Nicknames and admonitions

Sorry that I don't have any photo to go with this topic. I was told that bloggees like purdy pitchers.

Anyway -- as a kid I had a very high pitched voice, and the other kids in the neighborhood nicknamed me "squeaky". Unfortunately, my high voice continued into adulthood, and when I had jobs that required me to be on the phone, persons who didn't know me would respond to me with "Yes ma'am," or "No ma'am". Needless to say this irritated me so that I finally went to a speech therapist to get my pitch down. It worked pretty well unless I got excited, at which point I'd start sounding like a soprano again.

I remember one incident where I was on the phone with someone who kept saying "Yes ma'am," or "No ma'am". So I consciously tried lowering the pitch as I was taught. It worked so well that by the end of the conversation, the other person was saying "Ma'am?"

At home I was Don, unless someone was angry or annoyed with me, in which case it was "DONald!!"

Everyone called Amalie "Am", (as in "the great I am").

Amalie came up with a great nickname for our Cockatiel, Pepper -- Miss Poopsalot. No, she doesn't answer to that.

Admonitions
You are probably aware how some people end their emails -- "Have a good day", "Be good", "Stay well", and the like. Because of my history of falling, what gets said to me is "Don't fall down", or "Stay upright", or -- the latest, "Stay vertical".

Humor:
Too Little, Too Late

A man arrived at the Pearly Gates, waiting to be admitted. St. Peter opened the gate and said, “I’ve been checking your file. I can’t see that you did anything really good in your life, but you never did anything bad either. I’ll tell you what—if you can tell me one really good deed that you did, I’ll admit you.”

So the man answered, “Once I was driving down the road and saw a gang of thugs attaching a poor man along the side of the road. So I pulled over, got out of my car, grabbed a tire iron, and walked straight up to the gang’s leader—a huge, ugly guy with a chain running from his nose to his ear. Undaunted, I ripped the chain out of his ear and smashed him over the head with the tire iron. Then I turned around and, wielding my tire iron, yelled to the rest of them, “You all leave this poor man alone! Go home before I teach you a lesson you’ll never forget!”

Impressed, St. Peter asked, “Really? I can’t seem to find this in your file. When did all this happen?”

"Oh, about two minutes ago.”