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Conundrum

I have tried to accustom myself to medical waiting rooms.  It isn't easy.  And maybe not possible.

It is bad when all the magazines are intended to make good use of the time people have to spend there by educating them about kidney disease, or by convincing them to eat only the food labels that are printed on recyclable paper.

It is worst when the waiting room has a television set.  It is inevitably tuned to "daytime" TV.  Oh god!

Today there was no TV, and all the magazines were published before Gutenberg invented moveable type.  I focused my good eye on something in Guam, and listened to the conversation of two old guys who might have come for hearing tests.  One was a World War II veteran, and the other had apparently been born just a few months too late to have been shot at.

The Shipwrecked Sailor said, "I was in that lifeboat for seventy-two hours!"

"Holy cow!", his logical friend said.  "You didn't drown?"

It reminded me of the Norwegian joke about two farmers meeting in town:

"Hallo Olaf!  Is that you?  Are you here in town, too?"

The Shipwrecked Sailor was called by a Clipboard Engineer to his Interim Reward off to the left somewhere, so the Logician decided to talk to his wife.  They rehearsed something they had rehearsed before.  The Logician snorted of someone, "That woman didn't know what she was talking about!  She told me she didn't know.  That is how I know she didn't know!"


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