Punday Night: The Jerry Springer Show
Brought to you by Pun of the Day: Those new courier companies are always pushing the envelope. A carpenter sat on his drill and was bored to tears. A painter’s joke may be off-color while a cook’s might be tasteless. A plumber struggled to replace a tight washer because he didn’t want to faucet. He couldn’t figure out how to fix the washing machine so he threw in the towel. My new expensive vacuum cleaner really sucked. And then there was the roofer who came down with the shingles. When a fire broke out in the barber shop it was a close shave but everyone got out by a whisker. Old fire fighters never die, they just do asbestos they can. An insulting telegram is a barbed wire.It turns out that the “Old King Cole” of nursery rhyme fame is loosely based on a 14th century ruler.
The slightly mad monarch is best known for his decree that the entire fiefdom’s crop of lettuce be diced and drenched in mayonnaise.
He called it, of course, Cole’s Law.
Have I mentioned that I work backstage at the Jerry Springer show? I haven’t? Well, I do.
Allow me to demonstrate. My ninja-assassin superwaitress, Jamie, has a brother whom we’ll call Jeb. Jeb is a douchebag. He’s a decent enough douchebag, but you know, he’s ignorant trailer-trash who slaps his women around. Just to have in the restaurant as a regular customer, he’s decent enough, but you know. Douchebag. So, Jeb got hooked up with a gal I used to work with in another restaurant, and we warned him, she’s a skenk. I mean, seriously. Professional skenk. He paid no attention and stayed with her, and was miserable, like we told him he would be, and finally, he dumped her. Skenk, being the nasty, lying whore that she is, immediately accused him of molesting her kids, to get even with him.
Now, I’ll freely admit, Jeb’s a top-notch trailer-trash asshole. Smacks his women, lies, is lazy, etc. But! For all his faults, he does not molest children. Everyone who knows Jeb can agree with this. And it’s not one of those, “Omigawd, I would never have believed he could do that, I’m so shocked!” kind of deals, it’s straight up. He wouldn’t do that. Besides that, Skenk has a long history of lying about the men who dump her nasty ass. She told everyone that her last husband beat her. I’ve known her ex-husband for ten years, and he does not hit women, period.
So, child-molestation charges have been pressed against Jeb, by Skenk. Jamie is understandably distraught. (Besides that, Jamie has been suffering other family drama: mother and sister both have cancer, grandma’s in the hospital not doing so well, ex-husband is allowing a known, convicted child-molester who molested her kid before to tuck the victim-child into bed at night when the kid’s over for visitation, and on, and on, and on. Plus, she’s been working herself into the ground, and her back is about to give out again — ruptured disk and herniated disk that she can’t afford to have fixed. Lots going on, there.) Meanwhile, we hired Jeb’s ex-wife, Misery, to wait tables for us. Misery is a professional victim, and dumb as a bag of hammers. Seems nice enough, but nuts.
Misery’s mother, who is certifiably insane, has forced Misery to revoke visitation with their son, because of the charges, which would be understandable, except even the prosecutor in Jeb’s case has told Misery and her mother that such a step is unnecessary, due to the fact that the charges are bullshit. Misery’s mother is doing this just to be a controlling twat. She runs her daughter into the ground, threatening to take her kids away every time Misery so much as thinks of defying her mother.
So, with all this going on, Jeb, who is a regular customer, has decided not to talk to Misery when he comes in to eat, which has been driving Misery insane. She’s been weeping and useless and chain-smoking, missing days, coming in late, barely doing her job when she does show up. Jamie’s been on a psycho hair-trigger, and been getting on everyone’s case all week, including Misery’s — no more or less than anyone else’s, though. But Misery, being insane, has developed a persecution complex regarding this, and has been holding entire conversations with thin air over how persecuted she is at work. I’ve seen that for myself. I’d even mentioned it to the Boss, saying, “You know, maybe we should fire her next time she’s late. She ain’t wrapped tight.”
