The Monday Morning Mirth

Tag: GPS

  • The Beer Scooter

    How many times have you woken up in the morning after a hard night drinking and thought, "How on earth did I get home?" As hard as you try, you cannot piece together your return journey from the pub to your home.

    The answer to this puzzle is that you used a Beer Scooter.

    The Beer Scooter is a mythical form of transport, owned and leased out to the drunk by Bacchus the Roman god of wine. Bacchus has branched out since the decrease in the worship of the Roman pantheon and bought a large batch of these magical devices.

    The Beer Scooter works in the following fashion: The passenger reaches a certain level of drunkenness and the slurring gland begins to give off a pheromone. Bacchus or one of his many sub-contractors detects the pheromone and sends down a winged Beer Scooter. The scooter scoops up the passenger and deposits them in their bedroom via a trans-dimensional portal.

    It is not cheap to run a Beer Scooter franchise, so a large portion of the passenger’s in-pocket cash is taken as payment. This answers the second question after a night out ‘How did I spend so much money?’.

    Beer Scooters have a poor safety record and are thought to be responsible for 90% of all UDI (Unidentified Drinking Injuries), such as skinned knees and that sore spot on your head.

    An undocumented feature of the Beer Scooter is the destruction of time segments during the trip. The nature of trans-dimensional portals dictates that time will be lost, seemingly unaccounted for. This answers the third question after a night out ‘What the hell happened?’

    With good intentions, Bacchus opted for the REMIT (Remove Embarrassing Moments In Time) add on, that automatically removes, in descending order, those parts in time regretted most. Unfortunately one person’s REMIT is not necessarily the REMIT of another and quite often lost time is regained in discussions over a suitable period, usually aided by further consumption of alcohol.

    Independent studies have also shown that Beer Goggles cause the scooter’s navigation system to malfunction thus sending the passenger to the wrong bedroom often with horrific consequences. With recent models including a GPS, Bacchus made an investment in a scooter drive-thru chain specialising in half eaten kebabs and pizza crusts. This answers another question after a night out ‘What’s that awful taste in my mouth?’

    For the family man, Beer Scooters come equipped with flowers picked from other people’s garden and Thump-A-Lot Boots. These boots are designed in such a way that no matter how quietly you tip-toe, you are sure to wake up your other half. Special anti-gravity springs ensure that you bump into every wall and the CTSGS (Coffee Table Seeking Guidance System) explains the bruises on your shins.

    All much clearer now?

  • The Cowboy and the Yuppie

    A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

    The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

    The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Munich, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

    Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."

    "That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his BMW.

    Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

    "You’re a consultant." says the cowboy.

    "Wow! That’s correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

    "No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; then you wanted to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I didn’t ask; and you don’t know anything about my business."

    "..Now give me back my dog."