Your Best Cocktail Party Stories

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Flack
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Your Best Cocktail Party Stories

Post by Flack »

One of my assignments for school is to come up with a list of 5-10 "cocktail party" stories. These are your go to stories that you whip out at parties -- maybe the time something crazy happened to you, or you met a celebrity, or you saw something amazing.

If you have a great cocktail story, post it here.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Tdarcos
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Post by Tdarcos »

I was working as a cashier for People's Drug at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC around 1988 and there were three things I remember from my time there.

I was ringing up some things, and I wasn't the type of person I am now, things could bother me, so at one point I had a problem with the register ringing up something which meant I had to ask for a price check over the PA system. I said to my manager I hoped we never had a problem with prices on condoms because I would not ask for a price check for that, I'd go look them up myself. And as it turned out, one time a guy brings up a pack of condoms, the register doesn't have it, so I walk away from my register, walk over to the shelf, look at the price, then come back. Nobody said anything.

I was ringing up a guy's order and one of the items was a pack of gum and it came up 35c which is what all gum costs. He complained it was supposed to be a quarter. Well, people try to claim the price is wrong so they can get it cheaper, so I go over to the shelf to look. And sure enough, he found the one and only item in the candy section that was still marked on the shelf as being 25c. I was so surprised that if I had the authority I'd have given it to him for free for finding the item.

An older lady walked up to the register and was buying something. The thing was, I thought I knew her from somewhere. So I admitted that she looked vaguely familiar. And she said, "I'm Jeanne Dixon," and I instantly remembered, she was the famous astrologer who I think did horoscopes for one of the supermarket tabloids.

Use whatever you like, if any.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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Flack
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Post by Flack »

It's cold and rainy here this morning, so here's a "cold and rainy" story I tell occasionally.

One December, a friend of mine and I were riding around in my Ford Festiva when we came across this flooded parking lot. We got the idea that if we drove real fast and then yanked on the hand brake, we would glide across the water and it would be really fun.

I popped the clutch and took off. We started racing across the parking lot when all of a sudden I drove into a large hole. They were doing construction in the parking lot, and suddenly my car was tilted 45 degrees forward and cold water began coming into the cab underneath the doors.

My friend yelled that we should get out, but we didn't want to open the doors and let more water in so we climbed out through the windows and jumped into the water. The hole was only 2 or 3 feet deep, but my Festiva was front wheel drive and the front wheels were hanging over the edge. Between the two of us, we were able to push the car backwards and get the wheels back on the pavement.

But now we had another problem. We were soaking up past our knees with freezing cold water. Our socks and shoes and pants were soaked. My friend became convinced that we were going to die from hypothermia, so we decided to take off everything but our shirts and our underwear. We threw our pants, socks and shoes in the back of the car and drove home, freezing, with the heater on full blast, praying that we wouldn't get pulled over and have to explain the situation to a cop.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Jizaboz
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Post by Jizaboz »

Probably told this one before..

When I was in my early 20s, I went out to Toys R Us to buy a new Sega Saturn game. On the way, walking from a record shop to the Toys R Us I see these guys all in black, and nearly all of them wearing White Zombie t-shirts.

I turn to my friend and say "Haha look at these lamers! They think they're White Zombie!"

Went into Toys R Us.. and there's one of them with another dude not wearing black. Yup, it was Rob Zombie buying a Superman toy.

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FlyingCarp
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Post by FlyingCarp »

Tough to top TDarcos's compelling tales from the register, but I've got a fishing story I like to tell:

This story begins with me waist-deep in a tributary to Lake Erie, fishing for steelhead. Steelhead are large salmonids, so like a giant trout, that leaves its home in a lake or ocean to travel up tributaries to spawn. They're so busy thinking about screwing, they're notoriously difficult to catch and I was having trouble.

The other thing about steelhead fishing is that it attracts lots of anglers, so much so that people often refer to steelhead fishing as "combat fishing". But, lucky for me, there was no one out that day. I was all alone on the stream, until out of the corner of my eye I saw a man downstream from me.

Paying no mind, I kept fishing, until I glanced again and the guy was closer and getting even closer. In fact, he didn't even have a fishing rod and was charging towards me upstream. I started to wonder what the hell was going on and judging from his movement and his expression, the guy was pissed off.

When he got close enough, I heard him yell out, "You gotta me help me! I'm hooked!" What the hell? Well, it turned out he'd gotten a large hook with a bright pink salmon egg pattern stuck into the soft of his palm between his forefinger and thumb. He showed me and I said, "What do you want me to do about it?"

He pulled out a stretch of thick monofilament, wrapped it around the bend of the hook and told me to yank it as hard as I could. I'm not particularly squeamish, but the thought of ripping a chunk of out this guy's hand made me go white. Still, despite my protests, this guy was adamant that I "not be a pussy."

So, I wrapped the line around my fish, asked him if he wanted me to count down from ten (he said, "I don't give a fuck."), and upon reaching one I yanked. The guy knelt in the water, swore for about 30 seconds, dipped his hand in the water to "cleanse" the blood gushing from it and turned to head back from whence he came.

