My parents are mad (lighthearted)

My elderly relatives were going to have a water meter installed, so they bought a dishwasher to save on water-usage.

They scrub every single item with running water (no soap) before putting it in the dishwasher! When queried, they say it's to prevent the filter getting blocked, because "it's expensive to replace".

If the filter gets blocked, you just remove it and clean it - I do this a couple of times a year - but they pride themselves on never having had to clean the filter, because no food debris goes into the dishwasher!

Love this thread.
PIL arranged to come and stay (and insist on arriving bang on the time they say they will - I swear they park round the corner and wait) and the night before stayed in a Travelodge situated on a roundabout of a busy intersection 4 miles away and dined in the food hygiene rated 1 Little Chef. We were around, footloose and fancy free with more than enough space to accommodate them for an extra night.
MIL has a G&T every evening at 5. For 30 mins she is delightful then that's it.

My MIL keeps her phone switched off unless she needs to make a call as she thinks she will be charged for having it on

She leaves notes for herself in every room despite us buying her a calender and filo fax every year

She owns some lovely orthopedic shoes as she has fibromyalgia and plantar fascitis yet insists on wearing flipflops and fabric shoes from peacocks and wonders why her feet hurt!

'But DM also has an odd habit of bringing her own sheets and pillow when she comes to stay.'

My mum does this too! "To save you having to wash them."

Lovely lovely mad families

My late dad had a old tennis ball hanging in his garage, carpet and a notch out of the wall . Happy days

Lovely, even!

Little pieces of ear?! Bwahahaaaa!!!!

My livelovelyly old Nana, god bless her soul, was adamant you shouldn't put hot teabags in the bin or it'd catch fire....

My Nanny and dear departed grandad had a set time of day they would go for a walk. So if you turned up at about 3pm you would have to sit in the house whilst my gran used my grandad as a walking aid and they shuffled up the road and then came back again. Every day without fail. They couldn't possibly go before guests were due to arrive!

My mum is a fiend for turning electrical things off at the switch but it's an electricity thing with her. She's also insistent that not one thing I ever owned can be stored in her house, which is fair enough apart from the time she kept a jar of apricot jam and some other food items I once bought for over a year and made me take them back on the train with me. It had gone funny by this point.

"Little pieces of ear" omg, Im dying

like I'd imagine the Queen would in a Onesie.

This mental image makes me very very happy.

There's more.
My mum spent the past 18 months wearing her hearing aid upside down. She was puzzled as to why it was so uncomfortable.

She won't use a computer so when she wants to contact anyone, regardless of what it's about, she will write really long winded letters in a very elaborate scrawl on small notepaper. She only ever writes on one side and always starts it with 'To whom it may concern'.

If she's on the phone to a stranger who's female she always calls them 'my love' and tells them what everyone in the family does for a living.

She refuses to wear jeans. I saw her wear them once about twenty years ago and she's never worn them since. She looked really odd and out of place in them, like I'd imagine the Queen would in a Onesie.

Love this thread.
I see your sawn off bed and raise you a small hallway with flooring made from a dismantled wardrobe.

Well more a square than a hallway really, in a Bungalow, as you walk through the front door.
My lovely dad likes to have a bash at DIY and always makes a real mess of things. Our house was bound together by his favourite tool - masking tape -when I was growing up.
He decided to chuck away the grubby hall carpet and had dismantled the built in wardrobe as they'd bought new bedroom furniture. He decided to place the wood down on the floor. The first I knew about it was when I went through the front door and thought the floor felt weird. Sort of springy and slidey. He was very proud of it.

They have a mobile phone. They remember to take it with them but they never switch it on.

They Skype their friend in Spain and talk really loudly to her asking her repeatedly if she can hear them. The first time they used it my mum made my dad hold one of the leads above his head like a television Ariel so 'the picture would be clearer.'

SO funny. I have just watched my dad (77) walking around outside in his socks because he 'didn't want to dirty his shoes'. He also insists on emailing everything in ZIP files (like WTF)

When I go to their house, I have to watch what they want on TV, and when they come to mine I STILL have to watch what THEY want on TV. Usually this thing where people buy containers full of stuff and have no clue what's in it. Anyone else have this?

My gran made my grandad wear white gloves around the house 'so he didn't get dirty marks on the furniture'. My grandad retaliated in eccentricty by cutting holes in the toes of new slippers 'to make them more comfortable'.

My mother is convinced that ear piercing is barbaric and that the places that do it must be full of 'little pieces of ear'.

I'll see your silence for Midsomer Murders and raise you my DF, who insists on perfect, reverential silence for the shipping forecast.

He lives in a city, miles from the sea, and doesn't own a boat or sail.

Hiding the TV remote from burglars is also genius. DH thinks I'm mad at the best of times (because I do things like hide the laptop out of view of the front window when we go out, etc) so might try this one and see how he reacts.

Pacific my darling grandad had a pompom hanging in the garage for exactly the same reason! Had forgotten all about it until now.

disrespectful to the tiler

This one might out me. My DM, Dsis and I once went on a weekend away to Paris. DM started packing about 2 weeks before we went, and called me to ask if I thought she should bring the iron with her

I told her that we were staying in a nice hotel, so if she was desperate to iron something she could borrow theirs. "But I've got a travel one...it's no trouble to bring it..." I just nodded along in the end.

Re. the same trip, my paranoid Ddad told us we must be careful with our things, and not to wear backpacks, and keep everything zipped up at ALL TIMES because Paris is full of pickpockets and not safe, and we'd be robbed blind if we dared to relax for a second. The fact that I live in London, my Dsis often visits and my DM works there on a daily basis, and all 3 of us are pretty street savvy, apparently bore no relevance in a foreign country.

Barking.

This is a wonderful thread! There did used to be public information films about closing doors at night to contain fires (lifesaving, especially before smoke alarms) , unplugging appliances, etc. My mum was a terror for this. If she didn't want me to be playing my records (vinyl) she'd just pull the plug out, so the stylus would grind into the disc. Cue teenage tantrum from me!
My dh will leave all internal doors open, all lights on, external doors wide open, until he sits down for the evening, then the front door gets locked (rarely the back door, tho!)
I dread to think what my kids would say about me!

LOL at LOL

My favorite though is SecretWitch's mother's t-shirt wearing dog. "It's Better in the Bahamas." Howled at that.

I had to explain to my mother that texting "sorry to hear about your loss xx LOL" wasn't appropriate. She was adamant it meant lots of love

Could be worse cashpoint mine once took out her TV remote instead of her phone in the days of the mobile brick.

I bought my Mother a twin cordless phone so that she didn't have to either try to get downstairs or run down the room when the phone rang.

I took her to an optician's appointment and arranged to pick her up about an hour later. When I went back to collect her, the Manager was obviously trying very hard not to laugh.

I found out why when we got back to the car and she complained bitterly that her new 'mobile phone' didn't work properly as she hadn't been able to phone me from the Optician's to tell me she was finished early.

ipswichwitch my mother and your father both believe the shower tile myth.

I only discovered this last year when DM was abroad and my boiler broke. I sent her a text saying that I was going to use her shower as we had no hot water.

A frantic flurry of replies arrived saying that was fine but giving me detailed instructions on how to use the squeegee and various four clothes to thoroughly dry the tiles afterwards. There were a whole sequence of steps and she also said that if I held the shower head in my hand and crouched it would help prevent the tiles getting too wet.

When we picked her up after her holiday the first thing she asked was 'did you dry my tiles properly' and when we took her home she rushed in to check them.

I am obviously a slattern as I let my tiles get wet and don't spend ages lovingly during them