—BOB WHEELER
While I was an office worker at the local high school, a student stopped by to turn in a lost purse. I gave it to the principal so he could look inside for some type of identification. Moments later his concerned voice could be heard over the intercom: “Liz Claiborne, please come to the office. We have found your purse.”
—KATY HYCHE
When my niece’s coworker, Eula, began a job as an elementary-school counselor, she was eager to help. One day during recess she noticed a girl standing by herself on one side of a playing field while the rest of the kids enjoyed a game of soccer at the other. Eula approached and asked if she was all right. The girl said she was.
A little while later, however, Eula noticed the girl was in the same spot, still by herself. Approaching again, Eula offered, “Would you like me to be your friend?”
The girl hesitated, then said, “Okay.” Feeling she was making progress, Eula then asked, “Why are you standing here all alone?”
“Because,” the little girl said with great exasperation, “I’m the goalie.”
—BOBBYE J. DAVIS
One of my students could not take my college seminar final exam because of a funeral. No problem, I told him. Make it up the following week. That week came, and again he couldn’t take the test due to another funeral.
“You’ll have to take the test early next week,” I insisted. “I can’t keep postponing it.”
“I’ll take the test next week if no one dies,” he told me.
By now I was suspicious. “How can you have so many people you know pass away in three weeks?”
“I don’t know any of these people,” he said. “I’m the only gravedigger in town.”
—SRINIVAS NIPPANI
Discovered: why our nation’s education system is in trouble. When a friend delivered 20 new math books to a teacher’s classroom, the teacher exclaimed, “Oh, shoot! I was hoping it was something I could use.”
—ANGELA TIMPSON
“You need to be careful when writing comments,” our principal told the faculty. He held a report card for a Susan Crabbe. A colleague had written, “Susan is beginning to come out of her shell.”
—MARGARET WHARF
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class. “In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.
“However,” the professor continued, “there is no language in which a double positive can form a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
—E. T. THOMPSON
When our students began raising donations for Child Abuse Prevention Week, the school administration did its part by setting up a collection box outside the principal’s office and displaying a banner by the front door of the lobby. It read “Please give $1 to help stop child abuse in the front office.”
—ANGELA LONG
After lunch at a restaurant with five other teachers, my friend Shirley realized they’d forgotten to ask for separate checks. To figure out how much each owed, the tab was passed around the table. The group laughed and chattered through the whole ordeal.
When they finally rose to leave, the man in the next booth grinned at Shirley. “You ladies sure are having a great time,” he remarked. “What business are you in?”
“All teachers,” she said proudly.
“Ah,” he replied. “I knew you weren’t accountants.”
—WILLMA WILLIS GORE
During the college speech course I taught, I spoke about a Chinese student who, after moving to the United States, decided she wanted an English name to honor her new home.
“She chose the name Patience,” I told the class, “because she wanted to be reminded to be patient. Every time someone called her name, the message was reinforced.”
I asked the students what names they would select for themselves. After considering the question, one young man raised his hand and said, “Rich.”
—JOAN WALDEN
“Ms. Henson, you’re going in for Ms. Simms.”
As a band instructor at an elementary school, I require my students to turn in practice sheets signed by their parents so I can be sure they are putting in enough time. I had to laugh, however, when one parent wrote on her child’s sheet, “Practiced 17 minutes, but it seemed like hours.”
—MEGAN E. TUTTLE
Our school had just installed a new air conditioning system, and a representative from the company wanted to make sure it was running smoothly. Poking his head into an empty classroom, he asked the teacher, “Any little problems here?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “All our little problems have gone home.”
—ROSALIND POPOV
My wife and I were watching the gorillas at the zoo when several of them charged at the enclosure fence, scattering the crowd, except for one elderly man. Later, my wife asked him how he had kept his composure.
“I used to drive a school bus,” he explained.
—MARVYN SAUNDERS
Our architectural school had been without a department chairperson for two years, and students were growing frustrated at the lengthy process of choosing a new candidate. Finally a group of students sent a message to the dean. He arrived at school one morning to find 50 seats stacked up in front of his office. A sign said “Pick a chair!”
—SANDRA HEISER
I’m a high school geometry teacher and I started one lesson on triangles by reading a theorem. “If an angle is an exterior angle of a triangle, then its measure is greater than the measure of either of its corresponding remote interior angles.”
I noticed that one student wasn’t taking notes and asked him why.
“Well,” he replied sincerely, “I’m waiting until you start speaking English.”
—PATRICIA STRICKLAND
After applying their lipstick in the school bathroom, a number of girls would press their lips to the mirror, leaving dozens of little lip prints. The principal decided that something had to be done. So she called all the girls to the bathroom and explained that the lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian. To demonstrate how difficult it was, she asked the maintenance man to clean one of the mirrors. He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet and swabbed the glass.
Since then, there have been no lip prints.
