I know not what would pass as an acceptable cocktail party story. But I've got everything from the trip to NYC at 16 going to sleep with 5 people in the room and waking up with about 25 to 30...

to... co workers trying to retain customers cancelling cable because it "was going to cause the apocalypse" how does one retain against the apocalypse? Good question.

To Scaring the bejesus out of grown men when I worked at Halloween Express for my 6 month stint in Ohio.

To the Den of Teenage sin...

To getting stranded in airports with 3 kids/overnight in DC missing the cruise but continuing on to enjoy NOLA for a week or so.

To arguing with a judge in their own courtroom.

To describing the REM concert in June 1995 in Toronto when the moon rose full and red and turned purple and blue as it was in across the sky, and Michael Stipe pointing us out for being the only people standing in our section...

To the penis bonus challenge

to accidentally crossing the border into Canada

to some of the crazy f*cked up things my family members have done, like the hitchhiker my dad picked up on the way back from Disney, to having us stay in hotels in Toronto where hookers hung out in the lobby

Or the time my brother kneed a state trooper in a drunken stupor and got away with it

to all the adorable stories about my kids saying things like "mommy don't forget your mepod" or those horrifying moments in parenting when you think "there can't be anymore vomit" but then there is more vomit...

Tdarcos wrote:

pinback wrote:How's that assignment coming along?

What assignment? As far as I know I have nothing I had promised to do for a specific person that I was behind on or had failed to do.

Flack wrote:One of my assignments for school is to come up with a list of 5-10 "cocktail party" stories.

That assignment. You know, the one that was the whole point of this thread.

pinback wrote:How's that assignment coming along?

What assignment? As far as I know I have nothing I had promised to do for a specific person that I was behind on or had failed to do.

How's that assignment coming along?

Continuing with the Checking Account program, it allowed you to sort the records but the sort was terrible, it would take about two minutes per record.

I check out the program, and its sort is horrible, it basically compares the first record to every other and the lowest one gets moved to the top, then repeat. So I'm not even that good and I do a bubble sort and cut the sort time in half. A sort of about 100 records drops to 20 minutes. Yeah, it was still slow but it was a big improvement.

----

After a year or so of using the Apple II to balance her books Mrs. Rice decides to buy an IBM PC Clone. I, of course, being a regular visitor to the University I had a copy of practically every piece of software I could pirate, so I had Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.

Whereas the memory on the Apple II was so small we could only do one month at a time the IBM could handle a whole year all at once. In fact, she originally bought only 256K of memory but I was getting so much done I maxed it out within a week after she bought it and so she bought more memory to boost it to 640K

I discovered how much faster it was when I did a sort in Lotus 1-2-3. I had written a program to convert the data and we used a serial connection to transfer data from the Apple II to the PC since they can't read each others floppies.

So I load up a month's worth of data, which takes 20 minutes to sort on the Apple, and ask Lotus 1-2-3 to sort it. Hit the last key, and about a second later it just comes back, not having done anything. Do it again, same thing. So I do a descending search, and Boom!

I go back into her office. "You know how it takes about 20-25 minutes to sort a month's checks on the Apple?"
"Yeah."
"I just ran a sort on the PC with a month's records loaded into 1-2-3. You know how long it took?"
"No."
"About two seconds."

------------------------------------------
Later on I have to tell this story, in which I spent $20 to find 1c, my boss knew in advance I was going to have to spend $20 or more to find it, and to top it off, we didn't even care about the 1c.

Not bad, but it's no "25 cent gum" story.

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.

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

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



THE
FLOATING POINT INTERGER
AARDVARK

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.

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.

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?"

Hmm. Not bad. Not bad at all.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.