Caution, Wet Floor

I had this coworker a while back. We’ll call him Zee. Zee was interesting in a few different ways. I mean, this guy was just a hodgepodge of bad habits and sharing the wrong bits of information. He shared the details of he and his wife's Valentine's day. Or maybe it was the anniversary, either way it was a bit much to hear behind the counter during a work shift. He would go back and forth from trying to be everyone's friend and share a ton of his projects like his prog metal band or his sketch comedy group, and then would get overly serious and act like he owned the branch. It was weird being around him for a full shift.

He would tell you about how creative he was and all the things he wanted to do. And he would tell you how sure he was of his vision, and how creative he was, and how funny some of his ideas were. And then he would tell you a joke and it would be awful. Or better yet, it'd be a joke you'd heard before but he'd tell it wrong.

Like this one he tried this one time, I remember, his joke was , "What's the difference between Jews and pizzas?" Pause. "Jews don't scream when you pull them out of the oven. No, wait." He knew that he had screwed it up, but it actually made an otherwise bit of unnecessary racism actually funny to me. I was like, Jesus, what kind of pizzas do you have at your house? Like, what if that was normal, like you're sitting at your house and you just hear a random shriek from the kitchen, and the first thought in your mind is, “Hey, y’all makin’ pizza tonight?!”

Sometimes things are only funny because you had to be there.

There’s a phrase that hangs around a lot of jokes that people tell. The phrase is, “You just had to be there.” There are a lot of versions to this phrase, but they all amount to the same basic principle: This is an inside joke, that has context that you will not understand unless you know the people, place, or things involved. They are jokes that basically no one will find funny other than a select few people that know or experienced something specific.

Then again, inside jokes are kind of what all jokes are, when you think about it, because you have to know some kind of context for really anything to be funny. Context is the key. Whether you’re making fun of something or you’re referencing something ironically or you’re just being goofy, most of the time it’s only funny if you know what is being referenced. If I show you Abbott and Costello’s bit, “Who’s on first?” and you don’t know anything about baseball or what names people usually have, the joke doesn’t make much sense, does it? You have to understand the setting of what something is supposed to be before you can go into why something is different.

A pie and a face? Not inherently funny. A pie in the face? It’s funny to some people, kinda played out to others. Same with someone getting punched in the face. Some things just work with certain people, which may very well turn back to our own experiences, I don’t know. Obviously there’s no formula for figuring out what’s funny to which people, what stuff we should all find funny, blah blah blah. But as much as we laugh at things because they were going the way the joke is supposed to go, sometimes we laugh even harder at things that are going the wrong way. Yes, sometimes failures and screw ups are just as funny, or even funnier than the intended thing was supposed to be.

Things that you witness are usually pretty hard to explain why they were hilarious if you don’t have a way to fully relate what was going on or who was involved. Even a picture or a video rarely does the situation actual justice.

I’ll tell you a story now.

I was out with some friends of mine in college, and we went to this Mexican restaurant on the edge of campus that didn’t card. We went there because we were all underage, or only one of us had an ID, I forget how it worked. But we went there and drank, and we were too young to do it legally. The place was known for it’s margaritas. It was also known for serving underagers those margaritas. Believe it or not, the place is no longer in business. Before you ask, no, it was because they were busted for serving underage drinkers. They actually had huge shootout that happened there, too. Or whatever, I just know they closed years ago, that’s not the point.

I had just met these new friends, and was just getting to know them as they were getting to know me. But I was the new one in a group that had been around each other for a few years, and I was constantly caught off guard by them. For one, they were all Packer fans. I had come from Texas to college and was still a Cowboys fan. I didn’t know all the same people as they did, I didn’t watch all the same shows, I was in different types of classes, stuff like that. In fact, I remember being somewhat intimidated by these friends I had just made. They were all really smart and really passionate about what they were studying in school. Mitch and Dylan were studying engineering, Breah was a year ahead in Business school, Luca was building racing car motors, and Karen was into Veterinary science. Me, I was between majors at the time. I ran track and field at our school and I worked with Dylan at football games up in the club seats, but not much else was solid in my future plans. So yeah, that’s what I had to talk about.

But there was one thing I discovered at this Mexican restaurant that I could definitely do with these kids: drink.

We started in on those margaritas and we just did not let up. I think we got them in pitchers rather than individual drinks, and we basically each had our own pitcher by the end of it. And this was on a weeknight, I very clearly remember this coming on a night that I still had homework to get done before class the next day, this was not ideal. But it all just escalated quickly. It went from, “No, I’m not drinking” to “Well, I’ll have one if you guys are just having one” to “One or two more won’t hurt anything” to “Where the hell is our table? Do we still have our table?” These drinks were not playing around, I can remember that much. Their kung-fu was strong. There may have been some tequila shots too, not sure.

Anyway, we get up to leave. And we were, to put it mildly, 'feeling it'. It was sometime around November or December, because it was the first snow of the season, but it was this nasty rain slush that was coming down. Tough to walk in, tough on the eyes and face, it was windy too, so this just sucked to be out in. So what we did is cut through a building on the first block out that was on our way home, which allowed us to be inside for at least a little longer. This building had an art gallery that was actually open at the time, so naturally there were these classy types having a nice little cocktail mixer, enjoying fine art. And in comes 5 noisy drunken undergrads, talking shit about each painting like we know what era and techniques each of them entail. I’m not sure if we tried to stay and order drinks or not, I just remember that we were essentially ushered out of the building, as politely as possible. Or we just kept walking and didn’t try to stop, either scenario is equally likely. But this detour was notable for one other reason. I may have borrowed something on my way out.

When we left the building and began walking again in the slush again, a young couple was walking across the sidewalk, in front of us. I held up the yellow fold-up sign I had taken from the building that read “Caution: Wet Floor.” I announced the words of this to the couple, who turned around, surprised. Then, as politely as I think anyone ever could have been, they just waved and said, “Oh, thank you,” as if this was a revelation to them. Well, the rest of the group saw this and thought this was a ridiculous and completely unnecessary. And so we decided to keep doing it to everyone else on the way home. Basically, every passing person or group of people and every car got the same announcement of a wet floor. And with one exception, everyone was really nice about it, and said thank you. There was one couple that did look at us like we were nuts, which was probably the funniest part of all of it. But even passing cars just had people wave and laugh at us.

Why was this funny to me? Well, perhaps it was the fact that literally no one needed us to know that the ground was wet, and it was a goofy way of trying to feel better about crappy weather. Maybe it was the idea that I was hanging out with these brilliant kids, and yet they were all acting just as dumb as I was at the moment, and that years later I still talk with some of them about nights just like this. And again, maybe we were just really, really drunk. But this is one of my best memories from college and it came from something that probably makes no sense and isn’t funny if I tell you what happened with no context.

Guess you had to be there for it.