Puns at work

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, March 9, 2008 5:19pm

It came out at the staff meeting last week that the company that does customer service for our warehouse in Wisconsin also does customer service for Kohler. Yes, as someone put it, "the toilet company".

This prompted me to ask the person next to me if maybe we should publish a book on bidetlilies.

Reasons you probably didn't think that's funny:

• You couldn't tease apart that portmanteau into its constituent parts: "bidet" and "lilies".
• You didn't know what a portmanteau is, so you don't expect to understand the rest of whatever it is I'm talking about.
• You didn't know that the word "bidet" is pronounced "bi-DAY", thus making it a pun on "daylilies", a kind of flower.
• You didn't realize that I work for a publisher of gardening books, including at least one on, yes, daylilies.
• I don't know, you don't get lots of kinds of humor because you're kind of thick, maybe?

Anyhow, I bet that if I were to do a spreadsheet of how I spend the various minutes of each day, it would turn out I spend a surprising amount of time coming up with awful puns. Most of them are probably even worse than that one.

You should be glad that I'm so lethargic about blogging, or you'd have to read a lot more entries about how clever I think I am with this pun I totally made up by myself.