Saturday night, Jamie finds out about her ex-husband and the child molester around her kids, and comes into work wired for cable. She was a ticking bomb. I had Friday off, but Misery is going on and on about how mean everyone was to her the day before, talking to me about as though I were there and allowed it to go on, even though I wasn’t there, and had gently reminded her of that fact repeatedly.
Along with all of this, there had been a big Easter Passion Play that night, and we were expecting a hellafied dessert rush to come rampaging in the front doors any second now. I innocently take three minutes to go to the bathroom, and while I’m in there, shit hits the fan, and Jamie and Misery burst into a screaming, slapping, punching catfight. The cook and the dishwasher dragged them apart. I come out of the bathroom, find this, and am, like, WTF?
Now I’ve got two servers, both of whom are bloody, and crying and separated. I try talking to Jamie, and she says Misery attacked her. I try talking to Misery, and she’s going on and on about stuff that — blatantly — never happened. I can see that she thinks it’s happened, things like Jeb starting fights with her, and Jamie throwing dishes at her all night, and other things, but these things never happened. I was there all night. There all week, in fact. This shit never happened. Misery is clearly making things up, and clearly believes them. Misery didn’t work Thursday, so stuff didn’t happen then, and Mary was running shift Friday, and I know she wouldn’t have allowed fighting and dish-throwing to go on. No way. I was there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and no fighting or dish-throwing happened any of those days, either.
Okay. So, Misery is nuts. I send her home, and tell her to take it up with the Boss in the morning. She leaves, and immediately calls the cops, which she tells me when she calls to ask if she can come back and get her purse. Meanwhile, Jamie calls the cops, too, so now I’ve got a monster dessert rush coming in the door, and cops interviewing my lead waitress in the back, and no one on the floor but me, a trainee, and the cook, who used to be a manager six years ago. Damn!
After everything settles down, and desserts are taken care of, I quietly interview the witnesses to the fight, and now it’s starting to sound like Jamie did, indeed, start the fight, which surprises me not at all, because, like I said, Jamie’s my ninja-assassin psycho superwaitress. But, by now, we’re almost closed, and I decided, all right, I’ll keep Jamie on, get the place closed, and the Boss can deal with this shit in the morning.
Sunday afternoon, Easter, I show up, and find that the Boss has fired the both of them. Fighting for any reason, regardless of who started it and why, is unacceptable. I agree. I hate to lose Jamie, but the Boss is right.
So, no more superwaitress. Did I mention she was also a good friend? And the part where she seems to think I sold her out and let her get fired, and blames me for losing her job? Yeah, that felt great.
Backstage. Jerry Springer Show. I wasn’t exaggerating. On top of all this, it’s been a generally craptastic week, both at home, and at work. So, on that note, we’d better have a couple more puns.
Mercy Hospital in Chicago is run by a group of nuns who came from Australia. Through the years the years they have gone out of their way to maintain ties with their native land — putting up a large map of the country in the recpetion area, and serving Australian tea from tins decorated with koala bears.
One night a patient calls a nun into his room and tells her how much he likes the hospital and the care. But he has one small complaint: he found some leaves in his tea.
“Oh,” the nun says, “the koala tea of Mercy is not strained.”There was a snake called Nate. His purpose in life was to stay in the desert and guard the lever. This lever was no ordinary lever. It was the lever that if moved would destroy the world. Nate took his job very seriously. He let nothing get close to the lever.
One day off in the distance he saw a cloud of dust. He kept his eye on it because he was guarding the lever. The dust cloud continued to move closer to the lever. Nate saw that it was a huge boulder and it was heading straight for the lever!
Nate thought about what he could do to save the world. He decided if he could get in front of the boulder he could deflect it and it would miss the lever. Nate slithered quickly to intersect the boulder. The boulder ran over Nate, and it was, in fact, deflected, leaving history to conclude that is was better Nate than lever.
