When a Middletown, New Jersey, police officer retired, he cited low morale. But he didn’t leave quietly. While walking the beat on his last day, he wrote 14 tickets for expired inspection stickers … all to police patrol cars.

Never trust a man with a tassel on his loafer. It’s like, What, did your foot just graduate?

It’s often a challenge to explain to strangers exactly what I do in the aerospace industry. At one gathering, I didn’t even try. I just said, "I’m a defense contractor."

One of the guys was intrigued. "So, what do you put up mainly? Chain-link?"

A customer pulled up to my drive-through window at the fast-food restaurant where I work and requested something from the lunch menu.

"I’m sorry, but it’s 10:15," I told her. "We’re only serving breakfast now."

After thinking it over, she asked, "Do you have anything on your breakfast menu that tastes like lunch?"

Posted by the Illinois Valley News: "How bad do you want to be a reporter? Bad enough to work nights and weekends? In exchange for your long hours and tireless efforts, you will be rewarded with low pay and marginal health insurance."

If you’re interested in becoming a lawyer, you’ll need a degree. But as these court transcripts reveal, the question is, in what?

Attorney: "How was your first marriage terminated?"
Witness: "By death."
Attorney: "And by whose death was it terminated?"
Witness: "Guess."

Attorney: "Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?"
Witness: "All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight."

My coworker at the hotel was miserable at his job and was desperately searching for a new one.

"Why don’t you work for your mother?" I suggested.

He shook his head. "I can’t," he said. "Her company has a very strict policy against hiring relatives."

"Who made up that ridiculous rule?"

"My mother."

Canada wants us to remember that it, too, is part of North America. So The Week asked its readers to come up with an eye-catching slogan for our neighbor to the north. Canada: Where Your Cold Front Begins Canada: It’s Not Just for Draft Dodgers Anymore Canada: Land of Cheaper Drugs Canada: Where Winter Spends the Summer

People’s parents actually give them sage advice, like “Do what you love, and the money will follow” or “The early bird gets the worm.” All I remember is “Don’t fill up on bread.”

Jack wakes up with a horrible hangover and a throbbing black eye. The first thing he sees is a single rose on the side table and a note from his wife: “Dear, breakfast is made. I’ve gone shopping to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you!”

He stumbles to the kitchen and, sure enough, there’s breakfast. “Joe,” he says to his son, “what happened last night?”

“You came home soused and got that black eye tripping over a chair.”

“So, why the rose, breakfast, and sweet note from your mother?”

“Oh, that. Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take off your clothes, you screamed, ‘Leave me alone, I’m married!’”

Are you a redneck? Want to be one? Take the Redneck IQ test and see how well you fare. Don’t look for answers. If you need them, you’re no redneck. 1) Which of these cars will rust out quickest when placed on blocks in your front yard? ’65 Ford Fairlane ’69 Chevrolet Chevelle ’64 Pontiac GTO 2) Calculate the smallest limb diameter on a persimmon tree that will support a ten-pound possum. 3) A woodcutter has a chain saw, which operates at 2700 rpm. The density of the pine trees in the plot to be harvested is 470 per acre. The plot is 2.3 acres in size. The average tree diameter is 14 inches. Here’s the question: How many Budweisers will be drunk before the trees are cut down? 4) If your uncle builds a still that produces 20 gallons of shine per hour, how many car radiators are required to condense the product?

I have a bad attitude. When I was a kid, I wore Lex Luthor underwear.

I was driving when I saw the flash of a traffic camera. I figured that my picture had been taken for speeding, even though I knew I wasn’t. Just to be sure, I went around the block and passed the same spot, driving even more slowly. But again the camera flashed. Thinking this was pretty funny, I drove past even slower three more times, laughing as the camera snapped away each time while I drove by it at a snail’s pace.

Two weeks later, I got five tickets in the mail for driving without a seat belt.

I just saw an ad for a position I feel completely qualified for: "Wanted: bartenders. No exp. necessary. Must have: legal ID, phone, transportation, and teeth."

A customer walked into our store looking for Christmas lights. I showed her our top brand, but—wanting to make sure each bulb worked—she asked me to take them out of the box and plug them in. I did, and each one lit up.

"Great," she said.

I carefully placed the string of lights back in the box. But as I handed them to her, she looked alarmed.

"I don't want this box," she said abruptly. "It's been opened."

As we were putting out cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve, I accidentally dropped one. "No problem," I said, picking it up and dusting it off before placing it back on the plate.

"You can't do that," argued my four-year-old.

