Saturday, October 10, 2015

The sweet revenge of laughter






Here's a story of triumph for you. I have made this man I work with laugh before, many times at this point. But I still remember something that someone told me about him twenty years ago. I have worked with this man for nearly all the time I have worked at the library. I even trained a few days with him at the beginning of my career. But for the first year of my employment he worked at a different location than me. The thing I was told, twenty years ago, was by someone who worked with both of us. He related that this man said, about me: "I don't see why everyone thinks he's so funny. I don't think he's so funny."

Soon he moved to my branch. It has been the work of a lifetime's revenge making this man laugh.

I'm not saying the joke is necessarily so funny, for the record.

At my library we have an automated book return. There is a one way drive up depository that feeds through the brick wall of our building onto our fancy system of moving belts and rollers, but if our automated return breaks down we have a big blue bin, ramshackle and past its use by date, that we unlock and use as a back up. This week we got a brand new fancy sign for this beaten up blue book return. It says "Back Up Book Return".

Here is the story I told to the man who two decades ago didn't think I was so funny:

I was out unlocking the blue bin when a car came up to me in reverse, against the one way traffic of the book return lane, and it almost hit me.

"Hey!" I yelled "What are you doing?"

The guy pointed at our bin and said "What? It says back up book return."

Sure, you may not think that's so hilarious, but this man burst into laughter.

Who's not so funny now!






 


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