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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!hao!seismo!ut-sally!crandell
From: crandell@ut-sally.UUCP (Jim Crandell)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: You deserve a break today.  Give me your arm.
Message-ID: <2313@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Jun-84 22:13:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2313
Posted: Wed Jun 20 22:13:02 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Jun-84 03:52:06 EDT
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 50

Recently I was overhauled for replying in a pseudo-common-sense fashion
to the ``I don't care...'' gaff, and in case anyone else was similarly
offended, I propose to make amends by submitting a couple of nonoriginal
(and reputedly factual) jokes.  Enjoy it while it lasts.


Along the same lines, a major newspaper (whose name I have mercifully
forgotten) once carried a story about a notable scandal in city hall,
the details of which were so complex and confusing that the city's
governing body remained in a quandary for several days as to how to
administer the appropriate retribution.  The story's headline
read ``... council can't decide whom should be fired''.
An incredulous reader responded -- in a letter to the editor which,
remarkably, made the editorial page -- ``Whom should be fired?
That's easy!  Whom wrote the headline?  Him should be fired.''



I wouldn't report this one except that the friend who related it
swore it really happened.  Not too many blocks from where I now sit
stands a business establishment of a sort which is fast becoming a
bona fide anachronism in cities of any size -- an old-fashioned,
Mom-and-Pop-style, corner grocery store.  But in the semi-rural lands
to the north of the city, the microscopic municipalities that make up
the (barely) limited-growth district in the northern reaches of the
county, one can still find a few such businesses.  It was in one of
these that the following exchange took place.

Virtually all tbhe customers of this business are local people, many of
them elderly, quite a few of them rather poor.  The grocer is ``one of
them'', and he does his best to keep his prices down, but when you're
a low-volume dealer, your choice of suppliers is severely limited,
and sometimes there just isn't much you can do.  Against this backdrop
enters an elderly lady who decides to grouse about the price of eggs.
It's not that she really can't afford them, but she's the neighborhood 
sourpuss, and her reputation is on the line.  She gives the poor grocer
an earful.

``Yeah,'' he replies, ``ain't that awful?  You know, I just don't know
why the wholesalers have to keep running up their prices like that.
I called up this guy the other day, and I says `Hey, Sam, I got some
of my customers paying about as much as they can handle right now.
Whatcha tryin' to do, break me?'  And he says, `Yeah, I know we
upped our prices.  Up yours.' ''
-- 

    Jim Crandell, C. S. Dept., The University of Texas at Austin
               {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!crandell