropriate mortified from the experience and learned the lesson now

  47. librarian*

    #4 – In my opinion, it’s very rude to make jokes/comments on why someone is taking the elevator as opposed to the stairs. There are lots of reasons why someone is doing this including countless invisible illnesses and disabilities.

    1. Rainy*

      Heh–I was typing my comment as you were typing yours. Great minds work in similar directions!

      I wish people who feel like they need to comment on other people’s locomotion realize what they sound like.

  48. Rainy*

    Re number 4, in my first few months at my current organization, a coworker (now retired) chastised me for being slow on the stairs and when I said lightly “Stairs aren’t always easy for me,” she said very condescendingly that I needed to stop using the elevator then so that I would get in shape.

    Later that same day another colleague and I were making lighthearted small talk when the conversation swung to old injuries, and when I realized the smug colleague who’d chastised me was eavesdropping, I took the opportunity to try to make her feel like the hateful boor she was.

    As it happens, stairs aren’t always easy for me because I was in a bad rollerskating accident when I was 11 and then 2 years later while my knees were still recovering, I was injured in a violent incident at my junior high, and I have pretty bad arthritis in both knees and a hip that doesn’t always want to be a hip.

  49. MasterOfBears*

    Many moons ago, before the days of Zoom and Teams, my company did a monthly conference call. They’d take a roll call of who was present from each region – “Ok Region 1?” “Hi, Marissa and Steve on the line.” “Region 2?” “Hi, this is Ford and Zaphod” etc.
    I was multitasking my way through the roll call and just had a few brain cells dedicated to listening for “region 12.” As best I can figure, that part of my brain was just tracking the count, going “region 12 region 12 region 12,” so when they called Region 12, rather than saying “Hi, this is Trillian and Arthur here,” I unmuted and said, in my best bright, confident phone voice “Hi, this is 13 14 – uh I mean um–”

    Fortunately everyone laughed it off as the autopilot misfire it was, and I got immediately upstaged by someone from region 14 walking by moaning “Caaaaaake, caaaaaaake” like a zombie.

  50. It's Gonna Be May*

    I was very good friends outside of work with one of my colleagues. We both have odd, rather inappropriate senses of humor – the type where I got her a bottle of wine labeled “Bitch” and she got me a coffee mug shaped like a toilet filled with poo. We regularly referred to each other as various iterations of the word “Skank”. (What can I say…we were young and thought we were hilarious). One day at work I received a phone call; caller ID said it was my skanky friend. I answered the phone as “What’s UP, bitch? Who you f*$#ing today to get yourself up that corporate ladder?” There was silence at the other end and my heart dropped into my stomach. Turns out one of the exec team was passing by my friend’s office and had a question for me, so used her office phone to call me.

    Even though I no longer work there, I ALWAYS answer my phone now with “Good day, this is May, how can I be of service?” regardless of what the Caller ID says. This skank learned her lesson.

    1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      My cousin went to all girls’ Catholic school and one of her friends had the last name Ho.

      It was a VERY long 4 years for the staff who had to endure teen girls yelling variations of, “HEY, HO!”

  51. whimbrel*

    This literally just happened and I want to die of embarrassment. I got into an intense focus zone and ended up working through lunch today to finish a document for my manager, before he was to have a meeting on its contents with his boss.

    As my manager came back from lunch, I said to him that I was going to take an adjusted lunch as I hadn’t noticed the time while I was working, but that I would only be gone briefly to go to the store to get some deli meat, like salami or something (not mentioning that I had brought sandwich fixings to work but hadn’t had any sliced deli meats).

    He chuckled and said ‘So you’re just going to eat a package of lunch meat for lunch?’ and for reasons which will forever be opaque to me, I said ‘no, I was thinking one of those giant salamis, you know, the ones like this’ and held up my arms as if I was measuring a fish or similar catch. Or something much less SFW.

    I’m assuming he laughed as I was too busy focusing intently on wishing a crevasse in which I could be entombed forever would open up in the floor beneath me.

    (I am fortunate that I know my manager very well as we worked together as colleagues before he got his promotion, and he absolutely knows how awkward I can be, but I still wish it hadn’t happened!)

    1. Rainy*

      Just FYI–there’s currently a Listeria caution on meats sliced for you at the deli counter due to a multi-state outbreak of Listeriosis. You can check out the CDC’s alert page for details, but it’s probably safer to stick to packaged deli meats (that haven’t been implicated in the outbreak) until they figure out what’s actually causing it.

