Grandpa was always going on about the good old days and the lower cost of living in particular. “When I was a kid, my mom could send me to the store, and I’d get a salami, two pints of milk, six oranges, two loaves o’ bread, a magazine, and some new blue jeans … all for a dollar!”

Then Grandpa said sadly, “You can’t do that anymore. They got those video cameras everywhere you look.”

It was reported years ago that a Washington bureaucrat sent a letter to the state of New Mexico requesting the number of cattle guards in the state. The state promptly responded and was told by Washington, “That’s too many. You’ll have to fire about half of them.”

The wedding day was fast approaching. Everything was ready, and nothing could dampen Jennifer’s excitement, not even her parents’ nasty divorce. Her mother had finally found the perfect dress and felt she would be the best-dressed mother of the bride ever!

A week later, Jennifer was horrified to learn her new young stepmother, Barbie, had purchased the same dress. She asked Barbie to exchange it, but Barbie refused. “Absolutely not! I’m going to wear this dress. I’ll look like a million bucks in it.”

Jennifer relayed the conversation to her mother, who graciously replied, “Never mind, dear. I’ll get another dress. After all, it’s your special day, not hers.” Two weeks later, another dress was finally found. When they stopped for lunch that day, Jennifer asked, “What are you going to do with the first dress? Maybe you should return it. You don’t have any place to wear it.”

Her mother grinned and replied, “Of course I do, dear. I’m wearing it to the rehearsal dinner.”

Temp jobs are a double edged sword. On the one hand, you only have to put up with these people for a specified amount of time, but on the other hand, you have to put up with these people for a specified amount of time. Aye, there’s the rub.

And I’ll go one step further and say that temp jobs in IT are the worst kinds of temp jobs. Oh, you can go on about data entry all you like, but have you ever put up with the same person asking how to “do” an attachment ten times a day?

Now I graduated with honours in Computing Studies, I could build a server from scratch with little more than an Apache framework and a thimble full of Javascript. I don’t tell you this because I’m proud, I tell you this because I’m murderously angry.
(more…)

Artist Pablo Picasso surprised a burglar at work in his new chateau. The intruder got away, but Picasso told the police he could do a rough sketch of what he looked like. On the basis of his drawing, the police arrested a mother superior, the minister of finance, a washing machine, and the Eiffel tower.

A social worker who had recently transferred from the big city to the mountains was touring her new territory. She came upon the tiniest cabin she had ever seen. Intrigued, she knocked on the door.

“Anybody home?”

A child’s voice answered, “Yep.”

“Is your father there?”

“Pa? Nope, he left before Ma came in.”

“Well, is your mother there?”

“Nope, Ma left just before I got here.”

“Are you never together as a family?”

“Sure, but not here. This is the outhouse.”

The teacher gave her fifth-grade class an assignment: get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.

The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.

Ashley said, “My father’s a farmer, and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess.”

“What’s the moral of the story?” asked the teacher.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!”

“Very good,” said the teacher.

Next little Sarah raised her hand and said, “Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks, and the moral to this story is, ‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.’”

“That was a fine story, Sarah. Michael, do you have a story to share?”

“Yes, my daddy told me this story about my Aunt Karen. Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the Gulf War and her plane was hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun, and a machete. She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn’t break and then she landed right in the middle of a hundred enemy troops. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke. Then she killed the last ten with her bare hands.”

“Good heavens,” said the horrified teacher, “what kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?”

“Stay away from Aunt Karen when she’s been drinking.”

A salesman for a major cola company returns from his assignment in the Middle East and reports his assignment was a total failure.

“Tell me what happened,” his boss says.

“When I accepted the assignment,” replies the salesman, “I was confident I could turn a profit for the company there, since it was a brand new market and no one had ever tried our drink. But once I arrived, I realized that I had a problem: I didn’t speak their language.”

“So what did you do?” the boss probes.

“I decided to convey our message by using three posters. In the first, I showed a man crawling through the desert heat, exhausted and panting with thirst. The second poster shows the man having a drink of our cola. The final poster showed the man happy and totally refreshed. I had them plastered at every corner and in every market I could find.”

“That should have worked,” the boss chimes in. “Why didn’t it?”

“Well,” the salesman confesses, “not only did I not speak the language, but I also didn’t realize that most people in that country read from right to left.”

I was in Starbucks yesterday when I suddenly realized I desperately needed to pass gas.

The music was really, really loud, so I timed my gas with the beat of the music.

After a couple of songs, I started to feel better.

I finished my coffee, and noticed that everybody was staring at me …

Then I suddenly remembered that I was listening to my iPod.

A Redneck buys a ticket and wins the lottery. He goes to Austin to claim it where the man verifies his ticket number.

The Redneck says, “I want my $20 million.”

To which the man replied, “No sir. It doesn’t work that way. We give you a million today, and then you’ll get the rest spread out for the next 19 years.”

The Redneck said, “I want all my money right now! I won it, and I want it.”

Again the man patiently explains that he would only get a million that day and the rest during the next 19 years.

The Redneck, furious with the man, screams out, “Look, I want my money! If you’re not going to give me my $20 million right now, then I want my money back!”