I think we need another light thread during this time of madness. Anyway, something made me think of my days as an auto mechanic and a few memories of hilarity that occurred came back to me. In one it was winter time and I was working in a really poorly lit shop and a dude came in with a Ford Tempo with the exhaust system mangled and a fresh yellow stripe from approximately front to back on the bottom. I asked him if he ran over a median and he replied “Hit a possum”. I immediately called one of my co-workers over and he looked at the car and says “What?” in kind of an annoyed tone, so I just said “Possum” and he shot right back with “Yeah, everything starts looking like a possum after 5 shots of Jack Daniels” and walked away. Customer did not react at all and we did not book the job. But I think it was worth it.
Another time, different shop we had a kid from one of the auto mechanic programs in the area doing an apprenticeship and my boss had him run across the shop with a white plastic garbage bag to get an air sample and take it to the complex manager’s office. Watching him run across the shop was hilarious. He took it down there and the complex manager wrote a big F on the bag and told him to bring it back. Kid felt really dumb but he took it ok.
A lot of funny shit went on in the shops I worked at. It was pretty fun most of the time. I set myself on fire once and nobody stopped working. I had dropped a large blob of molten welding rod down my sleeve in a moment of “I’m quick enough to get out the way” hubris and it landed on my arm just above the inside of my left elbow. It was a beautiful yellow-red teardrop when it fell. Smoke immediately poured out of my sleeve and my co-workers could not have given less of a shit. That might be the most pain I endured as an auto mechanic. It hurt more than having to pop my shoulder back into its socket. Still have all my fingers though.
These guys get lost in the shuffle of Citations Needed, but Citation Needed is a really fun podcast that brings both the chuckles and the interesting info, and they need more love.
One thing to note, the guys who run the show have been podcasting for 4 different shows for almost a decade now (separate shows, Tom and Cecil do Cognitive Dissonance, and Noah, Heath and Eli do Scathing Atheist, Skepticrat, and God Awful Movies) so some of the funny stuff are callbacks/inside jokes to things in their long podcasting history (see Eli’s obsession with Jon Benet Ramsey.)
Anyway, Citation Needed came out well before Citations Needed, and since the latter has become such a big hit in the political sphere, I thought it would be good to get some awareness out about the former for those interested.
Thinking of more funny shit from my auto mechanic days. I worked with a coupe of guys with “little man” syndrome. I liked both of them well enough. They both probably could have been normal with therapy. We had really high turnover and were recruiting from the local automotive training schools and we got a young Chinese guy named Ken. He was barely 21 iirc, super quiet and purposefully making it ambiguous as to whether he spoke English or not. I have had extensive experience with Chinese people and could tell he understood everything that we were saying very well. He didn’t have swearing down yet and once told me that I have very large nose holes. He knew all the curse words but the sequence was off. He could swear a blue streak in just a few months. So “little man” always marks his territory by talking down to the newb and bossing them around a bit and Ken had his shirt unbuttoned two or three down. Little man got after him with some “We got an image to uphold” bullshit and told him to button it up. I was amused and watching and Ken and I made I eye contact and he started buttoning up and leaned over little man and the first words I ever heard him say were “You got a bow tie for me too man?” He was a blast to work with.
We also had access to very exciting blends of gasses. I made an acetylene cannon at one shop and we would shoot tennis balls out of it. They turned into little black dots in the sky and we could reach the Mercedes Benz dealership a block away with it. I would set it off without warning anyone sometimes and little man jumped a foot in the air every time.
A really pretty 6-foot tall redhead dropped her car off with us and needed a ride back to work and little man was all over it. Opening and closing car doors and shit. He’s like 5’5, maybe 5’6 and she towered over him. I was in office when she came back to get her car and she told my boss “I think Marty likes to climb trees”. It was hilarious.
I was writing up an estimate for a woman and saw her staring at Ken’s car. There were a bunch of Hello Kitty dolls lined up in back window of his low end Infinity. I fed Ken shit about them and he told me the Asian girls go crazy for them. I told her that she was looking at a guys car and she was floored. Ken had a GF at the time who wouldn’t commit to anything serious until he was making $75K a year. I told him to dump her in the meanest way possible. Like take her somewhere and ditch her there.
Watching Marc Maron on Netflix and thinking about times I saw comedy shows in the 90’s. Most were really funny, but one opener was really awful. She called herself Glitter and looked like Brett Butler. I would not be shocked at all to learn that it was her. Anyway, she was awful. Literally not a single laugh from the start. She got a guy up on stage and put him over her knee and started spanking him. It lasted forever. I was seated against the wall maybe 5 or 6 tables from the stage. Far enough that she didn’t hear me throw myself against the wall and ask nobody in particular “How long does this go on for?”. The waitress taking orders at the next table turned around and pointed at me and said “I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve been here all week!”. 20 people burst out laughing and I looked at Glitter and she had her hand up trying to block the lights to see what was happening. Only laugh of her show. At the end of the night the MC comes out and asks the crowd to give a round of applause and Glitter got none. Dude said something like “Harsh” and moved on to the next comic. I still feel bad for her.