Workplace humour is a necessity

I couldn’t imagine the workplace without a sense of humour. Oh what a dull, dreary place it would be. Humour at work, in life, has to do with people, of course, and the way they come across. Some are fun to know because they are naturally witty while others manage to be desperately funny despite themselves.

As an example of the latter: many years ago, Mrs Jones upbraided my dour workmate Ben for his unintentional flatulence. “How dare you break wind before me,” she admonished, to which Ben responded, “Sorry, Mrs Jones, I didn’t know you wanted to!”

Touché.

My wife and I spent a lot of years operating a supermarket. With such a wide variety of personalities, staff and customer, there were many light moments (but I only have space to tell you a few):

We had a butcher’s shop on the premises, providing fresh meat to the town and the surrounding community. The butcher was a character, his apprentice even more so. One afternoon there was a shriek followed by gales of laughter from a couple of lady customers. I came around the end of an aisle at about the same time to find the women bent double, laughing at the apprentice. He had a cow’s tongue hanging from his mouth and a sign around his neck reading, “… and can breathe through my ears.”

All right. Make what you can of that, you awful lot!

Two women worked for us as casual shelf stackers when a truckload of goods arrived. One afternoon in the 1980s, one took a carton of a recently released product from the pallet, stopped and looked twice to be sure of what it was: Adhesive sanitary napkins. Turning to her companion, she asked, “But wouldn’t it hurt taking them off…?”

Anna came regularly from another town. She always brought Maria, her mother, a dear old soul of eastern European origin, as well as her two toddlers. One day as I walked into an aisle, I saw Anna bend to get a 10kg bag of rice from the bottom shelf. I told her to leave it, then picked it up and carried it to the checkout for her. As I leant forward to get the bag, Maria said,
“Thank you. Her piles not good now since she have her babies.”
Anna wailed, “Oh, M-U-U-U-UM…!!!”

Monday morning. Kerry, a really great customer and a funny, funny woman, too, came in to buy a pack of tampons on her way to work. They scanned at $34.50 instead of $3.45. Kerry said I could ring Mr Smith (at the warehouse) and tell him where he could stick his tampons. I did. Mr Smith said to pass on the message that it would be cheaper for Kerry to have a hysterectomy. I did. Quick as a flash, Kerry told me I might ring him back and tell him she hoped his wife sat on a tube of super glue! Mr Smith gave up at that point, laughing his head off.

Then there was the day Gina came in and asked if we had any idea why her son, Paul, no longer liked pumpkin. Paul was a likeable kid and a great worker. The fruit and veg warehouse had a surplus of pumpkins and allocated a half-tonne bin of Hendersons for sale at 39c per kilogram. They sold well but, as sometimes happens, there were a few in the bottom of the bin that had seen better days. One very large pumpkin was a bit ‘sus’, so we asked Paul to pick it up carefully and drop it into a little skip kept for compostable material. As he lifted it, the skin, still firm but no more than a shell, split asunder. The entire insides of the pumpkin had turned to an especially foul liquid and this doused the lad from the navel down. Y’know, twenty-five years on, I don’t think Paul can face up to pumpkin yet…

It was the late 1980s and recycled paper products were more readily available. Robert, mid-twenties, and his mother walked in and stopped to check a promotional display of toilet rolls. The manufacturer’s sign, in large print, bore the word ‘RECYCLED’. Robert’s mother looked at it and said, “Oh yuk!” Robert responded, “Don’t worry, Mum, they’ve been rinsed!”

I’ll try to assemble a few more on another occasion but I bet you’ve got a few to share, too.

What was your first workplace like? Was it fun and full of humour? Tell us in the comments below…