Five Things You Learned From Unintentional Eavesdropping

[WayneLigon]

I read quite a lot in public places, usually when I'm at lunch or have gone out to dinner. I don't have my nosed buried in the thing but apparently any book creates an invisible field around itself that convinces people in the surrounding booths that I am, in fact, deaf.

Last night I wasn't feeling well so I decide to treat myself and go to a nice local steakhouse for dinner. I get my salad and settle down to continue the second volume of The Reality Dysfunction when four people sit down in the booth behind me. They have to walk past me, so in glancing I see they're either senior high-schoolers just out for the summer, or early college-aged people. Three men, one woman. They proceed to converse among themselves as people are wont to do but since it's a Monday night the place is not very full and their voices... carry quite easily, as they aren't being particularly careful to keep it down. Not really annoyingly so, but certainly loud enough for me to easily hear almost everything that comes out of their mouths for the next hour if I had been so minded.

My attention is on Captain Joshua and the tangled web of circumstances surrounding him but every now and again, keywords from the booth behind me cause me to focus my attention that direction.

From this, I learn several fascinating things I never knew before.

1. Drinking four glasses of water will lower your blood sugar from 460 to under 200 and thus gets riid of the need to take your diabetes injection. And you can have pie.
2. The first part of all SSN's must have at least one odd number in them so nobody will ever get '666'.
3. Girl Y's full SSN.

I didn't get to a full five, but I'm sure the rest of you have done better.

 

[JimAde]

Only one thing, but it was important.

My wife once had an asthma attack while we were visiting friends out of state. We wound up in the local emergency room and saw a bunch of "girls" (high school or college-age) drag in a male friend who was barely coherent. All of them were quite drunk (I shudder to think who was driving). Apparently the guy had passed out and they dragged him down a flight of stairs, bumping his head quite badly. As the nurse was interviewing him in the next curtained bed, we heard this exchange:

Nurse: What were you drinking tonight?
Guy (after several repetitions of the question): Beer, just beer.
Nurse: Any drugs?
Guy: No!
Nurse: How many beers did you have?
Guy: I don't know. One or two.
Nurse: (skeptically) Really?
Guy: Yeah. I guess it mixed badly with the Prozac.

So I learned not to mix alcohol with serotonin reuptake inhibitors LIKE IT SAYS ON THE LABEL!

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

1. Drinking four glasses of water will lower your blood sugar from 460 to under 200 and thus gets riid of the need to take your diabetes injection. And you can have pie.

I've learned to not believe everything that you hear when eavesdropping. That one is a load of bunk and could lead to someone getting in serious trouble.

I've learned a lot of things about people in adjacent cubicles that I really wish I could scrub from my brain...I'll spare you those details.

 

[WayneLigon]

I've learned to not believe everything that you hear when eavesdropping. That one is a load of bunk and could lead to someone getting in serious trouble.

That's the point of the Humor flag; I was being sarcastic, in that nothing they said was in any way anything one should 'learn'. These were some of the A-Number-One stupidest people I've ever had the pleasure to sit by. There was a lot more diabetes talk (my Mom was diagnosed diabetic near the end of her life and we both got a crash course in how to care for a diabetic, etc, but I certainly don't pretend to know everything abou it) and all of it was wrong as far as I could tell. There was more high stupidity but I've forgotten most of it; I should have posted last night wnen things were fresher.

 

[reveal]

This reminds me of a Lewis Black routine:

I was sitting in an International House of Pancakes and the woman behind me said "If it weren't for my horse, I never would have finished that last year in college."

 

[der_kluge]

1. Drinking four glasses of water will lower your blood sugar from 460 to under 200 and thus gets riid of the need to take your diabetes injection. And you can have pie.

1. 
   
   This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
   
   And people wonder why they have to get their feet amputated, and they go blind because of diabetes. Manage it, people!!!!

 

[Xath]

All I ever get from eavesdropping is alot of work related gossip. I've also learned quite a bit about astrology.

 

[Crothian]

I learned my neigbhor gets the crap beat out of her and that she in turn beats the crap out of the guy beats the crap out of her

 

[Xath]

I learned my neigbhor gets the crap beat out of her and that she in turn beats the crap out of the guy beats the crap out of her

....interesting neighbors...

Are you in an apartment or townhome? Or can you actually hear this from across a strip of grass?

 

[Crothian]

....interesting neighbors...

Are you in an apartment or townhome? Or can you actually hear this from across a strip of grass?

Apartment, she used to sit below my window and talk on the phone late at night after the bf passed out from drinking. I learned a lot during the months it was nice enough to have my windows opened.