Susan's Place Transgender Resources

This thread is kind of off topic, but I had a super awkward, hilarious instance at work today that I have to share somewhere.

As I've mentioned before, I work as a supervisor in a call center for a catalog/gift company.  I get to have lots of super fun conversations with angry customers who demand to speak to a supervisor. 

So today, I'm on one of these calls, and getting super frustrated with this customer who keeps interupting me to yell about how we screwed up, while I'm trying to offer ideas for how I can fix the problem for her. (I can't fix anything If you dont let me talk!)  It gets to the point where she sounded like she sounded like she was about to cry, while yelling at me, and randomly blurts out.
" I have no teeth!  Its a gift for my dentist who gave me new teeth for free!"  After that, I completely lost it, and couldn't stop my self from laughing uncontrollably.  The customer is completely oblivious to the fact that I'm laughing (I had to put my hand over my mouth and move the mic from the headset as far from my mouth as I could) while she's continuing to yell at me.  I didn't help that I've been sick the past week, drank too much caffeine today, and was 8 hours into a 9 hour shift.   

I eventually managed to get it together, finish the call and somehow make her happy.  When I finally got off the phone, and was finally able to explain to everyone around me who was giving me wierd looks the whole time what was so funny, I (and the girl I took over the call from) were practically in tears from how hard we were both laughing.  It was bad.  I'm kind of embarassed by how un-professional I was with the whole situation, but at least the customer never realized I was laughing.  For the rest of my shift, people would randomly come up to me and say "I have no teeth!".  I'm still laughing to my self about it now, and this happened like 4 hours ago.

Any one else got stories about laughing uncontrollably in completely inappropriate situations?

When I was in the 8th grade I was walking down the hall this boy yelled "You're actually a girl yet you're the only one in middle school that has to shave!" It was true, and I don't give a crap about having side burns, but he was obviously tying to insult me so before he could finish saying gross I had him on the ground. He was so much bigger than me so I wasn't really expecting to do him much harm. After I got my bearings I realized he was tearing up and in pain. I thought he was just being dramatic. I called him a baby and went back to class. A couple days later I found out I broke his ankle and that he told everyone he fell down steps. I never told anyone what really happened, but I found it funny. I only saw him one other time and he picked up a book I dropped in the Library for me.

I laugh at crazy customers all the time.

Haha Kyle, I don't know how you don't laugh more often with that job. I've never worked in a call center myself, but my mom does and she has some crazy stories from the people that call. Some guy called her once and was upset over whatever issue, and then randomly tells my mom that uppity black people like her are what's wrong with the country and they make Obama look bad lol  :D

Neither of us have any idea what he was talking about, my mom's not even black either, and it's not like he could see her so I have no idea where that came from. Sometimes I think those people just take their problems out on call center workers, which totally sucks.

That made me laugh too.  When I worked at a cafe, reading the angry comments page was a common group activity.  My favorite was a lady who wrote a whole freakin' essay about how she couldn't believe we put mustard on her chicken salad sandwich even though she knew it comes with it and didn't ask for no mustard.  ::)

I would've lost it too, that sounds funny as hell.

When I was in fifth grade, we were taking the catholic school equivalent of SAT tests (or something similar, standardized test thing) and I'd finished early, so I pulled the book I'd been reading out. It got to a part where one of the main characters is spying on his dad, who is piss drunk and screaming at mounted heads in his trophy room.  I started snickering at first, got dirty looks, which is always a gaurantee to make you laugh even harder in those situations. It got so bad that I was removed from the class and sent to the library, where I could laugh my ass off in peace. Damn you Stephen King for your strange, sudden moments of hilarity!

I work as an apartment manager and I spent two years working in a pharmacy. I pretty much get the chance to laugh at the worst possible times every day. The most recent one was a call I got about a noise complaint. It is finals week here, so I asked the guy where he lived and what the noise was. Bearing in mind this guy is maybe 22. His response was "My neighbor...well, neighbor and wife, see they are uhm. ...Having maritals?" (Just try reading that out loud in a confused, terrified and half questioning way.) Needless to say I thought I was going to wet myself.

Seriously, who says maritals??  :D

Hmm... in my grade 12 psychology class my friends were sharing their dentist horror stories (because I had just gotten retainers). When exam time came we were all still laughing about some of them, it took us (or me) about a quarter of the way through the test to calm down, and our teacher never said anything to us. It's probably not funny from me telling i tright now, but it was funny in the moment.  :)

One time at girl scouts our leader (very big woman) was sitting on one side of the picnic table and there were three of us sitting on the other side.  We all got up at the same time and the picnic table flipped over on our leader.  Everyone else was running to see if she was ok, but I was standing back trying to hide the fact that I couldn't stop laughing.

An even worse time was when my grandmother was dying of cancer and we were taking care of her.  I had to help her get to the bathroom, but I didn't realize I had to help her sit down, too.  I stood her in front of the toilet and turned to leave when I hear a crash and turn around to see her fall right into our bathtub, knocking the faucet off.  I was laughing as I tried to help this poor frail, dying woman out of the bathtub.  Luckily I was able to hide it from my aunt, who came running in to help after hearing the crash.  She probably would have kicked the crap out of me if she realized I was laughing about that.

Finally, as a 2nd grade teacher I have a bad habit of laughing when my students do something wrong/inappropriate.  It doesn't work out too well for classroom management and last year I had several kids purposely start acting up just to make me laugh.

