Nine times out of ten, the pen you receive to sign the credit slip will not work or not work very well. So you make slash marks to try to get the pen to work better. These odds are increased if you're at a restaurant and want to leave a tip on the slip, i.e. you have to write more onto the to-smooth-t0-write-on-especially-with-a-lousy-pen credit slip paper. I hate that; it frustrates me. If if my meal was only one point below perfect, this causes me to remember it as about ten points below.
We took a bathroom shower stall caddy back to Bed, Bath, and Beyond the other day. It was a $45 thing, but it wouldn't fit because it hung right over the on/off/hot/cold knob. So we took it back. This was an ordeal. It took three people to help us (the original lady at customer service, a manager-type person because she'd initially punched up $45 due instead of refund, and finally a different manager-type person to enable the "credit" on my card). But I also had to re-swipe my credit card, tell the lady my name and phone number, and sign two slips of paper. Each with a pen that didn't work.
What does it mean when somebody says you're full of shit? Does it mean you simply have misinformation, that you are ignorant? Or does it mean that you're being deceptive?
I figured out what the term practical means in the phrase practical joke. All along, for my entire life of hearing that phrase, I thought it meant: a joke worth doing, a joke that you ought to do because it is practical. I'd wondered why a bucket of water sitting on a door ajar would be deemed practical! It only dawned on my last night while reading Edgar Allan Poe's Hop-Frog that it means "practiced" instead of "verbal." I never said I wasn't an idiot, folks.
