All Grown Up! Puns

"That's why it's called adult super-vision."

I'm quite the music history buff- always have been. My first inkling as a college student was to explore turning this into a career. So I found a music museum, wrote an impassioned essay, and somehow landed the 12-week internship.

When I got there, I met the curator, a woman named Rhonda. Like me, she had grown up enjoying music and always wanting to know more. Thanks to grants and donors' generosity, she had helped continue the museum's legacy of showcasing what might otherwise be lost to history.

The tradition of the museum had always been to let the interns work in the orchestral wing. My assignment in particular was the string section.

Now I didn't know a whole lot about the string family, but I saw some really fine specimens and decided we could perhaps tell a broader story about the progression of the instruments. And so I began studying.

After about a week of studying, I went to Rhonda and asked if we could do something different here. She was very receptive to the idea and introduced me to her assistant, Dr. Will. His PhD was in history, natch, but he still relished having everyone call him Doctor. It was funny.

Dr. Will helped me learn so much about how the family of instruments developed over time, their overall cultural footprint, etc.

Did you know a fiddle and a violin are the same thing? Did you know the viola family dates back to the 16th C.? Vivaldi wrote 25 cello concertos!

I dazzled visitors with tales of the Stradivarius, Amati and Guarneri families. I noted the increase in neck length over time. I reassured them that despite the name catgut, no cat intestines were used in the creation of these instruments—but it sure might be sheep or goat.

Sadly, 12 weeks goes by quickly when you're having fun, and I got enthusiastic letters of recommendation from Rhonda and Dr. Will, and I do miss them. Hello, you two.

I figured I could waltz (sorry) right in to more museum jobs later, but boy, was I mistaken.

I kept interviewing for the job, but after about the 10th cold shoulder, I had to find out what I was doing wrong. I had done such a good job, after all, right??????

So I fucking called the museum

got the guy who interviewed me on the line—and he wasn't thrilled to even talk to me. But I asked him, sir, why didn't I even get a call back? Weren't my qualifications good?

He said, yes, BUT.......

"...we simply can't hire someone who has exhibited a history of violins."

Not quite as tragic, but it manifested into something which has haunted me at my job for years.

When I was a little kid learning about the world around me, my dad was naturally the font of all knowledge for me, He would answer all of little snippersmith's questions with his own unique insights and anecdotes teaching me of my surroundings with varying degrees of accuracy.

One day In a picture book, I encountered a photo of one of natures most bizarre creatures, the mighty duck billed platypus. Filled with curiosity of this bizarre creature and an Inability to read a young snippersmith asked his father what this creature was called, To which his father replied,

That's a Quackopotamous.....

As is a highly likely situation in day to day life the Platypus (or indeed the Quackopotamous), did not come into conversation for another 17 years, Until of course the Platypus came into conversation around the lunch table at a now grown up snippersmith's full time place of work.

I have not been allowed to forget I thought the Platypus was called a Quackopotamous, Indeed I am reminded on a daily basis by my colleagues, by my nickname Quackopotamous .

Thanks Dad.

EDIT 1: Holy Cow this took off! Gold! thank you so much.

This is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, after the story ends. After chopping down the beanstalk, Jack realizes that he’s actually pretty damn good with an axe, and casual vegetative vandalism really struck his fancy, so he began chopping down other trees for a living. He became a traveling woodsman, and he enjoyed many years of his simple life of manual labor.

One day, as he chops wood, he hears screams from a nearby cottage. Hurriedly breaking in (because recall: jack has no problem with entering houses uninvited), he sees a cross dressing lycanthrope attempting to devour a little girl dressed all in red and her little grandmother too. Wielding his trusty axe, Jack murdered yet another fantasy creature, and safely led Little Red all the way back home. Answering the door was a beautiful woman of around his age. After sending Little Red to bed, the two of them talked for hours.

One thing led to another, and a year later they were married with a child on the way. They had a beautiful little boy named Jack Junior who followed in his father’s steps to become a woodsman. This was fortunate, because as Junior grew up, Jack was feeling the pain of his previous adventures. An old back injury from jumping from the beanstalk was haunting him, and over time his posture grew more and more hunched. He had a tough time working, but at least Junior was becoming a strapping young man.

One day, Jack and Junior took the long road to the grandmothers place to bring her a meal, just like that fateful trio Red took so many years ago. When they arrived, the grandmother greeted them cheerily, welcoming them in and making conversation. “Oh Junior,” she said, “you’ve grown into such a handsome and strong young man. It’s so kind of you to handle all the work so your poor father, with his bad back and all, doesn’t have to. Why don’t you have a girlfriend yet?” Junior hesitated. “Well Grandma,” he replied. “It’s because... I’m gay”. The close-minded, set-in-her-ways grandma’s expression became stormy. She pulled poor hunched-over Jack into adjacent room, and whispered angrily: “Jack, your life is a mess! Your posture is terrible and your son isn’t giving me any grandsons!” Jack replied: “Ma, we’re happy, you can’t just-“ But she interrupted. “No excuses!” She snapped. “You need to straighten your lumbar, Jack!”

Context, we had family over my parent's house and were talking about what all us kids have been up too since we are grown now. They were talking about my cousin that just became an RN when I dropped gold that wasn't appreciated.

Cousin: "Yeah, she is doing great down in Florida now at a great hospital. She's a nurse on a really prestigious floor."

Me: "Hmm, must be made of marble or something."

My cousin: "Huh?"

Me: "It's a prestigious floor. It must be made of marble or something."

No one got it.

Recently, Joe has been under the slight suspicion that his wife is cheating on him. So, one day he comes home early from work, to his crap-shoot apartment on the eighth floor, and hears her scurrying around when he enters. Almost as if there's another person in the house. When he calls out her name she hollers back that she just ran into the shower. So he investigates the bedroom and encounters a shocking surprise... a pair of hands dangling from the other side of the window sill! Those of a grown man, hanging on for dear life. Infuriated at the sight of the man who's sleeping with his wife, Joe takes the bedside lamp and starts bashing the guy's fingers until he falls eight stories onto the sidewalk. Only he's still alive, writhing and broken. So Joe hauls the refrigerator from the kitchen out the window, sending it down onto the poor sucker, killing him instantly. Now the hysteria of the moment induces a fatal heart attack and Joe himself, dies. So now, as he's up at the pearly gates, St. Peter is telling all the incoming souls that in order to gain access into heaven, they need to provide a solid account of how they died. After hearing Joe's story, St. Peter allows him in. The next man in line says that he was tanning in the sun, drunk, on the roof of his apartment building when he fell off, only to catch hold of a window sill that could have saved his life, until a crazed bastard beat his fingers and threw a refrigerator onto him. St. peter tells him that he's a shoe-in. And when he asks the next guy in line how he ended up deceased, the guy replies, "...So I'm naked in a refrigerator, right?"