You Had To Be There

Sometimes I think I am a funny guy. Sometimes I am the only person in the world who thinks so. Today could be the latter.

I was sitting in my cubicle today, working away, when the company news site popped up on my computer screen with today's important announcements. These are generally from the "ask not what the company can do for you, but what you can do for the company" variety of ideas. I mostly don't get past reading the headlines, but one caught my eye.

Item number one was about saving money by using the company conferencing service rather than traveling for meetings. You all know how I feel about this issue and since the big boss has commanded that we all appear in antoher city one day next week for his big pow wow, it struck me as a bit nonsensical.

My boss Randall Bing is away from the office this week on business, so I couldn't harangue him about it in person. I got this bright idea to send an email copy of the notice to him, along with a note telling him that I had also sent it to Mr. Big Boss. Randall is a chain-of-command kind of guy, so I figured he would get a kick out of this and see it for the sarcasm that it was.

The chain of command from bottom to top is me, Randall, His Boss, Big Boss, Bigger Boss, and the Boss of Bosses, our President.

After a bit, Randall emailed back, thanking me for warning him, because as we all know, stuff rolls downhill.

I thought about his response, trying to gauge whether he knew I was kidding him or not and finally decided to send another email telling him I was just joking.

After another bit, Randall emailed me back to tell me that he had already warned his boss, in case Mr. Big Boss was offended and decided to roll things down the hill. He suggested that I should let his boss know that it was just a joke.

Now my dilemma was, is he kidding me? I decided that he must be and sent another email telling him I wasn't falling for that trick. We'll see.

I'm reminded of something that happened to my best friend's father when we were in high school. When I was a senior in high school my parents were forty-four years old. My friend's parents were older and his father retired that year, 1968. He was just fifty-six but they had money so he was free to do as he pleased. What he chose to do was mostly nothing.

Every morning my friend's parents would get up, eat breakfast, do a few chores and then, about ten in the morning, they would retire to their respective recliners and watch soap operas and the midday news while they ate lunch. Then, if need be, they would go out and do some shopping. This was their routine day after day. My friend's father also prided himself on being a funny guy and for the most part he was.

One morning the phone rang and it was a woman asking if they had any items that a particular charity could pick up when the truck came around. This interruption of his soap opera watching annoyed him, so rather than simply saying no and hanging up, my friend's dad decided to tell the woman that he couldn't talk to her and that it was imperative that she hang up, because the house was on fire. They both hung up the phone and he went back to watching television.

The poor woman on the other end of the line, thinking that there was a fire, decided that she should call it in just in case no one else did.

A short time later my friend's father noticed sirens that seemed to get louder, until they sounded as if they were in front of the house, which of course, they were. There was a pounding at the door and the place quickly filled with firemen and the police. He was threatened with arrest for making a false report.

So I guess the moral of both stories is, that even the funniest guys in the world are not so funny once in awhile.





Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor