Real life "Jokes"

Last year we got a visit from a man selling his pest control service. He told me that he was working for one of our neighbors (without actually saying "All their bugs will be moving to your house") and asked if we had any insect problems they could take care of.

I told him if we have any insect problems the spiders will take care of it.

His expression was priceless.


What are your favorite real life experiences that stand as permie "jokes"?

Years ago I was helping with a high school trip and we were sitting around chatting. I happened to mention that "I got into chickens for a really shitty reason - I want the manure for my garden."
A sweet teen-aged girl piped up, "that's not a shitty reason".
The silence in the room was deafening...

A guy came by and said he needed one of my timber logs

I asked " how long?"

He said "a long time. I'm building a shed"

When I was a kid, our neighbor was spraying his corn with atrazine. He offered to spray the corn that my mother was growing in the garden, telling my dad that it's great because it kills everything except corn. Dad said, "no thanks, we are not corn."

We had a telephone energy survey and the asked what energy source our clothes dryer was.  When I responded "solar" he acted suprised like he had never heard anything like that "new" technology in a dryer!
Ok, I should have said it's powered by a fusion reactor and he would have been even more confused!

Once upon a time I worked in a sugar factory.There were many heavy lifts which impacted the body and especially the back bone.
One day a lady came to teach us workplace ergonomic.She told us that the bad impact on our bodies started already in the morning when we brusched our teeth.We lean forward and that is not good she said.One man told her that he never leaned forward when brusching his teeth.No? She replied.How do you do it then?
The man took out his teeth and put them in a cup with water. The lady begun womiting.

Eric Thompson wrote:We had a telephone energy survey and the asked what energy source our clothes dryer was.  When I responded "solar" he acted suprised like he had never heard anything like that "new" technology in a dryer!
Ok, I should have said it's powered by a fusion reactor and he would have been even more confused!

He probably would have accepted that more easily!

It was obvious to everyone that I was living in my car after the house I was working on was just too torn down to stay in. So I slept in the car, beside the building that I was salvaging materials from.

I explained that "I'm not homeless, I'm living off grid." :-)

I just finished trimming a hedge, using my cordless electric Stihl machine. My customer, Nick, was quite pleased. He said, "thanks, that was awesome, I'm glad we did it, that's an awesome tool."

I've known Nick for 20 years, so there was only one response that would make sense.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID  !!!😂

One day a well-meaning lady told me I *really* should get those dandelions out of my front garden. I replied that it was on my list, but not until I had a space by the chicken run to transplant them to. The looks on both my husband's and the lady's face were priceless!

(The only reason it was on my list to get them out of that garden, was that I figured the chickens needed them more than the Flowering Dogwood did! Our chickens are mostly on pasture, but we have a coop and attached run for brooding and back-up.)

I was in a movie theater. About half way through a cell phone rings,  then i can hear a jolly voice talking on the phone. A strong voice that can be heard through the whole auditorium. A familiar voice.

Then it starts

"DUDE, GET OFF THE PHONE!"

"YOU'RE SCREWING UP THE MOVIE!"

I look closer and see the guy on the phone. I then stand up and say

PEOPLE, THIS IS PAUL! FUCKING! WHEATON! YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY THAT HE IS ON THE PHONE, CAUSE WHEN HE IS ON THE PHONE, THINGS ARE HAPPENING AND THE WORLD IS BECOMING A BETTER PLACE. THE ONLY TIME TO GET CONCERNED IS WHEN HE IS NOT ON THE PHONE. ... SO SIT DOWN, BE HAPPY, AND SHUT THE FUCK UP!



if the story was true (which it's not), it probably would have worked...

I've spent a lot of time this week chopping and dropping weeds I don't want and encouraging plants I do want. I came in the other day needing to get right to work on dinner, and my son comes up to me and starts picking bed-straw leaves off me and says, "Mom, you've got to stop bringing your work home with you," in his usual, total deadpan way! I'd have laughed harder if I hadn't been so tired!

Jay Angler wrote:I've spent a lot of time this week chopping and dropping weeds I don't want and encouraging plants I do want. I came in the other day needing to get right to work on dinner, and my son comes up to me and starts picking bed-straw leaves off me and says, "Mom, you've got to stop bringing your work home with you," in his usual, total deadpan way! I'd have laughed harder if I hadn't been so tired!

It must be a boy thing. My then 8 yo told me one day “ Mom , you must be really bad at your job since all your patients die “.  
I’m a hospice nurse.

I put in a small plot of wheat last fall at a friend's property. Two days ago I biked over and harvested 1/2 of it, figuring it could just sit out for a couple of days before I worried about getting it home. As I was finishing the section I was working on, I looked up and saw dark clouds coming from the west. Now, technically, it wasn't calling for rain. Usually, it doesn't rain at this time of year. But I looked at those clouds and just *knew* that if I didn't get the wheat under cover, this would be the year we got a thunder storm. My friend has an oval garden table with a large market umbrella over it. I stacked the bundles of wheat on the table around the umbrella pipe and tied it in place with a kids skipping rope.

Today I went back with a vehicle to harvest the rest of the wheat and bring it home. Adam saw me and said, "I just *loved* that beautiful center piece you left on the table!"

Years ago when my husband worked in IT, we used to get meat chicks through a local shop and hubby would pick them up on his way home from work.

The shop called to say the chicks had arrived.
I emailed hubby and put, "pick up chicks" in the subject line.
The shop called again as he hadn't arrived and it was getting close to closing.
This time I called hubby - the email had got caught by the spam filter. Duh! I was very careful about wording emails about baby birds from that point on.

Jay Angler wrote:
I emailed hubby and put, "pick up chicks" in the subject line. ... Duh! I was very careful about wording emails about baby birds from that point on.

Yup, my husband was good at picking up chicks too...

I rebuilt my driveway, and I ended up putting a pretty big ditch in it to get water to move, enough so I had to build a walking bridge, and one to drive my tractor on. So my friend came to visit, and asked me, "So what are you doing, building a moat?" To which I said, "Yeah, to keep out riff-raff from Jackson, but I see you made it across".

Obviously, he lives in Jackson, a town that is about 100 feet away from my home so there is a little rivalry between my town and that town.

I'm doing a huge project trying to prune back 100 ft of overgrown cedar hedge. One of my husband's egg customers showed up to collect his regular egg order and said to him, "I see your business is branching out." Hubby replied, "no, we're more de-branching at the moment," to which Len replied with no hesitation,"well, just don't go out on a limb." Guys - what are you going to do with them???

My sister is a Cardiologist and she was telling me one day that "80% of her patients die". I said...

"That is quite the gig, I am a welder, and if 80% of my welds failed; I would be fired."

(Note to people of Permies: Never have a heart attack if you are in Alaska.)

My Brother-In-Law is a Commercial Fishing Captain up in Alaska, and he was trying to tell me how much money I could make working aboard his ship because I was an Engineer on Tug Boats for quite awhile. I loved the job, but my sailing days are over...

So I told him, "I was not born with web feet".

I walked in the door and this was what I immediately encountered. My kids didn't mean it to be this creepy but damn this was creepy!

I remember an occasion when I was in a bit of a daydream....on my way to post a letter and eating a banana.

In a split second I had posted the banana and bit the letter!   🤪

I stayed at a hotel a couple weeks ago. I always take my breakfast because they rarely have options I can eat or that are healthy but I usually grab a banana on my way out. This time all I could see at a glance was a variety of overcooked / processed food (think stale danishes and rubbery eggs) so I asked the woman at the front desk if they had any fruit because I hadn't seen any. She gave me a blank look and said "we only serve breakfast." I started to respond and then realized it was pointless.

If someone pulls in the driveway, and my house is a mess, I will quickly fill the sink with water and dump in some bleach (so they smell it) and say, "Oh, I was just getting ready to clean." If they are good friends, this at least gives them the impression you were about to clean. Now if I do not want the people hanging around I will go a step further. "I am so glad you showed up. You do not mind helping me clean up this place do you? That would be so helpful!" If you say that, they always have someplace else they have to be. (LOL)

I think in Maine their are about a dozen of us people that all look the same. Yes, I feel bad for all those other people who must have a face like mine because I constantly hear, "Haven't I seen you before somewhere?"

I got kind of tired of it, so now I say with a straight face, "Well I was in the pornography industry for years, you probably have seen some of my videos."

THAT ends that conversation pretty quick.

A somewhat dumb/embarassing memory from my hippy days....

I shared a squat with some friends.  Typically, we regularly got stoned and weren't too bothered/mindful about keeping the place er...spick and span (shall we say!)

In the bathroom, the carpet was always wet...not just by the bath but mysteriously sodden/saturated all over.  No one really bothered to find out why until one day I looked into the bucket that collected water leaks from the boiler there...er....
there was a CRACK in the bottom of the bucket!  

Amy Francis wrote:A somewhat dumb/embarassing memory from my hippy days....

I shared a squat with some friends.  Typically, we regularly got stoned and weren't too bothered/mindful about keeping the place er...spick and span (shall we say!)

In the bathroom, the carpet was always wet...not just by the bath but mysteriously sodden/saturated all over.  No one really bothered to find out why until one day I looked into the bucket that collected water leaks from the boiler there...er....
there was a CRACK in the bottom of the bucket!  

Well thanks for the visual Amy! I represent that greatly!

