AskReaders: What’s your good/awkward/funny story you’ve always wanted to share?

21-25 Good/Awkward/Funny Stories

21. I once dropped my pants when going through TSA. For those who fly in the super early morning it can be rough. I purposely didn’t drink coffee so I could sleep on the plane.

I was on the security line, and did the normal routine of taking stuff out of my pockets and putting them in my laptop bag. Then off with the shoes, placed on top of my luggage, then off comes the belt as usual. Then of course when you take off your belt you take off your pants… uhhh Nope damnit. Put them back on and WTFed for a moment as I finished up in security. Luckily not that many people fly at like 0430am.

22. About a year ago, I fu*ked up by showing my dad Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I downloaded it for him and put it on a USB so he could watch it when he had some downtime. So he watched it a few days later and when I got back in, I asked him what he thought.

“Really good, but quite confusing at times though, took quite a bit of effort to understand the direction but it wasn’t impossible.” I knew something wasn’t quite right. My dad is an intelligent man – he should be understanding this film with no problems whatsoever. I projected my disbelief to him -“The plot is good, it’s a good film! I don’t know how that wasn’t apparent to you?!”

He replied: “It was just quite unclear at times with the dialogue, the script was definitely lacking, which was a shame because it could have been really good!” I was still heavily confused – most people who have seen this film would agree it’s engaging and exciting. I could not see what the problem was. I took the USB stick back and plugged it into my laptop and I decided to watch it again for the hell of it.

Then I realized. The download didn’t have hardcoded subtitles.

23. I was due to attend a university for a guided tour and interview and we were allowed to bring a guest with us. I decided to bring my dad because he’s a fun guy to make the trip with and thought he might be interested in looking around.

So I’m filling out all the details on the online booking form and it asks “Who will be attending with you?”. Now here’s the fuckup, rather than typing in my dad’s name, I enter ” My Father”. Clearly I was thinking a tad too literally.

So I forget about this for a few weeks and we finally end up going. When we get there, they are calling out names and handing out visitor badges in pairs, one for prospective students and one for their guests. I receive my pair of badges, one with my name on and the other simply with the words “My Father” on. I show my dad, hoping he’ll laugh it off and I can go explain and get a different name badge but instead he insists on wearing the badge all day, kindly explaining to everyone how stupid I was.

24. In 2007, I was 16 and had been training Kung Fu and Krav Maga for about 2 years. My instructor told me I had a gift and to never use my deadly techniques unless it was a life or death situation. I fed off his praise and continued paying the $19.99 monthly fees while believing I was some kind of Caucasian Jet Li.

Around this time the UFC began to become very popular in New Zealand and everyone was talking about ex-middleweight champion Anderson Silva. Being the martial arts master I was, I decided to rent some UFC DVD’s and analyze his technique. His flawless victories were simply not impressive to my delusional 16 year old brain. I thoroughly believed I knew how to dismantle him or basically any MMA fighter for that matter.

I began boasting around school and to my girlfriend that I was going to be the next big thing in MMA and that I was going to leave school to commence my career as a certified badass. I basically quit school for a month to practice Kung Fu in my garage in addition to the 5-7 pm class at the rec center.

Following the most cringy montage imaginable, the opportunity to crush my adversaries came with an amateur MMA fight at a warehouse bar in South Auckland. I was unaware at the time but this was actually a Maori gangster clubhouse which hosted incredibly illegal promotions for anyone ballsy enough to fight for the $500 cash prize. My friends older brother who was a gang member got me a spot and basically told me he’d murder me if I didn’t show up.. like he stood a chance.

Fast forward to fight night, I show up with my girlfriend and high school posse for support. The club looked like something out of a movie, leather jacket wearing thugs everywhere and a makeshift arena dead center. The nerves sunk in but I remembered what my electrician / part time Kung Fu master told me about fear and sucked it up. Before my fight, two huge guys were literally pulverizing each other bare knuckle until once collapsed into a mutilated heap onto the canvas. Then came my time to shine. I was announced as a Kung Fu fighter nick-named ‘The Soul Eater’ and was escorted into the ring. My opponent was in his mid-twenties, tall, muscular and well, actually a fighter.

Needless to say my flying neck chop didn’t bring me home the cheddar and I was hospitalized with a fractured jaw, orbital and bruised rib. Worst part is I had to go back to school where everyone had some incredibly low resolution mobile footage of me getting rag dolled by an angry Maori.

And that there was the start and end of my fighting career.

25. For the last decade or so, I have been trying all the great Chinese restaurants I can locate, in an attempt to find a place that is as awesome as the one I fell in love with 25 years ago in college. Over these years I’ve been going to every different kind of Chinese restaurant I could find, trying to find something as delicious as what made me fall in love in the first place. I kept track of the different types of sauces, tried to learn how to cook it myself from recipes, and even recently took a Chinese food cooking lesson.

Every time a fancy new Chinese restaurant opened I would be there to taste the food, going from restaurant to restaurant like Prince Charming went door to door looking for a certain foot.

one day last month, as I was driving down the new street I saw a really crappy looking Chinese place. One of those in the bad part of town that also sells French fries, is all white, and is really just a takeout place. (Even though there are technically two tables in the place one is covered in magazines and the other has three kids under age 6 coloring because they are stuck there).

When I saw this place I said to myself, I said “Fu*k it, I’m never going to find anything great like they used to make it back in ‘my day’ and I’m hungry and lazy so I’ll just get some of this sh*tty Chinese and be done with it.”

When I got home and bit into the first dumpling, my di*k got a little hard because of 25 years of searching I’d finally found the perfect Chinese food I had been searching for. The sauce was just perfect even though it looked so simple… hey wait a minute… the Chinese place I fell in love with in college must have been a cheap Chinese place that only college students went to. Thinking back now, it was in a strip mall next to a Laundromat.

What happened is that over the years, as my income grew, I slowly went to nicer and nicer Chinese restaurants just by default – whatever I could afford — and I eventually got used to the fancy ones that grown-ups with spouses and mortgages go to.

In other words, the reason I couldn’t find what I wanted all these years is that I thought I was searching for the best Chinese food when what I really wanted was that same cheap strip-mall Chinese that I fell in love with so many years ago and was dirt poor.

So in short, “Current me” overestimated “past me” and I spent ten years trying to find something fancier and more expensive than I ever wanted or needed.