Then he stopped, reached into his vest and pulled out a small fly, a red-bodied nymph, and said, "Here. Use this." And off he went. As he turned, I noticed his fishing license was not the standard Pennsylvania license. This guy was a fishing guide.

After he'd gone well downstream, I tied on the fly he gave me, cast once and immediately hooked into a silver bullet! A massive, brute of a fish that ran way up and downstream until I wore it out enough to beach it. After reviving and releasing that fish, I cast again and sure enough, another hook-up! This fish was even bigger! As it leaped from the water, my line snapped and the fish got away with the magic fly embedded in its lip, probably off to find a friend to help it get the damn thing unstuck from its snout.

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

So the other day we take the girl dog into the vet because she had a growth on her behind. Vet says to us, "It's cancer." Argh. He adds, "Before we take it out, we gotta do a scan and see if she's filled with cancer. If she's got cancer in her heart and liver and prostrate then we're not going to operate, and she'll have six months to live."

He couldn't run the scan that day, we were gonna have to come back. I guess they have to charge it up or something. We had a very sad weekend as we could be losing our baby.

I take her back into the vet's office the next Monday. Doc does the scan and calls me up and says, "Good news, she does not have cancer everywhere. Just that little spot." That's GREAT news! This will cost me almost nothing. He'll do the operation and she'll be CANCER FREE and -- hello, oh he's still talking.

"The scan revealed that she ate three golf ball-sized rocks. We have to get those rocks out. We can try making her vomit first." Well, I knew that wouldn't work because she has hunger issues. I had to try to make her puke once before. She sucked down an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide, tail wagging. She thinks its a treat.

I drop by at night and yeah, the dog didn't throw up. The vets says, well, we have two choices. We can try to go in with a tube and suction them out, or we can open her up and operate. There's a chance that the suction may not work as desired (been there, ladies) so I say go ahead and operate.

They get the rocks out. As it turns out at the vet's office, if they take rocks out the present them to you in a bag. They are your rocks now. Congratulations Mr. Jonsey, here's the most expensive chunk of land in Denver. I take the rocks home to show my wife. Why, I dunno. Maybe she can identify if they are from our yard?

She looks at them through the bag and says, yeah, they're ours. I set them aside on the table and a few minutes later as we are having dinner I push myself away and say, "I must be the dumbest goddamn guy in Denver." In the middle of supperI take the rocks and the bag and deposit them straight into the Dumpster. Because otherwise that goddamn dog, when our backs were turned, was going to eat them off the table again and we'd start the process all over again.

Anyway, that's how I spent my last $1950.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

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Tdarcos
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Post by Tdarcos »

This didn't happen to me, but it was on signs on the doors of both restroom doors of a hardware store in Silver Spring, Maryland, about 20 years ago.

-------------------------------------

$1,450

This is what the plumber charged us to clear out the bathroom toilet because someone put paper towels in the commode and flushed it.

Please do not throw paper towels in the toilet.

---------------------------------------
I remembered this because a couple of years ago I had to yell at my landlord to stop him because he was doing some cleaning and was about to throw a paper towel down the toilet. (In our case, this could have been a problem; I have gotten the toilet routinely stopped up with nothing more than toilet paper from wiping my ass.)

I have on occasion teased him about this, that I've had to warn him not to throw paper towels in the toilet.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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AArdvark
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Post by AArdvark »

I'd whip that story out at a cocktail party.

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FlyingCarp
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Post by FlyingCarp »

Ass-wiping stories do break the ice quite well. If you're lucky, you'll encourage someone to respond with a poison ivy wipe story and then everyone is in for a good laugh.

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Jesus Christ, did Paul listen to a story that someone told at a cocktail party and throw out a story THAT LOGICALLY FOLLOWED ALONG and made perfect SENSE IN CONTEXT?

This is fucking amazing. I'm bronzing this thread. Paul, buddy, you have gained a goddamn level, and it's the level I never thought you'd gain. I'm fucken proud of you, pal. This is .... this is what I always wanted the BBS to be like.

FlyingCarp, I'm glad you were here to see this. In the spirit of Valentine's Week, this week we have squashed all beefs and healed all wounds.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

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Tdarcos
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Post by Tdarcos »

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:This is fucking amazing. I'm bronzing this thread. Paul, buddy, you have gained a goddamn level, and it's the level I never thought you'd gain. I'm fucken proud of you, pal. This is .... this is what I always wanted the BBS to be like.
If you thought those were good, I'll give you my tech support story because it's absolutely amazing.
----
I was doing tech support for a dial-up internet provider maybe 25 years ago, when I get a call from another department where someone who wasn't a customer was complaining. People trying to register for our service were calling her from their modems all day, and all night, and she'd even called the police about it. She was getting too many wrong calls for it to be an accident.

What was supposed to happen was people called the "Registration Server" which checked to see if the username they selected was okay. If so, it checked their phone number and handed back the list of local numbers for their area so connecting to the Internet wouldn't be a toll call. Well, our registration server had a number like "1-800-123-4567" (the number is changed to protect both the poor woman and the company). The woman's phone number was something like "701-8001".

