“Hey! You! Don’t take those!”
– Elderly woman to me, as I walked past a row of grocery bags on the sidewalk that she was clearly unloading from her car
Evidently when I’m not wearing a tie I look like a criminal element of some kind.
“Hey! You! Don’t take those!”
– Elderly woman to me, as I walked past a row of grocery bags on the sidewalk that she was clearly unloading from her car
Evidently when I’m not wearing a tie I look like a criminal element of some kind.
“The cat’s alive. Let’s go to dinner.”
– Penny, in The Big Bang Theory
(Referencing, for those of you who don’t watch the show, Schrödinger’s cat)
“Aaaa! I have no clothes on!”
– My Neighbor (heard from the hallway)
Leonard: “Who sells a full-sized time machine for $800?”
Sheldon: “In a Venn diagram, that would be an individual located within the intersection of the sets ‘No longer want my time machine’ and ‘Need $800′”
Homer (to his mom): “You keep disappearing and reappearing and it’s not funny. You’re just like that show Scrubs.” – The Simpsons (Season 19, Episode 19, “Mona Leaves-a”)
That’s not nice at all! I’ll choose instead to interpret that as a friendly homage to this scene in Scrubs:
Janitor: For three years I’ve been watching you pine after Blonde Doctor, and I gotta tell you, everyone is sick of it – “Will they? Won’t they? Looks like they’re going to! Oooh, the last second, something might – ohhhhh!” Come on! Enough already! I mean, you guys aren’t exactly Ross and Rachel.
J.D.: Who?
Janitor: Dr. Ross, and Rachel from Bookkeeping.
– Scrubs (Season 3, Episode 30, “My Fault”)
JD: “I’m just doing this thing where I use a slice of wisdom from someone else’s life to solve a problem in my own life.”
Jordan: “Seems coincidental…”
JD: “And yet I do it almost every week.”
– Scrubs, “My Waste of Time”
Guy: “I guess I don’t mind the F bomb…”
– On the way into Lewis Black‘s show
Girl: “I’m trying to stick to tattoos that mean something.”
Guy: “Oh.”
Girl: “So yours doesn’t mean anything? It’s just a random design?”
Guy: “Well, this one says ‘Mom.’ That means something…”
– B Line Train
“In [a traditional elevator] you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.” – The New Yorker, 21 April 2008
In my own recently remodeled elevator, the button for my floor doesn’t light up anymore. It still works; it just doesn’t light up.
This is completely unimportant in my daily routine, but it’s problematic when someone gets on after I’ve pressed it. When one of the many college girls in the building follows me into the elevator and presses, say, 4, on an otherwise unlit and apparently untouched panel, it must be creepy to see me standing there motionless, grinning passively as if to say, “I know exactly where I’m getting off tonight, baby.”
Even when she’s rushed out at the fourth floor and sees that I’ve stayed behind, I still look like a lunatic who’s just standing in an elevator not doing anything, like a homeless guy riding back and forth on the S train in Manhattan all day.
Basically what I’m saying is: “Maybe the next time you guys remodel the elevators, you should check to make sure all the buttons on the new control panel light up.”
Coworker: “How would you pronounce that word?”
Me: “Matte”
Coworker: “No! It should be Matté!”
Me: “Wait a second! You complained when I said ‘Frappe’ should be pronounced ‘Frappé’ – this is exactly the same thing!”
Coworker: “Yeah, but I know that one!”
It’s eerie how similar this conversation was with the interchange reported earlier that included a sixth grader.