When I put in my propane boiler for my heating system, I forgot that propane requires a drain for the moisture in the fuel, unlike oil heat which I am more used to.

So I just collected the boiler water with a bucket. In some ways it was nice, I could tell how much propane I was burning through depending how often I emptied the bucket. But then when I went to sell my house last year, like after 13 years of dumping boiler water, I knew I had to do something for the new homeowners.

In the end, it cost me $15 and about 20 minutes of time to hook up a drain into my washing machine drain. 13 years of dumping a 5 gallon bucket, and all the times it ran over and flooded the floor, etc for $15 and 15 minutes of my time! (Dumb Travis)

I am not big on fishing, not that I have anything against it, it is just that I cannot stand still long enough to wait for a fish to bite my line. But I LOVE fish! I am also a pretty good cook, so I will say something like, "Oh we had some really nice fish last night", and they will ask, "What lake did you get it from", and I say "Lake Hannaford."

Hannaford is our local grocery store chain! :-)

Travis Johnson wrote:I am not big on fishing, not that I have anything against it, it is just that I cannot stand still long enough to wait for a fish to bite my line. But I LOVE fish! I am also a pretty good cook, so I will say something like, "Oh we had some really nice fish last night", and they will ask, "What lake did you get it from", and I say "Lake Hannaford."

Hannaford is our local grocery store chain! :-)

Ha!  At least that's a slightly better answer than this...

A child was asked where does milk come from?

Proudly he replied "the supermarket!"

I have (4) daughters, and I often get their names mixed up, so I decided I ought to do the same as I do for my sheep: so I call them by number. #1, #2, #3, and #4.

It actually works, but people in the store look at you funny. "get back here number four"!

With the sheep I just impressed people with that trick. They would ask, "Wow, you know their numbers just by looking at them? They look all white to me. You must really know your sheep." I would just nod, because I was just calling out random numbers to make it sound good!

We don't generally get a lot of snow in my area, (read: therefore there's not a lot of snow equipment to deal with it if there is.) My sister lives in Ontario, which is known for more snow. When I emailed her that we had about a foot of snow, she replied, "The BC government wants you to stay home.  Ferries are being cancelled.  The Calgary zoo is keeping the penguins indoors this week due to cold."

Her last sentence threw us for a loop!

My Friend: Did you put some daffodil bulbs in your hanging basket?
Me, rather sheepishly: Ah, no, those are garlic sprouts.
My Friend: Gives me an exasperated look...

But really, I was given a garlic bulb that was already sprouting. What else could I do but plant it?

Reviving the real life jokes thread, because I could not make this stuff up.

Today I need to make pesto.
Not want to, not even (really) have time to, but have to nonetheless.

Yesterday we came back from a weekend at the beach and worked in the house during the afternoon, cleanup up front and garden work out back. We left dinner til the last minute, and it was already dark (this is our first summer in Brazil without daylight savings time, so it is not even dark late) when I ran out to get scallions.
Instead I got a gigantic spider web right across the face, that kind that is sort of resistant even to a large person's weight and you think somewhere in your lizard brain "man that must be a big spider", which of course was my cue to freak out. I was aware enough to avoid flailing into my beloved yardlong beans, but instead managed to lose my balance and fall down right on top of a couch-sized basil plant growing in a container. Which is now is totally splattered.

Many years ago in the US I had a farmshare and after a fun day picking peppers the owner said that taking embarrassing falls in the rows is a consecrated part of farming, so I guess I've finally made it.

Tereza's given me an idea - I wonder how basil would like growing in my planter beside/between the garlic? Anybody know?

I put garlic in with everything, since I usually have sprouting cloves to find a home for. At this moment I have it growing alongside sunflowers, romaine, okra, sage, papayas, asian eggplant, and maybe a cucumber. I grow it for the greens, so I don't know if there are any "bad relationships" that might affect bulbs. Just try not to fall on it, which can't be good.

John F Dean wrote this in the jokes thread:

You are presented with a bathtub full of water.   And, you are given a spoon, a cup, and a bucket.

How would you empty the tub?  .......................................................................................................
...............................................................................................A normal person would pull the plug.

https://permies.com/t/560/13290/jokes#1066151

All I could think of was - think of how many plants I could water with all those buckets of water?  The cup would be for when the water got too low for the bucket to be useful. The spoon - forget it, I'm not *that* desperate - even in August.

Hubby runs a small, farm-gate duck and chicken egg business and he takes orders because he doesn't like people wasting gas driving around to find farm-gate eggs. He got the following "auto-mistake" message the other day:

"Need

2 dozen duck eggs
1 dozen children

Whenever it’s possible

Many thanks"

Hubby replied that a dozen children was just *not* happening at our farm - he'd have to try some other suppliers!

These make me think of Monty Python's "I'm not dead yet!"