Three Facepalm Anecdotes

And now, for no real reason, here are three unrelated anecdotes that rendered me dumbfounded.

#1 - I'm riding a Bolt Bus from New York to DC. It's a full bus, and there's a guy about my age sitting next to me. He is asleep for almost the entire trip. The bus stops in downtown Baltimore, where the bus driver tells the passengers that the trip will begin again in ten minutes. My seat-mate gets off the bus to smoke a cigarette: I can see him smoking out the window. He finishes the cigarette and boards the bus, which soon resumes its trip to DC. Immediately, he falls asleep again. About an hour later, the bus is in downtown DC, making its way towards Chinatown. My seat-mate wakes up and groggily looks out the window. I notice a concerned look on his face, which soon turns to panic. For the first time on the trip, he turns to me.

"Are we in Baltimore?" he asks.
"No," I say, after a brief hesitation, "We're in DC."
"I thought this bus was going to Baltimore."
"It did," I said, and then, because I couldn't resist: "You got out there to smoke a cigarette."

And there you have it: the man who missed his bus-stop - one of only two stops on the route - despite exiting the bus at his stop to smoke a cigarette. I assume that after he realized his mistake, he eventually took a train from Union Station back to Baltimore - although with his navigational skills, there is no guarantee he isn't still riding the train to this day, Charlie on the MTA style.

#2 - It's probably bad form to tell a story in which one of my former students is the butt of the joke. But this happened a long time ago, at a different school, and I actually liked the kid. And also, it's just too good not to share.

I handed essays back to my students one day. Rather than writing letter grades on the last page, I had written corresponding number grades: 92/100, 90/100, 88/100, etc. To a girl in the front row, I handed back a paper marked 88/100. For a moment, she looked at the grade, furrowing her brow to try to make sense of it. And then, she got our her calculator and typed in 88 / 100 =. Predictably enough, 88 came up on the screen. She smiled to herself and deposited the paper in her English folder, pleased with her 88.

Fortunately for her, the essay didn't assess basic understanding of percentages. And just as fortunately, I didn't pass this on to her math teacher.

#3 - If you or I wanted to take food out of a microwave before it was finished microwaving, we would most likely either press the "Clear" button and open the door, or else, just open the door. But in college, I knew a girl who had a mind-bogglingly strange way of turning off the microwave. She was observed punching in: TIME --> COOK --> 0:00 --> START. As it turns out, this convoluted method will actually turn off a microwave. But... why?

She was baffled when we brought it to her attention there was in fact another, simpler way of turning off a microwave. Whether or not she changed her method from that point on, I have no idea.

No Gratitude for Magyver

Today at the zoo, we witnessed a little girl accidentally drop her portable water bottle into the rhinoceros pen. Immediately, the girl was inconsolable, even though her mother kept assuring her that it wasn't worth shedding tears over. Everyone in her family tried to reach through the bars of the fence to retrieve it, but it was just out of their grasp. (The bottle was nowhere near the animals, and there was no possibility of a person getting through the fence, so no danger.) They had given up and were about to notify the zookeeper, when I pointed out that they could fashion a hook out of a removable piece from their stroller. (I knew it was removable because we have the same stroller.) The grandpa took my suggestion, and sure enough, it worked.

The rhino isn't really the point of this story, but for what it's worth, it's my favorite part of the Baltimore zoo.
Also, a thumbnail of a rhino is an attention grabber.

Once the bottle was safe and sound, the family unanimously declared that Grandpa had saved the day. "Way to go, Grandpa!" "Our hero!" The little girl stopped crying and gave him a big hug. Someone even compared him to Magyver, for solving this difficult technical problem. Which seemed like a slap in the face, since all he'd done was what I told him to do. Meanwhile, no one said a word to me - not even a word of acknowledgment, much less thanks.

Of course, a good deed should be its own reward, but I was a little annoyed anyway. It was such an otherwise-satisfying moment of ingenuity (if I do say so myself), and, for this predominantly right-brained thinker, kind of a rare one. Plus, some basic gratitude feels nice - even if you're just holding a door, or letting another car in on a busy street.

It's more than a little shameless to openly fish for accolades in reaction to a relatively trivial moment that no one even witnessed, other than my wife and almost-two-year-old twins (who seemed indifferent). But hey, I'm not above accepting them. I'm still pretty proud of myself.