In pre-cellphone days, I was using one of those guest phones in a long bank of phones in a hotel. I had the privilege of hearing my phone neighbor, after a lengthy listen, demand loudly: “Well, but did you get the dead skunks OUT of the bedroom?”

I paused a little, hoping for enlightenment, but none came. So I am still wondering.

The apartment complex behind me often has some very loud and obnoxious tenants who are often outside on their phones. One time I overheard some woman say “I know you have always wanted to fuck my sister”. Man did I burst out laughing.

Prosecutor and public defender outside a courtroom:

Prosecutor: “You sandbagged me with that motion! Not one fucking word to me before!”

Defender: “Look, you closed all your arguments before you proved anything. My client is entitled to dismissal, & the judge thought so too.”

P: “Wait till I tell your wife what an asshole you are.”

D: “Fine. But don’t choke if she asks you for proof.”

@JLoon

Wow, I’d sure like to have my case assigned to that public defender!

Great question. I’m having a hard time remembering many, but there have of course been quite a few.

There was the mother yelling at her child about some authority issue that the mother clearly had no actual power over (especially over a phone call) and was rapidly undermining her own position and demonstrating her cluelessness. I don’t remember the words now.

There was the woman in a store speaking in a loud voice about someone with a disturbed homeless child who had thrown themselves off a roof.

I’ve probably had some phone conversations in public that sounded rather weird to anyone who could overhear them, too, especially ones about game topics that people might not get were about games.

In a barber shop once: A young teen girl in my community had been killed in a car wreck, and it was determined by State Troopers during the on scene investigation that she had been texting and driving. One guy in the chair next to me made a remark, that he knew the girl’s family, and she had been ticketed for doing that before, but they had told him the Trooper in question, and mentioned him by name, was a dick. Another guy who had been reading a magazine in the waiting section, announced to the whole shop, that “I am the dick you just mentioned. And maybe if she had taken that ticket to heart, she’d still be alive today!” Crickets chirping.

Back in my work days, my coworker and I would have random, crude conversations when standing in an elevator with people we didn’t know.
Things like “I don’t care if it’s contagious! I am tired of staying in my room!”

I remember coming home on the train and hearing one guy shouting on the phone to his little kid, “Tell Mommy I’m on the train. Tell Mommy I’m on the train. Did you hear me?” Suddenly a voice piped up from the back of the train, “We all heard you!!”

In 1997 my air phone picked up a dude taking a pee. Then he called his girlfriend. I could hear everything. Even before he dialed.

You can hear phone calls on old tvs on UHF channels.

It isn’t weird but I thought it was funny when an nine year old kid walking up Sauchiehall Street with his grandfather said “Aw Granpaw, it’s OK for you, you’re used to walking”.

I overheard two guys standing on the other side of a hardware aisle. One said he had personally been responsible for getting rid of a bunch of n-word simply by buying a gun every few weeks and leaving it in a vacant lot. “They use on their own kind”. It was very creepy.

^Wow. That is truly crazy.

Not a phone call. But your details made me remember staying at a hostel in Munich. You were responsible for washing your own sheets for the duration of your stay.

The guy in the bunk next to me must have been staying there for awhile. And probably never washed his sheets. During the day, you could literally see small bugs crawling on his bed.

And every night he’d be hooking up with a different girl. Which, normally, I’d say more power to him. But the idea of those bugs crawling over all of them made me want to hurl.