Helmut Feels Your Pain

So my (now wife, then) fiancée and I are visiting my uncle near Cochrane, Alberta. My wife has never been into the mountains before, so we borrow the truck and head out to Banff for the afternoon. We're driving along listening to the radio when an ad comes on.

Actually, I thought it was some kind of comedy bit, but my wife says it was an ad, and she has a better memory for these kinds of things.

So this ad comes on. I can't remember what the product was, but it's this guy named Helmut, doing a bad Austrian accent, Hans and Frans style. He's a bodybuilder and he's talking about how he never got any respect until he bulked up, beat the crap out of the guys who made fun of him, and got the girl. So it's pretty funny and we're already laughing out loud when he says, "Do you feel small? No one respects you? Well Helmut feels your pain! Helmut remembers when he was so wimpy, he couldn't even lift his car." At this point we're pretty much rolling on the floor laughing. I'm literally wiping the tears out of my eyes so I can keep driving. Maybe you had to be there, but, at the time, it was damn funny.

For the next couple of weeks we're doing 'Helmut' constantly. That was years ago, but that one phrase really stuck with me. Whenever someone says something that I can really relate to, I'll say it, and, like as not, I'll get a weird look. (Yeah, I get a lot of weird looks.)

That's the story. So hopefully, every once in a while, I'll write a post, and you'll read it, and you'll really relate to it, and then you'll say, "Helmut feels your pain."