—PHIL PROCTOR IN PLANET PROCTOR
I was working as a school psychologist in a major city when I was reassigned to a different school. I arrived at my new location early and started to get acquainted with the staff.
The secretary checked for the correct spelling of my name so she could place it on the directory posted near the school entrance.
Later in the day I happened to walk past the directory and saw that she had completed the job, though not in the format I would have expected. There, in front of my name, was the word psycho.
—RICHARD E. BUSEY, JR.
Rushing to work, I was driving too fast and as a result was pulled over by the highway patrol. The state trooper noticed that my shirt had the name of a local high school on it. “I teach math there,” I explained. The trooper smiled, and said, “Okay, here’s a problem. A teacher is speeding down the highway at 16 m.p.h. over the limit. At $12 for every mile, plus $40 court costs, plus the rise in her insurance, what’s her total cost?” I replied, “Taking that total, subtracting the low salary I receive, multiplying by the number of kids who hate math, then adding to that the fact that none of us would be anywhere without teachers, I’d say zero.” He handed me back my license. “Math was never my favorite subject,” he admitted. “Please slow down.”
—MEGAN STRICKLAND
I’m a teacher and high school basketball coach. During one season, things went from bad to worse when we lost to our local rivals by more than 30 points.
The next day in class, when one of my students asked about the game, I answered, “Let me put it this way. If this were t
he NBA, I would have been fired today.”
“That’s not true, Coach,” the student said. “If this were the NBA, you would have been fired a long time ago.”
—LLOYD ALDRICH
I had been teaching my seventh-graders about World War II, and a test question was, “What was the largest amphibious assault of all time?”
Expecting to see “the D-Day invasion” as the answer, I found instead on one paper, “Moses and the plague of frogs.”
—STEVEN CALLAHAN
Kids’ Quips
As a security officer for a defense contractor, I have to make sure all visitors sign in. One day I was in the lobby and noticed an employee’s college-age daughter writing in the visitors’ log. When I checked the log at the end of the day, I noticed her signature. Next to “Purpose of visit” she had written, “To get money from Dad.”
—JOSEPH HOFFLER
I have my office in my home. When family matters occupy my day, I often find myself working into the night to complete business assignments. After one particularly late session, I stood in front of my mirror the next morning applying cover-stick to camouflage the dark circles under my eyes.
“Mom must have been working late last night,” I overheard my son telling his siblings. “She’s using Wite-Out.”
—MARY J. MILLS
On Take Your Daughter to Work Day, I brought my niece to the office with me so she could experience many aspects of being a social worker. While driving her home, I asked if she had learned anything. “Yes,” she answered. “I learned that I don’t want to do your job.”
—KIM RIDER
Trying to explain to our five-year-old daughter how much computers had changed, my husband pointed to our brand-new personal computer and told her that when he was in college, a computer with the same amount of power would have been the size of a house.
Wide-eyed, our daughter asked, “How big was the mouse?”
—CYNDY HINDS
Stopping to pick up my daughter at kindergarten, I found out that the topic of show-and-tell that day had been parents’ occupations. The teacher pulled me aside. Whispering, she advised, “You might want to explain a little bit more to your daughter what you do for a living.”
I work as a training consultant and often conduct my seminars in motel conference rooms.
When I asked why, the teacher explained, “Your daughter told the class she wasn’t sure what you did, but said you got dressed real pretty and went to work at motels.”
—MARY BETH NELSEN
My coworker’s sweet six-year-old came into the office to sell Girl Scout cookies. A first-year Brownie, she carefully approached each of us and described the various types of cookies. One woman who was struggling with a weight problem asked, “Do you have anything that is not fattening?”
“Yes, ma’am!” the girl brightly answered. “We have Thin Mints!”
—JULIE SANDERS
When shopping online, it’s easy to forget that you may not be dealing with a large corporation.
I recently e-mailed a website asking why my purchases hadn’t arrived a week after I’d paid for them. Later the phone rang. “Sorry for the delay,” said a teenager. “I’ll check and get back to you. I can’t get on my computer right now because my mother’s vacuuming and this room only has one socket.”
—TERESA HEWITT
One of my duties as a bookstore supervisor is to handle customer returns. As I helped one young woman, I noticed the book she brought back was on the subject of dating. It’s the bookstore’s policy to ask the reason for the return, so I did. “My mother bought it for me,” she said. “She doesn’t like my boyfriend.”
—KELLEY MITCHELL
I stole a couple of minutes from work to give my wife a call. She put my two-year-old son on, and we chatted a while before he ended it with an enthusiastic “I love you!”
“I love you too,” I said, with a dopey grin plastered on my face. I was about to hang up when I heard him ask sweetly, “Mommy, who was that?”
—MATTHEW TERRY
My aunt, a kindergarten teacher, has to interview every new student. During an interview, she asked a little girl what her mother did. The girl proudly replied, “She is a businesswoman.”
“What does you father do?” my aunt asked.
