Greetings on this last day of the work week, (you remember when you didn’t work from home and went to the office and loved that feeling of going home on Friday evening?) and so, I need to say TGIF. We have to mark the passing of time, even in these times. We are on the full moon (the Flower Moon) and halfway through the month of Ramadan. It’s early May and only about 5 weeks away from the summer solstice! Hooray!
This is going to be some sort of a special edition of my weekly message. It was 25 years ago that this hobby began when I worked at our WFP HQers in Rome. So, I think that a quarter of a century is a good time to celebrate this accidental hobby.
Fifty years ago on May 4th, 1970, 4 innocent student protesters at Kent State University were shot dead by the national guard in Ohio. That led to the closing of many universities in the days that followed, including the one I was attending as a freshman. That meant that the class of 1970 did not have a graduation. Now, 50 years later, that same class does not have a 50-year class reunion! How unbelievable is that! I also feel really sorry for the high school and college graduates of 2020, who will not likely have that celebration of a graduation this year. What’s more, the high school graduates of 2020 were 9/11 babies! Hard to believe!
The last 3 pages of this issue will be about the origins and history of my TGIF messages. I hope you enjoy it and the trivia quiz that follows that. Please submit your guesses to me at my tgifjeff@gmail.com address. It’ll be fun to see who gets the most correct.
Things are starting to open up here in Vermont, little by little. Last week it was Farmer’s Markets and this week it is some state parks, trails, tennis courts and golf courses. I actually walked the front nine at my course today. It was sunny, a bit breezy and about 60 degrees. So, it was nice. I even played pretty well for the first time in awhile.
But, for the most part, we still have to be careful and get through this, as best we can.
1. Until further notice the days of the week are now called thisday, thatday, otherday, someday, yesterday, today, and nextday!
2. Can we uninstall 2020 and reinstall it again?... I think it has a virus ...
3. Just asked a 6 year old if he understands why there is no school. He said yes because they are out of toilet paper.
4. On the bright side, I am no longer calling this shelter-in-place. I am an artist-in-residence.
5. After years of wanting to thoroughly clean my house but lacking the time, this week I discovered that wasn’t the reason.
6. Where is your next travel destination?
- Las Kitchenas
- Los Lounges
- Santa Bedroomes
- Porto Gardenas
- Los Bed
- Costa del Balconia
- St Bathroom
- La Rotonda de Sofa
7. You’re not stuck at home, you’re safe at home. One word can change your attitude and one cough can change your life.
8. Coronavirus has turned us all into dogs. We roam the house all day looking for food. We’re told “no” if we get too close to strangers and we get really excited about car rides.
9. If you thought toilet paper was crazy ... just wait until 300 million people all want a haircut appointment.
10. 2020 is a unique Leap Year. It has 29 days in February, 300 days in March and 5 years in April.
11. Wearing a mask inside your home is now highly recommended. Not so much to prevent COVID-19 but to stop eating.
12. This cleaning with alcohol is total B.S. NOTHING gets done after that first bottle.
13. Kinda’ starting to understand why pets try to run out of the house when the door opens.
14. Does anyone know if we can take showers yet or should we just keep washing our hands???
15. You think it’s bad now? In 20 years our country will be run by people home-schooled by day drinkers….
16. Homeschooling Day #3: they all graduated. #Done.
17. Day 7 at home and the dog is looking at me like, “See? This is why I chew the furniture.”
18. My Mom always told me I wouldn’t accomplish anything by lying in bed all day; but look at me now! I’m saving the world!
19. I miss the days when we were terrified of Romaine lettuce. Ahh, the good times….
20. Whoever owes you money, go to his house now. He should be home.
* * * * * * * *
It’s been awhile since I featured an Ole and Sven joke. But I had not seen this one before.
Ole and Sven
Ole and Sven were drinking buddies who worked as aircraft mechanics in Minneapolis and one day the airport was fogged in and they were stuck in the hangar with nothing to do.
Ole said, "I vish ve had somethin ta drink!"
Sven says, "Me too. Y'know, I hear ya can drink dat jet fuel and get a buzz. Ya vanna try it?"
So they pour themselves a couple of glasses of high octane hooch and got completely smashed.
Next morning Ole woke up and is surprised at how good he feels. In fact he feels GREAT! NO hangover! NO bad side effects. Nothing!
The phone rang. It was Sven who asks "How iss you feelin dis mornin?"
Ole says, "I feel great. How bout you?"
Sven says, "I feel great, too. Ya don't have no hangover?"
Ole says, "No dat jet fuel iss great stuff -- no hangover, nothin. Ve oughta do dis more often."
Sven agreed."Yeah, vell, but dere's yust vun ting."
Ole asked, "Vat's dat?"
Sven questioned, "Haff you farted yet?"
