Open Mouth, Insert Foot!

We've all done it. You say something that sounds completely fine in your head but as soon as it is out and you start noticing the stares, you realise you may have just said something completely weird. The popular term for this is Foot-In-Mouth-Syndrome and I thought I would have a look at a few examples found on the internet.

• A woman walked into a store specialising in golf equipment and asked a salesman if she could see his balls. After everyone burst out laughing she realised what she had said and walked out again without saying a word.
• "When I was in high school, I worked as a cashier at a local grocery store. One weekend, at the very end of a ten-hour shift, I was utterly exhausted and partially brain dead. A woman came through buying diapers and baby formula, and as we chatted she confided in me that she had a newborn at home. I, in my brain-dead state, took one look at her still-heavy-with-baby-weight frame and popped off with, "Oh, and another one on the way!" Unfortunately it didn't click until AFTER the words were out of my mouth. I spent the rest of the weekend praying I would never see her again."
•  "Several years ago I used to work alongside my best friend, cooking in a small diner. One day I spotted a pair of rather unattractive older women coming into the restaurant and, finding their appearance amusing I quipped, "Oh look! Fat old ladies in baseball caps!" My friend never said a word, and it wasn't until he went out to speak to the women that I realized I had seen them before. They were my friend's mother and sister."
•  Barista: “Here’s your change… have a nice day.”
  Customer: “You know, you haven’t smiled once.”
  Barista: “Sorry.”
  Customer: “I’m so sick of the attitude of people in the service industry! Is it so hard to give your customers a smile as you’re pouring water through beans? You all are so arrogant, it makes me sick!”
  Barista: *eyes begin to well up*
  Customer: “Why aren’t you smiling?!”
  Barista: “…because my father died last night.”
  (At this point, you could hear a pin drop. The customer was literally glared out of the shop, forgetting her coffee.)
• "I remember, when working as a clerk in a library, telling a young Indian girl she should work hard during the summer and, "get up early to milk the cows." She looked at me and said "We don't eat cows." Then she left, making me feel like a moron."
• "My little brother and I, 6 and 11 at the time, were at the park with my mom walking through some heavily wooded trails. We must have been pretending we were in a jungle or something and my brother and I ran ahead on the trail out of sight from my mom. We came across a very obese couple walking in the other direction and we both smiled at them. At the same moment my mom who is still out of sight yells "Look Out For The Elephants!!" My brother and I froze in shock as they passed up and then turned to watch as my mom came around the corner and the smile on her face turned into a look of horror. Just as she passed them she says very ackwardly "And the giraffes and bears too..."
• "I'm scoring at my son's school cricket match. As is the convention, the other school has a Dad who is also scoring, so that we can both keep the score books in agreement. Turns out he went to the same high school as me, which is odd, because it is not either of the schools that our sons are going to. So we start reminiscing about old teachers, blah blah blah. Before long, we're getting on famously. Later on, while his son's team are batting (and so most of their team is off the field) some young 14 year old girl with too short a skirt and too much make-up comes up to them and behaves in a manner that is far too familiar to be proper. I figure she is a sports groupie hoping to get lucky with a trophy jock. So I say to my new found scoring mate, "Gee, someone's going to go to jail for that little tart." He says "What? My daughter?" An instant hideous painful death would have been a blessing. Because we were stuck with each other's frosty company for the next several hours."

And I decided to end off this post with a story of my own. A video store that I used to frequent upgraded from a card system to a biometric system that reads your finger prints and brings up your account. So the one day I had decided to rent some DVDs and was waiting at the counter for the (female) assistant to tell me when to place my finger on the biometric reader. Unthinkingly I told her "Let me know when you want my finger." She turned beet-red and all of the people in line behind me burst out laughing. And with that comment I officially joined the Foot-in-Mouth Club!