I was traveling with one of our sales guys to meet with a new customer who, while not actually mad at us, had some disappointments with our product. I was tagging along because a) I had some deeper product insights and 2) I was *not *a sales guy.
So we’re in this neat little jazz club a couple of hours before they open talking to the manager. She’s polite but reserved, as you might imagine.
We’re at this tall table in the bar and she suddenly realizes we’re all standing. She looks at us and says, “Hey, would you like a stool?”
I’m not thinking and blurt out, “I don’t know, I’d have to see a stool sample.”
Now this could have gone horribly wrong (I did mention I’m not a sales guy, right?) but she laughed and it turned out to be just the thing to break the ice. She loosened up and we had a nice conversation. When we left, she was happy and satisfied.
We had a family event over the weekend. My niece from Florida came up to visit with her boyfriend and introduce him to the big Italian family. As in every other family, I have a crazy uncle. My mom makes the best Caesar Salad anyone has ever tasted and my uncle has been know to finish off the last of it right out of the huge 2 foot diameter salad bowl, like I said big family.
Of course, he is offered the last of the salad and handed the big ass bowl. They left the tongs in there and he had already given away his fork, so he proceeded to eat the salad using the tongs. Slowly we all realize what he is doing and whisper and laugh and point. So he says that no one gave him a fork so he used the tongs. I defended him by saying they were Italian chopsticks and got a laugh out of the crew.
Working at a tech support job, a friend mentioned he’d recently read an article about an operating system that used “bipolar logic” (I have no idea what this means), and I asked, “does that mean the hardware needs to run off a lithium battery?”
Puppy story #1: new puppy loves to nuzzle my neck, and ends up eating some strands of my hair. This results, a day later, in problems pooping, as the hairs cause danglies and a very stressed puppy. I carefully set her to rights and muttered “I feel like Starfleet: circling Uranus searching for Klingons.”
Puppy story #2: puppy loves loves pigs’ ears for their extended chewing time. She gets one per day. About the time she’d finished it off, I’d sat cross-legged on the floor to watch tv. For some reason, the puppy begins rooting around my crotch, trying to scratch through my jeans (look, it had been a long day of sweaty work. I’m sure I had an interesting scent.). Finally, I picked her up, looked her in the eyes and said, “Pupppy, you cannot change a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Stop trying.”
My mom overheard both comments and completely lost it, then chewed me out, because she felt she couldn’t repeat them at work, so I’d deprived her of a couple of stories.
I’m laughing at all of these, but especially the lithium battery!
My husband floored me a week or two ago. Being too lazy to get up and find the remote, we were watching the copyright warning screens at the end of a DVD. Screen after screen with different languages. One came up that looked like nothing so much as the alien alphabet from Futurama. I said, “What is that one?” and he replied, “Maybe it’s Swiss.” I couldn’t stop laughing because my engineer husband had just made a multi-layered linguistics joke.
A while ago I was describing an old acquaintance to a group of friends. I said, “Now, she had a lot of health problems, but I don’t know how many of them were . . . [searching for the right word] extracranial.” They all immediately knew what I meant, laughed, and said they were stealing that description.
I used to work with a girl from Tennessee, who was called Katie (this being in the UK). She was dealing with a particularly difficult client on the phone, and when she had finished, she had a bit of a rant about how this patronising this woman was, and how she hated being patronised.
I let her finished, and then said in the smuggest voice I could manage, “Katie…its pronounced Patronising”
Not me but unwittingly from a friend. We were watching some flavor of Star Trek, and in this episode, Data had been kidnapped by some villan. Data and the villan were debating something and Data came up with a well-worded zinger.
My friend loved it. He said “Good one, Data. I love a good… statement.”
Last year I was hanging out with some people, one of which had a broken leg. Since we were doing a lot of walking, he borrowed a neighbors scooter. You know, the kind that obese people with mobility issues sometimes use. He was talking about how he was going to jack it up a spoiler and mag wheels. I said “Yeah, and you could put little glittery tassles on the handle bars.”
