Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Good morning crew,

For some reason I was thinking about college the other day. My freshman year I took Composition 101 and learned valuable writing skills like how to squeeze out another page by adding one and a half inch margins and how to pad my bibliographies. But one day kind of stands out in my mind...

I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before so I wasn't quite as attentive as usual when the instructor gave the assignment, "Write a 3-5 page expository paper on Euthanasia."

When I got the assignment back two weeks later this note was at the top, "B. This is a good paper on the challenges facing young people in China, Joe, but I felt I had to deduct an entire grade because you completely misinterpreted the assignment."

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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When I was a kid, we walked 10 miles to school every day, sometimes in the rain or snow. Man, did we feel stupid when we found out there was a bus.

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A teenage boy to his father... "Here's my report card and a list I've compiled of entrepreneurs who never finished high school." --Charles Almon in The Wall Street Journal

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"I just bought a microwave fireplace...You can spend a whole evening in front of it in only eight minutes." -Steven Wright

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The best illustration of the value of brief speech was given by Mark Twain.

His story was that when he had listened for five minutes to the preacher telling of the heathen, he wept, and was goingto contribute fifty dollars... after ten minutes more of the sermon, he reduced the amount of his prospective contribution to twenty-five dollars...after a half hour more of eloquence, he cut the sum to five dollars.

At the end of an hour of oratory when the plate was passed, he stole two dollars.


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
At the end of my factory shift, I was asked to purchase some supplies. The machines' conveyor belts needed talcum powder to prevent them from sticking, and we had run out of aspirin for workers with noise-induced tension headaches.

I drove to the nearest store and loaded a shopping cart with four cases of baby powder and several boxes of aspirin. As the man behind me in the checkout line peered at my purchases, he laughed and exclaimed, "Must be one heck of a kid!"