This is a hilarious AF story about how the USPS once lost a box of my bugs and had extreme regrets. If you are bug phobic, this is your warning. There’s no photos of the bugs, just the poor mangled box.
Lets begin! Some of you probably remember earlier this year I lost a shipment of dubias. Since I was busy working with the seller on what the heck to do about that I forgot to ever post the full story. It’s great, I promise.
In Jan I ordered a shipment of dubias like usual, and it’s normally only 2 days to get here. By the 4th day in the mail I’m wondering what is the hold up, but also figure hey, holiday rush is still on, no biggie. Now, these only have to go from Kansas to Oklahoma, so when I pull up the tracking info I’m surprised to find they detoured to Cali. No biggie they’ll be a little late until the box totally disappeared.
There was suddenly no tracking info available for this package, it vanished into the postal system along with my 200 dubia. After a week of live bugs being in the mail I’ve given them up as unlikely to arrive alive. By the 2nd week I’ve accepted they are never coming home. This is where I am wrong.
I get a mystery package, not that unusual honestly. But the damaged notice? Now that was odd indeed! Opening the box was pretty crazy too:
Weird a garbage bag? WAIT A FAMILIAR GREEN STICKER!
By George it’s those lost dubia, poor bastards. Now at this point I should have known something was up, I mean why bags? Why 2 bags? But the only thing I can do is sit here and look at this poor destroyed box.
THOROUGHLY destroyed might I add. Also very slightly soggy? It was raining in Cali at the time it was there though, this makes some sense. Likely got left out somewhere. But wow it sure got a number done to it!
Now I’ll have to make a note here, the company I buy from does 2 things that are highly relevant here. Firstly, they send a small deli cup of food for your bugs with every shipment. Secondly, they also put a smaller box inside the larger one that contains the bugs.
Dubia food: busted open and missing. Inner box: OPEN. Bugs: ALIVE but half are missing
SUDDENLY THE BAGS MAKE SENSE. SUDDENLY I REALIZE SOMEWHERE A POSTAL WORKER HAD A BOX LEAKING DUBIAS ALL OVER THEIR POST. I LAUGHED SO HARD I CRIED.
OH MY GOD so an urban legend nearly happened to me at work today, I’m not even kidding.
SO I took my class ice skating for their first ever session and was having a whale of a time trying to persuade a student with ASD to let go of my jacket, and then I see a line of kids go down like freaking dominoes. One flails and knocks the girl next to him over, she butts another on the way down and then he wipes out two more. So that’s pretty funny, until someone starts screaming. They all struggle to their feet and one has her hand aloft like she’s victorious, celebrating the downfall of her friends and then I realize oh dear god she is bleeding and she is bleeding a lot.
I abandon my ASD friend, leaving him with the one already-competent skater in my class and hurtle over the the dominoes. The girl is still holding her hand up and it’s just bleeding everywhere, all down her arm and onto the ice. The coach looks like she’s trying not to swear and quickly says to me “please can you get her off the ice.” It’s worth noting that the screaming is still happening, though the girl who is bleeding everywhere is not the one screaming. She’s just looking at her hand in mild surprise, like “oh dear, all of my blood is evacuating via my fingers.”
So I grab her wrist and haul it up above her head and skate the fuck off the ice with girl in tow. By this point some bright spark is yelling “SHE’S LOST A FINGER,” and my entire class is freaking out. ASD boy gives up and lies on the ice with his legs and arms in the air like a distressed turtle. The rest of them just form a sort of perimeter around him, one of them happily explaining to the coach that yeah, he does this a lot, he’ll get up in a moment.
I take the girl off the ice to the medical room. By this point the ice looks like a massacre has happened, her jumper and leggings are wrecked, my jacket is doomed and both of our skates are covered. When we get her into the medical room I find that she’s still got all of her fingers (I did at one point think omg how do I explain to her mum that her kid is coming back missing a finger) but there is a huge gaping slice down one finger – i won’t go into any more detail apart from to say it was fucking gross. The medic immediately goes for adding pressure, so he’s gripping her finger while holding it up above her head and I have to ring school and ask what the procedure is when a child in my care has been maimed.
Half an hour later, the bleeding has stopped, the ice has been cleaned, her mum is on the way to pick her up and take her to have it stitched up, and the kid is still super chill. I’m not kidding, there was no screaming, no crying, not even a complaint. All she said was “it hurts a little but, less than shutting my toe in the door.”
I, on the other hand, am traumatized forever. And I broke a nail getting her skates off when she couldn’t do it one handed.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
Reblogged just for Medea
when i was little my family went to denmark on holiday and since norwegian and danish are very similar we would just use norwegian but one morning my mom went to a bakery next to our room and asked if they had buns in norwegian only the word for bun in norwegian means fucked in danish so she asked the girl behind the counter if she had fucked
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