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Tag Archives: totally true stories

Traffic rules

Image links to original site. Or you can just stare at this smaller version for awhile.

This reminds me of the time when I was in Wisconsin (yes, during that lovely time period) and I was heading back to the hotel after working second shift with grampaw.  We were looking for dinner.  The exit we had normally been taking (we took pretty much all of them that head to town in order to make our drive more interesting) didn’t lead to a lot of fast food places.  Why fast food?  Because it was late.  Grampaw and I really wanted to just go back to our rooms.  While I’m just fine not eating anything for hours or days on end, grampaw apparently can’t handle that.  Grampaw had McD’s several days in a row at that point and I thought maybe he should vary his diet a little.  We saw an Arby’s and decided to go there.

The interesting thing about that decision was that the Arby’s was on the left side of the road.  It meant that I had to make a left at the light.  Ok, so that’s not really that interesting.  What WAS interesting was/were the light/s.  There were two poles right next to each other facing the same way for the same lane, which was separated from the rest of the lanes with a largish island.  One pole had a light with a straight arrow and one had a light with a left arrow and they operated independently of each other.  The lane they were facing was for what I thought was a left turn only.  Why was there a straight arrow?   There was also a pole right next to the stop line of the left turn lane and it did…something I don’t remember.  The whole situation was weird.  Grampaw was of no help when various lights turned green but others stayed red and I had no idea what it was telling me to do.

I ended up running a red something while it was a green something else.  No clue.  (It might have been easier to figure out what it was telling me to do if it were daylight and if grampaw hadn’t worked two shifts and I hadn’t been jumping shifts all week.)

For the literal minded

As you know (or maybe you don’t), I am a fan of taking things literally. Perhaps too literally. It gives me much amusement.

Perhaps you do not understand why taking things literally is so amusing. Well, how about an example of live translation/transliteration? One time we had a meeting in which we needed live Chinese/English translation. Now then, I really respect people who are able to do live translation. It’s hard stuff. Big props to them.

Ok, fine, just one prop.

But some people are definitely better at it than others. Some people translate (or transliterate) things literally. This provides me with excessive amounts of amusement. Such as the time when someone translated the English name “Gary” into Chinese “咖哩” or “gālí.” Ok yes, they sound decently similar. But the translation of “gālí” is “curry.” The person who was translating basically told all the Chinese-speaking people in the meeting that the person’s name was Curry.

Hello, my name is Curry, and today I’ll be speaking to you about…

I found this SO. INCREDIBLY. FUNNY.

Is one example not enough? How about extremely literal interpretations of design drawings? How about cutting an angle into the stairs because there was a callout leader in the way?

Or how about cutting a revision cloud into the concrete?

Why would you drill a rev cloud into the floor?

Now then, cutting rev clouds into the concrete may be funny, but it could also cause massive amounts of damage. Like…here.

This rev cloud was cut into a water pipe and apparently caused a massive flood at a metro station in Helsinki.

I’m pretty sure that’s real. It seems like a respectable source. I don’t really know because I don’t understand Finnish. But in any case…it’s still EXTREMELY funny.

Why was I looking up rev clouds drilled into concrete? It was a byproduct of what I was really doing. Which was drawing rev clouds on some drawings I was modifying for a customer. I don’t remember what I was looking up exactly, but rev clouds in concrete apparently came up in my search.