Foot in mouth (again)
October 20th, 2006 at 01:10
I went to the pub with Michael after work on Wednesday night. We’ve had a bit of a pool rivalry going on, as of late, in that I keep thrashing him, and he keeps getting increasingly annoyed with the flukeyness of my incredible victories.
When we got to the pub, it turned out that none of the three pool tables were free- so we stood around trying to look as if we wanted a go, hoping that someone would surrender a table to us. Confronted by this problem, we came up with a solution.
After it turned out that neither of us dare break the fire alarm, we decided to challenge one of the tables to a game of doubles- we’d get to play pool that way, even if we did have to share the table with two other proles.
Now, this may seem like a relatively simple thing to do, but longtime blog readers might know that I seem to have something of a problem with getting my foot jammed into my mouth.
There were two women playing pool on the table at the end- as you might expect, they were rubbish. They didn’t seem to have any concepts of geometry or force- it’s almost as if they’d never played Maths Gorilla.
“Hello. I see you’re crap at pool… want to play doubles?”, I asked.
“No, not now that you’ve offended me!”, I was told. Whoops.
Needless to say, we had to wait quite a while longer until a table became free. The two women on the end table just kept playing, over and over- presumably to spite me now that I’d pissed them off.
Eventually another table became free, where I proceeded to kick Michael’s arse. Then play pool. Cough. After one fantastic victory of mine, Michael got so angry he picked up the blackball before it had even sunk into the pocket and chucked it across the table in a violent manner. The only other thing I’ve seen him get so passionately worked up about in the past is socialism and why the revolution “definately will happen soon”. Clearly this pseudo-sport means a lot to him.
As time wore on and I slowly realised that for all of my bravado and shouting swear words, I wasn’t actually that good at pool myself. Feeling vaguely guilty, I went back over to the women I’d annoyed and said as sincerely as I could “I’d like to retract my comments from earlier”.
“We’re girls, we’re supposed to be rubbish”, they said. I mean, they didn’t both say it in unison- only one of them did. But I don’t actually know either of them so can’t use names, nor is the fact that they’re multiple people vital to this story.
“Ah, okay”, I replied, “in that case… feel free to insult my…” I then wracked my brain for an appropiate way to finish the sentence. Even when I did think of an appropiate way to finish the sentence, I still said “feel free to insult my ironing skills“.
Yeah, it didn’t go down that well, unsurprisingly.
In writing this blog entry, Michael insists that I publish the following paragraph, or he won’t let me name him – which would make writing it rather awkward. So here is a paragaraph I have written of my own free will…
“I would however readily acknowledge that Michael is a far superior pool player to me and any victory I get is just a quirk of statistical likelihood and based on fortune, rather than any superior ability on my part. In fact, Michael is the best pool player I have ever seen. In fact I would even say the best human.“
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