Note from Bob: This week, our long-time employee and office comedienne, Mary Nicholas, is our guest writer for the Thought for the Weekend. Enjoy!
Murphy and I are good friends. You probably know his laws, including: “If something embarrassing is going to happen, it’s going to happen to me!” Truer words have never been spoken. On a recent business trip to Bay City, Texas, I was looking forward to meeting Karla. Karla and I have worked together for years, but this would be our first meeting in person. I got dolled up for the meeting (first impressions and all that), and arrived at the restaurant she had chosen called The Fat Grass.
The name of the restaurant made me laugh. If Karla thought I was the kind of girl who likes to eat grass, greens, and salads, she had the wrong girl! I like my meat and potatoes, so I was greatly relieved when I arrived at the restaurant and saw that the menu included steaks and hamburgers. I had arrived early, so I decided to take a seat at the bar and have a rum and Diet Coke while I waited for Karla to find me. A few minutes later, she joined me at the bar, and we chatted there for a while like long lost friends. Then, I asked: “Would you like to eat at a table? Or should we stay at the bar?” We agreed to head on over to a table for dinner.
After more than an hour of my short legs dangling off that tall bar stool, unbeknownst to me, my foot had fallen asleep. I got off the bar stool in the Fat Grass and very promptly fell on my fat…ahem…derriere. Talk about embarr-ass-ing!!! It was my ego that was bruised more than anything else, so we continued on to dinner. Thankfully, the restaurant was nearly empty; had there been a bunch of hot men at the bar I might have had to fake a serious injury requiring mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. (Just kidding, hubby!)
Hayley Williams said: “Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”. Thankfully, I found out that I’m in good standing with Karla and her company. In fact, she gave me some more freight to work on. So, now you know the price I’ll pay to pick up more freight! I hope that Karla will remember me not as the girl who fell, but as the girl who got back up! In any case, the whole thing reminded of a joke I once heard from one of my pool buddies:
Two guys are out drinking when one of them falls off his bar stool and lies motionless on the floor.
“One thing about Fred,” his buddy says to the bartender. “He knows when to stop.”
I promise I really did have just that one drink! I wasn’t about to mess with Texas. In fact I swear, on the way to the restaurant I saw a sign that had an image of a police car with flashing lights. It read: “If you drink and drive, we’ll provide the chasers.”
As a woman who enjoys the occasional cocktail and who loves to play pool, I understand that things like falling off a bar stool can happen to anyone. When I had to admit to my friends and co-workers that I fell off a bar stool in front of a client, I put my hand up and said “Now, don’t judge!” As the story goes:
A man walks out of a bar and sees a bum panhandling on the corner. And the bum says, “Mister, can you spare a dollar?”
The man thinks about the question for a bit and asks the bum, “If I give you a dollar, are you going to use it to buy liquor?”
“No”, says the bum.
The man then asks the bum, “If I give you a dollar are you going to use it to gamble?”
“No”, says the bum.
So the man says to the bum, “Do you mind coming home with me so I can show my wife what happens to someone who doesn’t drink or gamble?”
Have a cold one this weekend,
~Mary