After thinking for a moment, the girl said, “He does what my mom tells him to do.”
—APA RATTAPITAK
As an optometrist, I had a second-grader in for his first eye exam. He insisted his eyesight was good, but when I asked him to read a line from my vision chart, with the letters APEOTF, he couldn’t do it. I asked him about a line with the letters FZBDE, in larger print. Still he couldn’t read the chart.
“You mean you can’t read those lines,” I said, puzzled, “and yet you don’t think you need glasses?”
“No,” he replied. “I just haven’t learned those words yet.”
—SEAN CONNOLLY, OD
A student tore into our school office. “My iPod was stolen!” she cried. I handed her a form, and she filled it out, answering everything, even those questions intended for the principal. Under “Disposition,” she wrote, “I’m really ticked off.”
—DEBORAH MILES
Before my son could start going on job interviews, he needed to dress the part. That, he decided, required a $500 suit.
“What!?” I answered, gagging at the price tag. “I’ve bought cars for $500!”
“That’s why I want the $500 suit,” he said. “So I don’t have to drive $500 cars.”
—JOE KULAKOWSKI
At our base post office, my four-year-old could not take his eyes off the Most Wanted posters. Finally, he asked, “Dad, why didn’t they just capture those guys when they took their pictures?”
—RAY OSBURN
Carrying mail, I walk the same route every day. One morning a girl was playing outside her house and called out, “Hi, Bill!” Though that isn’t my name, I cheerily replied, “Hi!” This went on for several weeks, until I saw the girl’s mother and asked, “Why does she call me Bill?”
The mother turned red. “Because whenever I see you coming,” she explained, “I tell her, ‘Here come the bills.’”
—LINCOLN REHAK
I had signed up to be a school volunteer and was helping a first-grader with her homework. But it turned out I was the one in need of help. The assignment required coloring, and I’m color-blind—can’t tell blue from red. As we finished our lesson, I told the little girl, “Next week you can read to me.”
Looking confused, she said, “Can’t you read, either?”
—HOWARD SIEPLINGA
When my neighbor’s teenage son was interviewed for a job at the local discount store, he was asked, “How would you treat an irate customer?”
The boy thought for a moment. “I’d treat him the same as the customer before and the one after.”
He was hired on the spot. Later, his mother asked about the interview.
“I guess it went well because I got the job,” the son replied. “By the way, Mom, what does ‘irate’ mean?”
—ANN MARIE ROWLANDS
The college football player knew his way around the locker room better than he did the library. So when my husband’s coworker saw the gridiron star roaming the stacks looking confused, she asked how she could help.
“I have to read a play by Shakespeare,” he said.
“Which one?” she asked.
He scanned the shelves and answered, “William.”
—SANDRA J. YARBROUGH
My 17-year-old niece was looking for a job, so her mother scoured the want ads with her. “Here’s one. A couple are looking for someone to watch their two kids and do light housekeeping.”
“Hellooo!” said my niece, rolling her eyes. “I can’t take that job. I don’t know anything about lighthouses.”
—KIM WILSON
A first-grader came to the ophthalmology office where I work to have his vision checked. He sat down and I turne
d off the lights. Then I switched on a projector that flashed the letters F, Z and B on a screen. I asked the boy what he saw. Without hesitation he replied, “Consonants.”
—STEPHEN DOWNING
Dumb and Dumber
Before setting off on a business trip to Tulsa, I called the hotel where I’d be staying to see if they had a gym. The hotel operator’s sigh had a tinge of exasperation in it. “We have over 300 guests at this facility,” she said. “Does this ‘Gym’ have a last name?”
—TARA CAPPADONA
“These are very disturbing figures. So I made all the zeros little smiley faces.”
In the deli where I worked, an employee was asked to post a sign advertising our latest meat special. After she put up the sign, however, our manager pointed out that she had listed only the price and needed to put the item on the placard too. Later he was shocked to see a slice of ham taped to the sign.
—SUSAN DYCUS
An elevator in our office building is frequently out of order. The last time, maintenance posted a sign that summed up the situation: Elevator Closed for Temporary Repairs.
—TERRI CRUDUP
Our colleague, a frequenter of pubs, applied for a vanity license plate that would cement his reputation as the “bar king.” A week later he arrived to work with his new plates: BARKING.
—NANCY SEND
I needed a passport and I needed it quickly. Luckily, a sign in the passport office told me exactly how long I could expect to wait: “Allow 10 minutes for regular processing and 15 minutes for expedited processing.”
—PETER VOGEN
Just as she was celebrating her 80th birthday, our friend received a jury-duty notice. She called to remind the people at the clerk’s office that she was exempt because of her age. “You need to come in and fill out the exemption forms,” they said.
“I’ve already done that,” replied my friend. “I did it last year.”
“You have to do it every year,” she was told.
“Why?” came the response. “Do you think I’m going to get younger?”
—JONNIE SIVLEY
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