Ole stopped to think. "No "
"Vell, DON'T, 'cause I'm in Iowa!"
* * * * * * * *
Frozen Crabs, ......the Lawyer and the Blonde Flight Attendant.
A lawyer boarded an airplane in New Orleans with a box of frozen crabs and asked the blonde stewardess to take care of them for him.
She took the box and promised to put it in the crew's refrigerator.
He advised her that he was holding her personally responsible for them staying frozen, mentioning in an arrogant manner that he was a lawyer and threatened what would happen to her if she let them thaw out.
Shortly before landing in New York, she used the intercom to announce to the entire cabin, "Would the lawyer who gave me the crabs in New Orleans, please raise your hand?"
Not one hand went up... So she took them home and ate them.
There are two lessons here:
1. Lawyers aren't as smart as they think they are.
2. Blondes aren't as dumb as most folks think.
* * * * * * * *
Murder at Costco
Tired of constantly being broke and stuck in an unhappy marriage, a young husband decided to solve both problems by taking out a large insurance policy on his wife with himself as the beneficiary and then arranging to have her killed.
A 'friend of a friend' put him in touch with a nefarious dark-side underworld figure who went by the name of 'Artie.'
Artie explained to the husband that his going price for snuffing out a spouse was $10,000.
The husband said he was willing to pay that amount but that he wouldn't have any cash on hand until he could collect his wife's insurance money.
Artie insisted on being paid at least something up front, so the man opened his wallet, displaying the single dollar bill that rested inside.
Artie sighed, rolled his eyes and reluctantly agreed to accept the dollar as down payment for the dirty deed.
A few days later, Artie followed the man's wife to the local Costco Supermarket. There, he surprised her in the produce department and proceeded to strangle her with his gloved hands.
As the poor unsuspecting woman drew her last breath and slumped to the floor, the manager of the produce department stumbled unexpectedly onto the murder scene. Unwilling to leave any living witnesses behind, ol' Artie had no choice but to strangle the produce manager as well.
However, unknown to Artie, the entire proceedings were captured by the hidden security cameras and observed by the shop's security guard, who immediately called the police. Artie was caught and arrested before he could even leave the premises.
Under intense questioning at the police station, Artie revealed the whole sordid plan, including his unusual financial arrangements with the hapless husband who was also quickly arrested.
The next day local newspaper headline declared...
"ARTIE CHOKES 2 for $1 @ Costco"
* * * * * * * *
The Origins and History of the Friday TGIF Message
(Reflections After 25 Years of Doing My Weekly Hobby)
I’d like to tell you a story about a hobby of mine that began quite accidentally 25 years ago. As you know, I worked for more than 30 years for the UN World Food Program, serving 5 countries in Africa, four in Asia and one 3-year tour of duty at WFP Headquarters in Rome, Italy. I was in Rome in 1995, at the time that all of us were being connected via email, and as we all know, one uses of email is to share humor and jokes we receive from friends. I had a dozen friends at HQ who would share jokes that we had received from outside of WFP. In April or May of 1995, my brother-in-law sent me a good joke. So, it was my turn to share it with these friends. I got the joke on a Friday and when I was preparing the joke to send, I had to put something in the subject line. I was a bit nervous about putting “Joke” there, as I didn’t know if “Big Brother” was in the WFP IT department. So, instead, since it was Friday – and I was happy about that – I simply put TGIF.
My international friends all enjoyed the joke, but it seemed that none of them knew what TGIF meant. For example, one guy replied to me that he really liked the joke but wondered what TGIF stood for. When I explained that it was short for “Thank God, It’s Friday”, he suggested that I send out a few jokes every Friday. And that’s how my hobby started, which has continued to the present, 25 years later.
To be a regular recipient of the TGIF message, I requested that members agree to forward to me any good jokes they receive from their friends. And each Thursday night after work, I would select new material received and cut and paste about 7 or 8 jokes onto a new TGIF message. I would then write my own introduction of 3 to 4 paragraphs, sharing family news, birthday greetings or commentary on the current news, or events or the weather.
My weekly TGIF message grew in readership from the original dozen WFP colleagues, as they started to share it with their friends and family and other WFP colleagues in duty stations in Asia and Africa and South America. In HQ back then, we only had 3 or 4 shared printers on each floor. One of the recipients would send the TGIF message to a printer and forget to pick it up. Other staff, looking for their print jobs, would pick it up from the printer and read it. Usually, they would then come to my office and ask me to add their email address to the list. So, within a year, I had nearly 200 colleagues in HQ who received it. They would then share it with some of the WFP country offices that they backstopped, as well as all of their own family and friends.
