O/T The Real Faux Pas

[Garland Bayley]

Yes Kalen,

Quite a prize.

[George Pazin]

Mine was introducing myself to someone I had met many times previously after the summer prior to my junior year at school.

"Hi, you must be Maryann."

"No, George, it's me, Nora, I was at your birthday party last spring and live across the street."

D'OH!

I blame my dad - he is a genius and remembers every disease, virus, etc., and every classical composers' birthday and what he died from (he used to give talks on music and medicine as a hobby), yet he struggled to remember our longtime next door neighbor's first name, which was admittedly a tough one: Joe.

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The faux pas I see repeated most often is: "When are you due?" You never, ever, ask that of a woman unless you are 1000% certain she's pregnant.

[Bob_Huntley]

BobH:

Go to this webpage and check out the part about halfway down about Mary Astor Paul (m. Munn, m. Allez), and her exploits in Paris during WW2 and then I'll tell you what was both a faux pas on my part but pretty funny while talking last year to her daughter, the indominable 95 year old Grand Dame, Mary, Countess of Bessborough, about her mother's spying for the Allies in Paris in WW2 and what happened when she got caught by the Nazis.


http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/socialdiary/2006/11_24_06/socialdiary11_24_06.php

Tom,

Thanks for the link.

There is only one Addison Miner house in Pebble Beach and quite frankly, it is the best of the lot.

I wonder what the buying power of a 1920s/30s dollar is tpday's equivalent?



Bob

[Brian_Sleeman]

A few years ago while I and a few fellow shop workers were visiting a sister club in Northern Michigan, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman in the golf shop.  He asked if any of us were in the PGA apprentice program, and I answered that I was.  We chatted for a bit about it, and he asked me what I thought of the PGA Teaching Manual.

My response as I'd just started the program was that I'd relied primarily on other books I'd read in the past, my own experience, talking with other pros, etc, and then BS'ed him by saying I'd looked through it a bit (a very *little* bit) but it didn't seem to add much to what I'd already read in the past.  His response?

"Well, I wrote it."

Whoops.

I've actually spent some time with it since then and can vouch for its usefulness.

[JohnV]

While my wife and I were touring Bordeaux in 1988, we stopped at a well known winery for a tour.  After the tour, we were in the tasting room.  The owner of the winery was the author of a well known book on wine, which we had been using as a resource during our travels.  We told the hostess that we were using the book and she asked my wife if we would like it autographed.  My wife replied, "Why would we want that?".  The author/owner was standing about 6 feet away.  His French ego was definitely bruised.

While the following isn't really a faux pas, it was equally as embarassing for the victim.  The company I helped found in the 1980s used the Unix operating system. In porting it to our computer we found a lot of bugs and fixed them.  We missed this one.

When you wrote an e-mail on the system, it stored the text in a temporary file.  Then when you sent the mail, it copied that text into all the recipient's mailboxes.  If you had a large mail list and the system was busy, this could take a few minutes.  One of our employees sent an e-mail to the entire company.  After he hit send, he then sent one to his wife, which was full of cutsy, love-dovey kinds of things and hit send.  What he, and we, didn't know was that the mail program used the same temporary file for each piece of mail that you sent.  Therefore, he overwrote the first e-mail with the second while the system was still sending the first one to the company.  Needless to say, there were chuckles coming from all over the building.  Primarily from those whose e-mail addresses were at the bottom of the list.  The bug was quickly fixed after that.

[Joe Bausch]

A friend of mine was marrying a Filipino girl.  Her maid of honor was her sister, invited over from the Philippines to California for the wedding.  My friend's first interaction with her was at the wedding rehearsal dinner.  He was sitting next to her and noticed while eating the first course of the dinner that a loose hair from her chin was about to fall into her soup.  So he reached over thinking it would be a good idea to grab it before it was swimming... turns out it was attached to mole underneath her chin.

D'oh!

[Sean Leary]

To tie this to golf,

when I started dating my now ex wife, I took her to buy her some golf clubs at a local golf score. It was on a Sunday morning, and she was in sweats and a teeshirt with her hair in a ponytail, basically. She was and is very diminutive, (5'0 and 90 lbs), so she needed lighter, smaller clubs. The salesman came over to the ones we were looking at and recommended that she not buy them . We asked why, and he said that he feared that she would grow out of them in a year or two, and would have to get another set.  I asked him how old he thought she was. They both got all red faced, then we all laughed when she told him she was 27 years old. .....