"Don't worry. Santa will never know."

He shot me a look. "So he knows if I've been bad or good, but he doesn't know the cookie fell on the floor?"

After I spoke at a grade school assembly about veterans, a student asked, "Were you ever in a war?"

"Yes, two," I said. "World War II and Korea."

The girl's follow-up question: "Which war did you like best?"

My mother cast one of her students as the innkeeper for the Christmas pageant. All the third grader had to do was tell Joseph, "There is no room at the inn." But during the performance—after Joseph begged for a room for his pregnant wife—the boy didn't have the heart to turn him down. "Well," he said, "if it's so urgent, come on in."

The topic for my ninth-grade class was palindromes, words or sentences that are the same read forward and backward. I asked the question "What is the first thing Adam said to Eve?"

I was expecting the answer "Madam, I'm Adam," but one student had a better reply:

"Wow."

"You shouldn't be eating candy so early. We have doughnuts."

"The key is to put the mousetrap outside the house. That way, the mice don't come in." "Your aunt couldn't make it, so I brought the cat."

"Don't do drugs. They're hell on your body, and I may need one of your organs someday."
—From Crazythingsparentssay.com

As I performed a simple medical procedure on my patient, I warned her, "After this, you can't have sex for at least three days."

"Did you hear that?" she asked her husband. "No sex for three days."

"I heard," he said. "But she was speaking to you."

The Twitter account @MeetingBoy invites viewers to gripe about work. Some of our favorite responses:

Hey, everybody! My boss is running a special on poorly thought-out, unworkable ideas today. The discount code is YESSIR.

Making up new words for business jargon embiggens us all.

Is he replaceable? Only if there's a 180-pound rock that can keep his chair in place.

I always thought my friend was disorganized, but after helping her move, I stand corrected. The label on a box I carried read "Stuff off the floor."

"I'll miss you, Great-Grandma," wrote my mother's great-grandson in an e-mail he sent before shipping out to Iraq.

"I'll miss you too, dear," she responded. "Stay safe. LOL, Great-Grandma."

Poor Mom didn't realize that LOL doesn't stand for "lots of love."

One side of the tag in my husband's cap read "Best Quality." The other side: "Ceptificate of Inspetion."

Scene: A bookstore

Customer: Can you help me find a book?

Me: Of course. Do you know the author or title?

Customer: Well, I was at the beach and I saw this girl reading a purple book. She looked like she was really enjoying it. I want that book.

Me: Ma'am, you're going to have to be more specific. There are a lot of books with purple covers.

Customer: Can't you search on your computer for purple books?

Me: Unfortunately, no.

Customer: In that case, I'll take my business to a bookstore that has better computers.

A newspaper editor missed this headline: "State population to double by 2040; babies to blame."

Dad passed away recently, and among the messages received by my mother was this e-mail from a great-niece: "Our thoughts are with you, Lucy. You and Chas are the last of an error."

Retirement is the best thing that has happened to my brother-in-law.

"I never know what day of the week it is," he gloated. "All I know is, the day the big paper comes, I have to dress up and go to church."

I arrived home from work to find all the windows and doors wide open. Apparently our puppy had had an accident. "Yeah, it really stank," my daughter told me. "In fact, when we first walked in, I thought you had come home early and were cooking dinner."

Days after we invaded Marja, Afghanistan, one of my Marines found out his wife hadn't paid the cell phone bill. He called the company and asked how he could settle up.

"You can go to Western Union and place a money order," the billing agent told him.

"Ma'am, I'm in Marja, Afghanistan," he explained. "We don't have Western Unions."

"No problem. You can also go to Walmart."

A sign spotted at a housing development: "This is a private road maintained by the owners of the homes which affront the street."

The band Kings of Leon cut short a concert after pigeons bombarded them with poop. Bass player Jared Followill couldn't say how many birds there were. "The last thing I was going to do was look up," he told CNN.

I was in Afghanistan speaking with a reporter as a soldier packed her things. The major came over and noticed some odd-looking pieces of cloth on her cot.

"What are you doing with all these eye patches?" he asked, lifting one up.

Taking it from him, she mumbled, "Um ... this is my thong underwear."

When my eight-year-old sister came to visit, I took a day off from my job at the Pentagon and showed her the Lincoln Memorial. There she saw a large block of text—273 words long—etched into the monument.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Lincoln's Gettysburg Address," I told her.

"If that's his address, how does he get any mail?"