One Friday, I had not finished it on Thursday night and I planned on completing it during my lunch break. I got a call from a WFP colleague who wondered where it was, since he was getting anxious emails from colleagues in the field offices who hadn’t yet received it from him. On another Friday during the early days of the TGIF message, one friend told me that when he got home from work on Friday evening, he was met at his door by his wife who asked him for the copy of the TGIF that he would normally bring home with him. He had forgotten to pick it up at the printer and had to drive back to the office to get it for her.
Working for WFP meant serving in many challenging environments in the third world. Personally, I had always used my sense of humor to deal with stress and I realized that my weekly production of the TGIF message seemed to help my colleagues deal with their own challenges. It was important for their well-being to maintain their sense of humor in isolated or hardship duty stations. With the encouragement of the WFP staff association, WFP management hired a staff counselor to help WFP staff deal with all sorts of issues, including the stress of living and working in hardship duty stations. The staff counselor became a friend of mine and appreciated the TGIF message and the fact that so many staff received it. She would go to visit staff all over the world. When she would return, she would give me the names of staff she had met and asked me to add them to my TGIF master list.
In mid-1996, I left Rome for my new posting in Pakistan. I turned over the reins of the TGIF to a good friend who was remaining in Rome. He carried on the tradition for a few years, until he also was leaving Rome for a country office. He failed in his attempt to find a volunteer in HQ who would continue issuing a Friday TGIF message. By then, in 1998, WFP had introduced a common email system for the entire organization. So, as I didn’t want my “TGIF baby” to expire, I decided to do it from Pakistan.
The TGIF message became widely known in WFP and I did get some negative pushback from some in senior management, who thought that this was a “frivolous activity” that took time away from our mission. Each time I was confronted about this and encouraged to discontinue it, I also pushed back saying that I was spending my free time on this hobby outside of working hours and that I thought a lot of staff needed the humor that it provided them once per week. The staff counselor also strongly supported this hobby with senior management and I succeeded in keeping it going.
When I retired in mid-2009, many colleagues pleaded with me to keep doing the weekly messages from my home in Vermont. By then, despite that I was a senior official of the organization and had been a country director in my last four countries served, I was known throughout WFP as “TGI-Jeff”. I agreed to try and continue it from Vermont in retirement if someone within WFP would agree to receive it from me every early Friday morning and share it within the WFP email network. A friend in IT agreed and even started a TGIFblog that anyone can access and where he also posts the latest issue, adding it on to the blog.
It is now 2020 and it has been more-or-less 25 years since I started this hobby. It’s proven to be a very good “vehicle” for staying in touch with former colleagues and other friends from all over the world. Most every week I receive a short note from a few of the people who have been reading it over the years, with a word of thanks and some news of their family and lives. I have heard from some of my relatives that they really appreciate my personal notes in my introduction and admit that they don’t spend much time on reading all the jokes. Other friends have admitted to me that they skip over all that “intro stuff” and head straight for the jokes. And it seems that everyone has a slightly different sense of humor, and a different favorite joke that I’ve used. Over the years, I would plead with recipients to send me material, in order to pay up their TGIF dues, and threaten to kick them off the list, to the point of haranguing them. So, some would write me and apologize for never contributing anything; but still expressed thanks to me for continuing to do it and not removing them from the list.
However, it got to the point that I thought that I had seen every joke ever written down and that there were hardly any new jokes for me to use. Yet many members kept trying to contribute material for me to use, even though they had forgotten that I had used that joke already. So, I decided to end each week with what I called “The TGIF Golden Classic” – where I used these old jokes. Many old jokes are updated (recycled) to fit new current circumstances or situations. The one good thing about the effects of aging and struggling with memory issues is that many of the older persons who receive the TGIF message don’t remember having seen some of my material previously. Thank God for that!
The End
Trivia Questions related to the history of the TGIF:
1. How do I refer to the very first group of TGIF member/recipients?
2. Which brother-in-law sent me the very first joke that I used?
3. Who was that first joke about?
4. Can you tell that joke?
5. Who suggested that I should call myself “TGI-Jeff?
6. Who is the family relative who only reads my introduction parts and skips the jokes?
7. Who was my friend in WFP who took over the TGIF editing in Rome when I left?
8. What was the name of the WFP Staff Counselor?
9. Who was my WFP colleague who continued to share my TGIF within WFP after I retired?
10. Who proofread my TGIF messages prior to their issuance?
11. Who was my “TGIF Censor” during the first dozen years?
12. What did I call the area in my Springfield house where I composed the TGIF messages for the first 5 years of my retirement?
I will be impressed if you can answer 5 of the above questions correctly.
I will be extremely impressed if you know 6 or more correct answers.
I would imagine that very few people know more than 7, other than me.
If you want to try, please submit your guesses to me at tgifjeff@gmail.com
That means “please don’t reply to this email, but address a separate email to the above address.” Thanks.
Even you don’t know all of them, or half of them, submit your answers, so that I can see if you have been paying attention over all these years!
TGI-Jeff