Well, clearly these phone numbers have nothing to do with each other, and nobody had been able to figure out why she was getting all these wrong calls. Then it hit me.

If you have call waiting on your phone, you have to dial a code to tell the phone company to disable it on that one call where you're using the modem. The normal "cancel call waiting" code is *70 then a comma to wait over the stutter dial tone, then the number. So, the registration server would normally be called at "*70,18001234567".

But if the person accidentally "corrected" it by losing the asterisk, they'd be dialing "70,18001234567" and that location didn't have overlay area codes, so seven-digit dialing was in effect. As a result, the people who knocked the * off the number - possibly people who didn't have call waiting, didn't know they didn't need the code, and the *70 caused an error in dialing so they took the * off - being dialed were calling 7018001 - the woman's number - and the phone system was ignoring the rest of the digits they dialed.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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Post by pinback »

Hmm. Not bad. Not bad at all.
I don't have to say anything. I'm a doctor, too.

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Flack
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Post by Flack »

That's better than my tech support story, for sure.

I used to sit next to a girl who was... easily tricked. Once we left a sticky note on her desk with a phone number and a note that she missed a call from "Myra Mains." The phone number was for the local funeral home. After demanding to speak to "Myra Mains" for three minutes, the lady at the funeral home felt so bad that she had to explain the prank to her.

That was almost as good as the time she left her desk and we sent her an email inviting her to go see a new band with us... "My Dixie Wrecked." Of course when she came back our boss was in the room and after the girl logged in to her computer she read the email, stood up, and said "My Dixie Wrecked?"
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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Post by pinback »

I don't have to say anything. I'm a doctor, too.

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Tdarcos
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Post by Tdarcos »

My first real job as a programmer goes back to around 1980 or so when I was hired by a woman who ran a combined real-estate brokerage and tax service. As is the case of the shoemaker's children, she had never been able to get her own taxes done on time.

She had an Apple II with a checkbook program written in Basic, that I used for data entry. It kept the six pieces of data: check number, date, amount, payee, and reason.

It would list checks, too, as the 6 items, one per line, then one blank line, about 10 checks per page and the sum of those checks. So, at some point months later, I'm trying to debug a problem. To make it easier to see in order to check, I wrote a private listing program for my own use. It listed each check on one line, check number, date, to, reason, and amount, then did a total on the page. It made it easier for me to catch errors when entering checks.

I'd been using this for a while, Mrs. Rice, my boss, comes out one day, looks at the private listing, says, "How come we're not using this?" And I don't remember what I said, probably on the order of "I didn't know it would be useful?"

Well, anyway, I don't have to be hit over the head with a 2x4, I installed it as the main print routine and we used it ever since.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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Tdarcos
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Post by Tdarcos »

Going back to Mrs. Rice and the Checking Account Manager on the Apple II, one day she comes out with a listing - the new format I developed - a calculator and some written notes.

The total is wrong and the checks don't balance. Through some research I discover the answer. Turns out there are subtle errors in Applesoft Basic floating point routines. So, I write a fix. Since every check is simply a dollar amount with 100 cents, when the check is entered, I convert it from a floating point to an integer by multiplying it by 100. When I need to display it, I effectively divide by 100 and put a fake decimal point in.

So now everything is stored internally as an integer and the error problem goes away.

This error, in a different way, would come back to haunt us years later.
Alan Francis wrote a book containing everything men understand about women. It consisted of 100 blank pages.

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AArdvark
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Post by AArdvark »

Best cocktail story ever. And you tell it with such enthusiasm.



THE
FLOATING POINT INTERGER
AARDVARK

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Post by pinback »

His stories do encourage the drinking of cocktails. Can't say they don't fit the description.
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Post by AArdvark »

So I had this friend of mine, he's dead now, by the name of Kevin. He got a job as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. The thing about the Dead was that they did everything top notch because they sold out anyplace they played. Kevin was the hospitality coordinator for the band. He would go to the venue early in the morning and solve all the on-site logistics issues regarding the food and drinks for the band and related people. The band was doing a week of shows at Madison Square Garden, this was in '86, so all the touring crew got rooms at the Marriott Marquee in Times Square. Kevin got a two bedroom suite on the 16th floor. I went to New York to hang out with him because, you know, free hotel, taxis and food for the AArdvark. Plus his work schedule was pretty light that week once he got everything all set up at the Garden. We would go to MSG around three or four PM and eat dinner (gratis) He'd work or whatever he did and I'd be a backstage groupie and people watch the weirdos. Once the show was over Kevin would wrap up for the night and we'd go out and party. Rinse and repeat.
There was a party at the Ritz that I remember some parts. It was Grateful Dead night and the downstairs bar was packed to the walls with deadheads. Private room upstairs, My first ever Chinese beer, lotsa those beers! I met Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Brent Mydland. Hanging out with those guys was surreal but they were all nice down-to-earth people. We left around three AM. Kevin and I went back to the hotel and dropped Bic lighters out of the hotel window and watched them explode when they hit the courtyard in back. Had to stop after the security guard came out. I don't think I got any sleep for the first two days, just so much going on.

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Flack
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Post by Flack »

Not bad, but it's no "25 cent gum" story.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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