Parrot
“If you have a parrot and you don’t teach it to say, ’Help, they’ve turned me into a parrot’, you are wasting everybody’s time.”
SARS Complaint
At the Internal Revenue Service where I used to work, no officer was immune from letters of complaint written by disgruntled taxpayers.
One time an irate farmer wrote to my supervisor:
“Please tell Officer McLamb I do not owe this tax. Furthermore, do not refer to my wife as a ‘spouse.'”
Broken fridge
When the icemaker in our new refrigerator broke, my husband dropped by the store to arrange for repairs. Because the sun was bright, my husband’s eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dim light inside in time to see a woman sitting on the floor examining carpet samples.
He stepped on her leg and she screamed, causing him to jump into a display of fireplace tools that went crashing in every direction. Unnerved, my husband stumbled over to the service desk, and as he went to rest his hands on the counter, he flipped over a bowl full of little mints, scattering them everywhere.
After taking a deep breath to calm himself, he announced to the wide-eyed woman working there, “My refrigerator doesn’t work.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she replied.
Mozart
A married couple trying to live up to a snobbish lifestyle went to a party. The conversation turned to Mozart. “Absolutely brilliant, magnificent, a genius!”
The woman, wanting to join in the conversation, remarked casually, “Ah, Mozart. You’re so right. I love him. Only this morning I saw him getting on the No. 5 bus going to Coney Island.”
There was a sudden hush, and everyone looked at her. Her husband was mortified. He pulled her away and whispered, “We’re leaving right now. Get your coat and let’s get out of here.”
As they drove home, he kept muttering to himself. Finally his wife turned to him. “You’re angry about something.”
“Oh really? You noticed?” he sneered. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life! You saw Mozart take the No. 5 bus to Coney Island? You goober! Don’t you know the No. 5 bus doesn’t go out to Coney Island?”
Winning Arguments
One day I found Morris, my five-year-old son, with the telephone, which he quickly hung up when he saw me. “What were you doing?” I asked him.
“Calling Aunt Sarah.”
“How could you have called Aunt Sarah?” I asked. “You don’t even know her number.”
“Yes, I do and I did call her,” little Morris replied.
I wasted a lot of breath trying to convince him that he didn’t know her number, but he insisted he had made the call. “Okay,” I said finally. “What did she say, then, if you called her?”
“She told me I had the wrong number.”
