Our family took shelter in the basement after hearing a tornado warning. My husband told everyone to stay put while he got his cell phone out of the car, in case the lines went dead.
He didn't return for the longest time, so I went looking for him. I was upstairs calling his name, when I heard our answering machine click on. "Hi," a voice said. "This is Dad. I'm locked out of the house."
The telephone solicitor selling basement waterproofing must have thought she'd died and gone to heaven when she reached my very polite and patient son on the phone. At the end of her long sales pitch, she asked, "Do you mind if we send out someone to give you an estimate?"
"Not at all," my son said.
"When would be a good time?" she asked.
My son answered, "Just as soon as I can dig us a basement."
Get this," said one drinker to his friends at the bar. "Last night while I was here with you guys, a burglar broke into my house."
"Did he get anything?" his friends asked.
"Yeah, a broken jaw, two teeth knocked out, and a pair of broken nuts. The wife thought it was me coming home drunk."
A woman was organizing her laundry room, while at the same time, getting ready to iron. She found a black sock, belonging to her messy son in his forties. Searching all around, in case she'd dropped the other one, she still couldn't locate the other black sock.
She said, with ire in her voice, "Why is this black sock in here all alone?"
The fella answered back facetiously to her, "Because my white socks are prejudiced!"
A reporter from New York was visiting an old colleague who now edited a newspaper in a tiny Vermont town. "I don't see how you do it," the NYC reporter said. "How can you drum up interest in the news, when everybody in town knows what everybody else is doing and with whom?"
"Sure they know," the editor said, "but they read the paper to see who got caught at it."
I was self-conscious about going to the gym, because I thought the pounds I had put on would make me stand out among the spandex-clad regulars. I chose a treadmill in the corner so I'd be inconspicuous.
However, as I exercised, my worst fears came true. At least a dozen people turned to stare at me periodically. I thought it might be my imagination, but then, one woman even squinted to get a better look! Mortified, I stepped off the machine to leave.
When I turned around, I realized that the gym's only wall clock had been hanging just inches above my head!
One of the questions from the career placement test which is given to applicants for a military commission.
"Rearrange the letters 'P N E S I' to spell out an important part of the human body that is more useful when erect!" Those who spelt 'spine became doctors. But the rest of the officers all go to flight school.
A mayor of a small town passed out pens imprinted with the message, "Got a gripe? Call the mayor."
One morning the phone rang and his secretary answered it. "Who was that?" the mayor asked.
"A citizen with a gripe," came the reply. "The pen you gave him doesn't work."
I'm a retired schoolteacher. My favorite classroom story concerns a young third-grade girl who came to school one morning all excited. She explained that things were really going to be different at their house now, because her grandfather had come to live with them. Then she added, "And he's sterile, you know!"
The teacher thought for a moment, then replied, "You mean 'senile,' don't you?"
The child replied, "Yeah... that, too."
While my friend, Emily, was visiting her mother, they went for a walk and bumped into an old family acquaintance. "Is this your daughter?" the woman asked. "Oh I remember her when she was this high. How old is she now?"
Without pausing, Emily's mother answered, "Twenty-four." Emily, 35, nearly fainted on the spot!
After everyone had said their good-byes, Emily asked her mom why she'd told such a whopper.
"Well," she replied, "I've been lying about my age for so long, it suddenly dawned on me I'd have to start lying about yours, also!"