Sometimes I start laughing when situations become ridiculous chaotic - especially when it involves children or improbable situations.
I have no idea why, but I can't stop when this happens either.
Honestly, I would probably be the person who would laugh at that phone call.
>_<

This is me.  All the time.  http://i.imgur.com/aocjx.gif (http://i.imgur.com/aocjx.gif)

That's Survivor.
And the girl I adored (Sugar) because she wore a 45 record adapter symbol around her neck.
For the win. <3

Hope you don't me joining in.

I'm a scientist. Years ago I was invited to a lecture by a leading Forensic scientist, invite only, closed room. I went with a colleague. We sat and the esteemed Professor, who looked about sixty and was bent over and looked very frail started to speak.

" I've done 45 unsolved rapes, 15 unsolved murders and 10 unsolved bombings." My colleague leaned over to me and quietly said, ' Looks pretty good after doing all of that" I just cried, I had my fist down my mouth, I had totally uncontrollable laughter. I had to try and hide my face in a handkerchief.  I tried to disappear behind the chair in front. I was about three chairs away from the speaker. Everyone noticed me. My 'friend' sat with an angelic look on his face.

I was never invited back to that lecture series.

Cindy

Oh I just remembered another good one.  (Thanks for the 'pissing off a prof' prompt, Cindy.) 
My parasitology prof was a tiny old woman who spoke in a very quiet voice.  She had up a picture of a prolapsed rectum all bunched up and covered in white worms when a voice from the back shouted over her with "It looks like a cinnabun!"  The rest of the lecture was full of snickers, and ascaris still makes me laugh.

I do theatre, and one year I was in The King and I as one of the King's wives. ('Cause y'know, I wasn't out yet and loved theatre enough to play any manner of parts - it was real life that felt like acting, until I finally transitioned)

There's one scene where Anna shows all of the wives her locket, which has a picture of her husband Tom in it, and then she sings a song about it. We were using a blank locket in rehearsal, but on dress rehearsal night, myself and another wife put a random picture of this really old dude in the locket. On stage that night, Anna opened it and showed everyone the locket, and all of the wives on stage were trying really hard not to laugh. Looking back, it was kind of unprofessional of us, but that's why we did it on dress rehearsal night and not a performance.

In that same show, there was a scene where I had to bow to the King while wearing a hoop skirt, and I was wearing a trick skirt that was rigged to go up over my head when I bowed. The King and Anna were behind me, so they saw my underpants (the plot of the show is that the women didn't know they were supposed to wear underpants, so the King and Anna have to act like we're naked.

On dress rehearsal night I drew a huge smiley face on my underwear so that when they looked down, there'd be a huge smiley on my butt. They enjoyed it so much (and were really good and able to keep themselves from laughing) that for the rest of the run, I wrote a different message on my butt each night, like "this space for rent" or "yeah, you wish".

Some directors hate theatre pranks with a passion, but I think most of the time, they are good at keeping the cast awake when they could get stuck in a rut of performing the same thing every night. I wasn't the only one in the cast who pranked people.

I almost started laughing again on the phone at work AGAIN yesterday.  We sell pajamas for cats (I wish I was making this up), which are basically the small sized dog pajamas that someone looked at one day and said "I bet this would fit a cat! lets remarket some dog pajamas as cat pajamas!"  I asked my manager in an e-mail after they announced the cat pajamas if they were going to ship with a tube of antibiotic ointment, so people could take care of the scratches they were likely to get while trying to put pajamas on a cat. 

So I got this angry customer yesterday, demanding that we made a huge mistake because her cat pajamas said 'for dogs' on the label, and didn't believe my explination.  Then shes like "Have you ever seen a dog?  Dogs are much bigger than cats."  I came soooo close to asking her if she had ever seen a chihuahua.  Or a toy poodle.  I also came dangerously close to loosing it laughing again.

(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fpajamagram.http.internapcdn.net%2Fpajamagram%2FImages%2FProductImages%2FSmall%2FGKPJ02365_Small_Keyword_20111128_1044.jpg&hash=6d7c11708ad7f3e3d947dde7557e7bdf91702592)

Okay, after Cindy's scientist story, I have one that's not quite as good. We didn't laugh as much, anyway.

I have a friend who does optics research on rats. He also plays a guitar, writes poetry, and does stand-up comedy. He's only good at the optics stuff. Anyway, he wanted to try out a humorous essay at an open mic, but he was self-conscious and didn't want to do it in our town. So we drove to Atlanta, to a place we knew had an open mic that night.

What we didn't know was that it was a black club (my friend is very white, both physically and culturally), and a pretty political and insular one at that. The patrons were regular southern conservative christians, but angry, and pretty much racial separatists, as far as I could tell.

So this guy goes up to the mic anyway. We'd driven a few hours, after all. He gets all the way through a David Sedaris-esque story that ends with a rat peeing in his mouth, but there was no laughter of any sort. It was all icy silence for the first half and angry murmurings for the second half. And me and my other friend at a table in the back trying not to lose our ->-bleeped-<- laughing. Not just at his story, but also at the really stupid situation the three of us are in.

We went home afterward and never spoke of it again. XD

lol Felix, that reminds me of the part in the movie Horrible Bosses when they go to that club XD