Our 25-year-old son moved back home with an eye toward socking away money to buy a condo. We never bothered asking how long he'd planned to stay, but I got a pretty good idea when I walked into his room recently. In the corner was a milk jug with a few coins in it and a label that read "Condo down payment."

When our minister and his wife visited our neighbor, her four-year-old daughter answered the door. "Mom!"she yelled toward the living room. "God's here, and he brought his girlfriend."

Experience is a great teacher, especially when it's someone else's. These examples were submitted to learnfrommyfail.com:

"When trying to compliment your girlfriend, tell her that she is prettier than her sister, not that her sister is uglier than she is."

"Never name a goldfish after your child, or his younger brother might go to school and tell his teacher that Eric died."

"When a coworker calls to say she's going to be late because she 'has to wait for the paramedics,' don't respond, 'Okay. Have fun!'"

"When your boyfriend is rehearsing for a play, don't tell your roommate that he is 'upstairs doing lines.'"

A Brooklyn café is charging $12 for a cup of Ethiopian coffee. The drink doesn't have a name, so The Week asked its readers to do the honors.

Mocha Dinero
Cost-a-latte
Brokefest Blend
Excesso
Ka-Ching-accino
Goldbean Sachs
Café au Laitaway

I was in juvenile court, prosecuting a teen suspected of burglary, when the judge asked everyone to stand and state his or her name and role for the court reporter.

"Leah Rauch, deputy prosecutor," I said.

"Linda Jones, probation officer."

"Sam Clark, public defender."

"John," said the teen who was on trial. "I'm the one who stole the truck."

Scene: My checkout line at the supermarket.

Me: Paper or plastic?

Customer: I'd like double-bagged paper, and I'd like you to make each bag as heavy as possible.

Me: Okay.

Customer: In case you're wondering, I had a fight with my wife, and it's my turn to pick up the groceries.

Me: Uh-huh.

Customer: It's also her turn to unload the car.

No thought is too random, no grievance too petty, to keep us from organizing a group. Our favorites:

1) Students Against Backpacks with Wheels

2) When I Was Your Age Pluto Was a Planet

3) People Who Always Have to Spell Their Names for Other People

4) No, I Don’t Care if I Die at 12 A.M., I Refuse to Pass On Your Chain Letter

5) Friends Don’t Let Friends Wear Crocs

6) I Secretly Want to Punch Slow-Walking People in the Back of the Head

7) I Don’t Care if the Spider Is Not Hurting Anyone, I Want It Dead!

8) I Am Fluent in Three Languages: English, Sarcasm, and Profanity

9) I Will Carry 20 Grocery Bags So I Don’t Have to Make a Second Trip

10) An Arbitrary Number of People Demanding That Some Sort of Action Be Taken

During an antiharassment seminar at work, I asked, "What's the difference between harassment and good-natured teasing?" A co-worker shouted, "A million dollars." 

A pregnant Omaha woman was fired after her boss claimed that her unborn child was "hostile toward him" and carried "negative energy."

Before he was deployed to Afghanistan, my brother Ken was lamenting over how many people seemed unaware of the conflict. I had to concede his point when I later mentioned to a neighbor that he was leaving for Afghanistan.

"Really?" he said. "For business or pleasure?"

At the funeral home where my husband works, the funeral director asked a recent widower, "Did your wife's illness come out of the blue?"

"No, she'd been sick before," he said. "But never this bad."

The toughest part of applying for a new job is having to explain why you're no longer at your previous one. Here are rationalizations from cover letters that did no one any good:

"My boss thought I could do better elsewhere."

"The company made me a scapegoat, just like my three previous employers."

"Note: Please don't misconstrue my 14 jobs as 'job hopping.' I have never quit a job."

"Responsibilities make me nervous."

During my eighth-grade sex education class, no one could answer the question "What happens to a young woman during puberty?" So I rephrased it: "What happens to young women as they mature?"

One student answered: "They start to carry a purse."

Cops had no trouble tracking down a woman who allegedly shoplifted from a Toronto-area store. A few minutes earlier, she had interviewed for a job there and left her résumé.

I answered a 911 call at our emergency dispatch center from a woman who said her water broke.

"Stay calm," I advised. "Now, how far apart are your contractions?"

"No contractions," she said breathlessly. "But my basement is flooding fast."

My husband and I were watching Forrest Gump at the base theater. The crowd was pretty quiet throughout the film, until the scene when Forrest graduates from college and is met by an Army recruiter. That was met with a shout from behind us: "Run, Forrest, run!"

The reason women don't play football is that 11 of them would never wear the same outfit in public.