      1. whimbrel*

        Thanks for the heads up! I’m in Canada, but I’ll check and see if it applies here also – fortunately what I bought was in fact packaged pre-sliced salami, I was using ‘deli meat’ as shorthand.

        1. Rainy*

          Oh good! Hopefully it’s just the US and not Canada, and sorry for US-centrism! Listeriosis is rough and I’ve been warning people reflexively about it. :) Given the outbreak map I’d probably be more worried if you were in Ontario or Quebec than if you’re from the prairies or out west. The first (and worst) state hit was NY.

  52. Joseph*

    #12 we always used to use V for Vendetta after the Natalie Portman movie. It was used so commonly that when I left that job and started another (in a more serious office) I struggled to train myself out it

  53. LaFramboise, academic librarian*

    oh #8 LW! my husband the health care professional laughed so hard at your story! What a great retelling!

  54. JustAClarifier*

    #12: I drew a blank on the phonetic alphabet recently as well and said “M for Metatron.” You are not alone.

    1. Rainy*

      I flew Alaska recently and their gate personnel are apparently required to do boarding groups with an explanatory word. On the way out, it was “Group E for Excellent, Group D for Delightful, Group C for Charming.” Pretty standard stuff.

      On the first leg of my flight home from a smaller regional airport, the guy calling the groups was clearly just done with work and maliciously complied by calling “Group E for Eight, Group D for Django, Group C for Czar.”

  55. Workerbee*

    Re: #12
    Years ago, I’d answered the phone at work and the person on the other end identifying herself with what sounded like ” Bosh.”

    In my mind, I saw it spelled as “Bosch,” and so I instantly said, “You mean like Hieronymus Bosch?”

    She didn’t stop laughing for quite awhile. Every time I thought she was calming down, she’d be set off again.

    I don’t know if she knew of the painter; I don’t know if it was just because you don’t expect to hear the name “Hieronymus” all that much today. But I’ve never forgotten this tiny exchange.

    And I don’t even LIKE Bosch’s artwork.

  56. Zeus*

    #12 (O for Oompa Loompa) is similar to a time a customer was reading out a serial number to me over the phone – A for Alpha, number 3, E for Elephant, V for —uh, virgin.

    Apparently it was the only V word she could think of at the time! She was embarrassed, so I tried not to laugh while letting her know that Victor is a good alternative.

  57. Workaholic*

    #12 I once had a coworker fall out of her chair laughing when I said “u as in ukulele” to a customer, then I asked why she kept laughing at me.
    “unicorn. umbrella… there are so many words! you picked ukulele!”
    I still had the customer on the line so he got a good laugh too.

  58. aarti*

    This one:

    “I called a company help line recently, and the customer service rep on the other end of the line greeted me with “Back off, asshole!”

    Her dog was stealing her snack just as the line connected. Pretty hilarious.”

    reminds me of an interaction I was on the receiving end of. I got a call and as I picked up the phone I heard a loud, sharp female voice saying, “We do NOT eat the plants!” I said “I’m sorry, I’ll stop! I was hungry!”

    She was of course mortified. She had been reprimanding her toddler at the bank who indeed, was trying to apparently nibble the (plastic) plants. I thought it was the funniest thing ever.

  59. SpaceyO*

    #5 – I had the same issue with the “y” and the “t” being too next to each other when typing out an email regarding the City University of New York…more specifically, its acronym.

  60. Nica*

    Ah, the #2 story…

    Years back I worked for a company that sold high end items like watches, desk/mantel clocks, jewelry, paperweights, etc. I often had to have items photographed for our catalog and we had an in-house photographer with his own studio. I was having a clock photographed but realized the sample clock had some damage so I needed to get another one from the warehouse that wasn’t damaged.

    Later that day, my boss wanted to be sure the 2nd clock was returned to inventory, so he sent me an email to confirm. I responded, “I went to the studio and got the good cock.” Yes, forgot the “L” in clock and realized it about 2 seconds after I sent it. I could hear him laughing from across the building. Thank God, he had a good sense of humor. However, he also forwarded the email to our photographer (also a friend of mine) who teased me about it for the next couple of weeks.

  61. Serious silly putty*

    I was trying to give my license plate number over the phone. The letters were BMH.
    “B as in Boy… M as in Man…”
    And because I was on a masculine theme, my brain went to “H as in Hombre”. All English words starting with H had escaped my brain.

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