My husband was born three months “premature” at nine pounds; it’s common knowledge and a source of good-natured jokes in his family that his mom was pregnant with him when she married his father. They recently had a 40 year anniversary dinner for his parents with some very old friends, and when they were taking a picture of the original wedding party afterwards, someone mentioned how everyone who was at the wedding 40 years ago is in the picture. I said something about how my husband should get in there and crouch down by his mom’s knees, to loud guffawing from everyone (they’re not an uptight bunch).
Several friends and I went to an all-night diner for a 2AM breakfast. A bright, chipper member of the wait staff came up, introduced herself as “Brandi”, chatted with us briefly and took our order. After she walked away, I made the comment that “She seemed like a fine girl.” Half the table broke out in laughter and the other half wondered what was so funny.
A couple of years ago, while visiting my parents, we’d gone out to lunch and were in the parking lot heading back to their car. My dad spied some old car from the '60s, and said to my mom “Oooo, honey look at that <whatever it was>. Your dad had a car like that.”
Obviously Mom didn’t remember, because she got a confused look, squinted her eyes a bit as though trying to remember, and said in a bewildered tone “my father…”
Just trying to be helpful, I said “You know! That guy who was married to your mom? Lived in your house when you were growing up?”
Do you mean something I said that I thought was funny, or something that people laughed at?
The latter: I was telling some people how small my first apartment was. “It was so small that when my boyfriend came over with his guitar and took the guitar out of the case, we had to put something else back in the case.”
Laughter.
But it was true; I usually had to pick up a pile of books while he set the case down, and then I’d put the pile into the case. But the explanation just ruins it, apparently.
At a restaurant with my folks a few years ago, my mom says, “Wow, I’m having some really strong deja vu.” So I said, “We heard you the first time.” The look of confusion on her face broke my dad and me up big time.
When I was a bank teller, we had an assistant supervisor who was not only little flamboyant, but something of a smartass as well. One day he had to fill in as a teller because someone was out sick.
When it came time to balance his drawer, he finished early and spot-on accurate.
“Damn, I’m good! Sometimes I scare myself”, he said.
“You scare us too, Richard”, I said in my best deadpan.
I’m friends on Facebook with a guy who was a teacher of mine in high school, and has kept in touch with a few of us since he went off and joined the Marines. He was always known as a pretty straight-laced guy.
This summer he posted a picture of him and his kids para-sailing. I was able to get a “firstie” in there (first comment) and say “I never thought I’d ever see [name] getting high with his kids!”
My favorite from recent months was memorable because 1) it was all set up and all I had to do was say the line, and 2) it actually got a big laugh, neither of which should have happened, since it is the oldest joke in the world.
A man was trying to find out a woman’s age and she was politely avoiding the question.
He: Well, when’s your birthday?
She: April 10.
He: What year?
Me: Every year!
The way she laughed, I think she believed I’d made up that chestnut on the spot.
I’m known as a joker and a smartass at work, but my wife doesn’t appreciate my humor, so I’m usually all business at home. We had an asshole of a chihuahua named Bo, who had bad separation anxiety when my wife wasn’t home. He sometimes peed in the bathroom or the kitchen if she was gone too long. One day, after we got back from a Wally World run, she said to me “Bo peed in the bathroom again.” I looked at her with a totally straight face and said, “Don’t you?” Kinda pissed her off for a while, but was totally worth it.
That’s pretty similar to the one I had about a month ago. A few friends and I were sitting around at a restaurant. Friend A has a birthday coming up and is turning 26. Friend B and my husband were there, too.
Friend A: I’m not sure what I’m doing for my 26th birthday.
Husband: When is it?
Friend A: November 20th.
Friend B: Wait. When did you turn 25?
Me: Last November 20th. It tends to happen that way.