10/20/99

Joke Email Not Always a Laughing Matter

Let me begin by saying that no one likes a good joke more than I do ... and those of you who share my sense of humor will have already noted that I started here with an obscure line from the original "Monty Python's Flying Circus" television show.

I hope that no one will construe this admission as indicating that I now want to join the Monty Python Joke-of-the-Day Email Club, which no doubt exists. Once upon a time, it was amusing to get jokes by email. The novelty had entirely worn off by 1995, however. Now, only two people in the entire world are allowed to send me jokes by email. One of them, I simply don't have the heart to tell to stop. The other apparently knows me so well that he is able to send me only those jokes that I have not seen before. I hear from him about every six months.

I have now heard them all, which is a sad state of affairs. More accurately, I should say, I've read them all. The problem with jokes by email is that there is no convenient way for the originator of the email to say, "Stop me if you've heard this one."

That said, stop me if you've heard this one. It's one of the few pieces of "joke email" I've enjoyed in 1999. I don't know who originally wrote it, and parts of it I wish I'd written.

Signs that you have had too much of the '90s ...

1. You tried to enter your password on the microwave.
2. You now think of three espressos as "getting wasted."
3. You haven't played solitaire with a real deck of cards in years.
4. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.
5. You email your son in his room to tell him that dinner is ready,and he emails you back "What's for dinner?"
6. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.
7. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.
8. You didn't give your valentine a card this year, but you posted one for your email buddies via a web page.
9. Your daughter just bought a CD of all the records your college roommate used to play.
10. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.
11. You check your blow dryer to see if it's Y2K compliant.
12. Your grandmother clogs up your e-mail inbox asking you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
13. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.
14. Every commercial on television has a website address at the bottom of the screen.
15. You buy a computer and a week later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.
16. The concept of using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make purchase is foreign to you.
17. Cleaning up the dining area means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.
18. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have email addresses.
19. You consider 2nd day air delivery painfully slow.
20. You refer to your dining room table as the flat filing cabinet.
21. Your idea of being organized is multiple colored post-it notes, and, of course ...
22. You hear most of your jokes via email instead of in person.

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