The Eternal Cringe Thread • Page 31

It’s not the same, but what’s also wild is when I see people from high school obviously unknowingly being part pyramid schemes

 

Resurrecting this thread with a story that is hot off the press. My eyes are still filled with tears of laughter.

Had a typical generic as vanilla corporate office training seminar thing today and the presenter was someone very knowledgeable but had absolutely terrible stage presence and clearly did not want to be in front of a room of 15 or so people.

At some point he was explaining a super convoluted process and ended with “and that’s basically how it will be for another few years. So few companies make this so… you know…”.

No one knew what this weird, vague, threatening(?) sentence meant. And his eyes got all wide and he started nodding in a very odd manner.

Someone asked him to clarify what he meant.

“Well, you know, like, it’s ONLY this one company that does that so… you know.”

No one knew.

Guy licks his lips and starts rocking and back and forth nervously.

“We can’t really tell them to make it better or get their shit together” (some lady literally gasped when he said “shit” lmao) “because we can’t really do that. We can’t make them mad because… you know…”.

At this point he holds his arm straight out and starts flexing his hand like he’s grabbing a stress ball.

“What is that?” someone says from behind me.

Still flexing the imaginary stress ball, guys says, “you know, they’re the only ones to do this so you know… ahh, not to be crude but they got us by the balls right? So like, you know, we can’t make them mad! They got us by the balls! Sorry. I can’t think of a different way to phrase that.”

He still has his arm extended, showing us how they will grab us by the balls.

“Oooooooook, thank you Derek, lots of interesting stuff to take away from this!” one of the department leads shouts and jumps from his chair after about 30 seconds of pure silence mixed with quiet wheezing of a few of us trying to not to laugh and a few looks of abject terror as if someone of these people had never heard something worse in their life lmao

 

Tripped and fucked my shit up (thumb knee and phone) bad in front of a bunch of people, including teenagers that I think laughed at me, outside of my local haunt. Like I’m here a few times a week. A few months ago I fainted at the bar (not from drinking, medical issue), I’m about to ban myself.

 

I slipped on ice two weeks ago and cracked my ribs I hope I wasn’t on a ring camera

 

Last winter I slipped on black ice directly in front of a fancy rich house in a fancy rich neighborhood and I fell like a cartoon character - slipped, and had to be totally horizontal and landed totally horizontal with everything hitting the sidewalk at the same time and laid there for 20-30 seconds, shocked I wasn’t in more pain, and because of where I fell I know I was on at least 3-4 Ring cameras if not even fancier shit and I assume those people saved that shit and enjoy it from time to time

 

Yeah this is exactly what happened to me except I’m still in pain 3 weeks later haha oh well

 

I slipped and fell down stairs outside of my apartment like 8-9 years ago and it was like a scene from home alone. Slipped and flew into the air and landed flat on my back. There was a car stopped at the stop sign that sat there for a minute probably laughing and then drove away without asking if I was okay or anything.

 

Being a dumb human there is just something usually inherently funny about seeing someone fall.

I still remember, clear as day, being in a fight with my girlfriend in 9th grade and we were getting ready to ride our bikes somewhere and as she’s chirping at me she tripped over the end of the rain gutter that went across the sidewalk and fell over and I could do nothing but laugh for several minutes. And seeing her get more irate as I tried to hold back laughing just made it that much funnier. Not sure how we didn’t break up that day. I actually have no recollection of any other part of that day, just that we were fighting about something, she fell over a rain gutter, I laughed far too long and too loud and that’s it for the day lol

 

On a Teams work call today with maybe 6-7 other people and a manager from another department asked one of the people on his team to turn his camera on and there is no response but you can see they are on the call.

so there’s dead silence for 10ish or so seconds.

manager asks again and says, “you’re on mute, we can’t hear you” and there’s another 10 seconds of silence before the guy says, “I wasn’t saying anything”.

Manager then repeats the request for him to turn his camera on and the guy says, “make me” and after about 5 seconds of silence I bolt and leave the call lol. No idea what happened after that or what becomes of that guy but holy shit it was awkward as fuck but also kudos on have brass balls to just give no fucks lol


(For some reason some departments require their team to have their camera on for all meetings even if it serves no purpose or they don’t even say anything during the meeting. Thankfully my department doesn’t have that requirement so only 2-3 people on the call had their cameras on making it even more unnecessary to ask/tell them to turn their camera on when half the folks on the call didn’t)

 

I am in a client-facing department in advertising and we have an unspoken rule to always have our cameras on in internal calls (unless we're sickly but still working or making lunch and we typically get ahead of it by saying so in the comments). We also do a lot of presenting, though, and it makes sense to have your camera on to help sell in what you're talking about. A disembodied voice is not going to engage anyone.

That said - be off-camera as much as you can if it truly doesn't matter!

 

I am never on camera unless I have to be. Otherwise I spend the entire meeting being self conscious that I'm on camera and will be literally thinking about it the entire time