A Republican and a Democrat were walking down the street when they came to a homeless person. The Republican gave him his business card and told him to stop by for a job. He then took $20 out of his pocket and handed it to him.

The Democrat was impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided it was his turn to help. So he reached into the Republican's pocket and gave the homeless man $50.

There are over a million words in the English language, but we can always use more. Here are some that wordsmiths contributed to the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary website:

Epiphunny (noun): The moment of sudden revelation when one gets the joke.

Nagivator (noun): A bossy person who rides in the passenger seat and gives directions to the driver.

Phooey Vuitton (noun): A sub- standard, counterfeit Louis Vuitton product.

Wuzband (noun): A former husband.

A woman in a hot-air balloon is lost, so she shouts to a man below, "Excuse me. I promised a friend I would meet him, but I don't know where I am."

"You're at 31 degrees, 14.57 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude," he replies.

"You must be a Democrat."

"I am. How did you know?"

"Because everything you told me is technically correct, but the information is useless, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've been no help."

"You must be a Republican."

"Yes. How did you know?"

"You've risen to where you are due to a lot of hot air, you made a promise you couldn't keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

An investment banker decides she needs in-house counsel, so she interviews a young lawyer. "Mr. Peterson," she says. "Would you say you're honest?"

"Honest?" replies Peterson. "Let me tell you something about honesty. My father lent me $85,000 for my education, and I paid back every penny the minute I tried my first case." "Impressive. And what sort of case was that?"

"Dad sued me for the money."

My wife is a by-the-recipe baker. But that attention to detail still hasn't made her chocolate chip cookies taste any better. One day, after the cookies had been in the oven a while, I smelled a familiar odor. "They're burning," I shouted. "I know," she said nonchalantly. "Aren't you going to take them out?" "No. They still have six minutes."

My techie husband and I were walking in the high desert when he stopped to photograph one stunning vista after another. Overcome by the sheer beauty, he paid it his ultimate compliment: "Everywhere I look is a screen saver!"

From our local TV news station, this undeniably true travel suggestion: "Next up, ten money-saving tips for your trip to Hawaii. Don't go away!"

"What's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?" I asked my husband. He thought for a minute before responding, "An optimist is the guy who created the airplane. A pessimist is the guy who created the parachute."

I dressed up my dog as a mailman for Halloween. He bit himself.

My 17-year-old niece was looking for a job, so her mother scoured the want ads with her. "Here's one. A couple are looking for someone to watch their two kids and do light housekeeping."

"Hel-looo!" said my niece, rolling her eyes. "I can't take that job. I don't know anything about lighthouses."

I picked up my nine-year-old daughter from school and asked how her day had gone. A few minutes later, I repeated the question, and again a few minutes after that. Instead of annoyed, Ariana was philosophical.

"Mom," she said, "your amnesia is my déjà vu."

A German, looking for directions in Paris, pulls up to a bus stop where two Americans are waiting.

"Entschuldigung, sprechen Sie Deutsch?" he asks. The two Americans just stare at him.

"Parlez-vous français?" he says.

The two continue to stare, so the German tries again "Parlate italiano?"

No response. "¿Hablan ustedes español?" Still nothing. Frustrated, the German guy drives off.

The first American says, "You know, we should learn a foreign language."

"Why?" asks the other. "He knew four languages, and it didn't do him any good."

An explorer in the Amazon suddenly finds himself surrounded by a hundred natives. Panicking, he mumbles, “Oh, God, I’m screwed.”

The sky darkens, and a voice booms out, “No, you are not screwed. Pick up that stone at your feet and slay the chief with it.”

The explorer picks up the stone and does just that. He looks up from the chief’s lifeless body in time to see the natives angrily lift their spears.

Just then the voice booms out again: “Okay ... now you’re screwed.”

My parents sent me to military school in Switzerland. There they taught me how to be neutral.

Facebook and Formspring are two of the many social-networking sites that allow users to embarrass themselves in front of millions of friends and strangers, like these people did.

LARRY: Happy Valentine's Day to All, especially Wendy, Heather, Lindsey, Ellen, Valerie, Isabel, and all the other wonderful women I adore.

JENNIFER: You forgot your wife.

One friend complained to another, "All my husband and I do anymore is fight. I've been so upset, I've lost 20 pounds."

"If it's that bad, why don't you just leave him?" asked the second friend.

"I'd like to lose another 15 pounds first."

They've just found a gene for shyness. They would have found it earlier, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.

Of course I can keep secrets. It's the people I tell them to who can't keep them.