WORDLE STORY

No amount of prose can convey the power of the spaceship that took me on board that night. I was driving down the road listening to an oldies station on the radio at three o'clock in the morning. The song was "Muskrat Love." I had the top down and the ship just sucked me up into itself. The next thing I knew I was prone on a stainless steel table, being given an anal probe by a group of aliens. After the procedure they put me back in my car and I went home. I cannot prove my story, but to this day, whenever I hear the Captain and Tennille I get a stiff pain in my ass. I say this supports my claim. Others say this merely supports the claim that the Captain and Tennille suck.

 

COMMITMENT TO THE PART

SPOT DIAGNOSIS

LOW BAR

LAISSEZ-FAIRE

RESPECT

ONE STEP BEYOND

I have a humor piece in the current issue of Funny Times:

A NATIVE OF THE SUN STAFF

By J.C. Duffy

The other day I got a text message on my phone:

“Transcript (low confidence) 

Good afternoon, it’s a 

native of the sun staff. I 

just wanna let you know

your groceries are here

whenever you get a

chance to pick them up.

Thank you.”

Imagine how excited I was when I thought I’d gotten a message from a native of the sun staff. I mean, the staffers on the sun must be busy. And hot. So, to take the time to leave me a voicemail, it must be pretty important, I thought. 

Then I read the rest of it: they wanted to let me know my groceries were here. Wow. How would a staffer on the sun know that, and why would they care, with everything they have to worry about up there? And why were they calling themselves “natives”? That’s weird. Then I noticed the words, “Transcript (low confidence),” so I listened to the actual voicemail. 

It wasn’t “a native of the sun staff.” It was actually “Anita at the front desk.” That made a lot more sense.

How disappointing. The nicest thing I can say about the robots at the phone company is that their low confidence in their transcript was well-placed. 

I went down to the lobby and thanked Anita for being a real person. She gave me the fisheye. It wasn’t the first time. As I turned away I noticed that the name tag on her sweater had a tiny image of the sun next to the word “STAFF.” Was there more to this than a mere garbled voicemail transcript? Was Anita a double agent, a spy working for both my building and the sun? I grabbed my groceries and got the hell onto the elevator in a cold sweat.

This will make a great scary story to tell the next time I’m sitting around a campfire roasting marshmallows with a bunch of idiots 

                                                         ****

This story was based on an actual transcript and an actual voicemail I got on my phone. And then I took it from there. One of the things I invented was the "image of the sun" on Anita's name tag. At least I thought I invented it. Then I noticed just such an image in one of the photos in my previous blog post:

Then I found images of the sun on my building's website:

[Insert the sound of eerie theremin music here.]

METHODOLOGY

Sometimes a delivery person will send me a picture of what they delivered:

Sometimes they'll send me a picture of themselves reflected in my front door:

ALWAYS NICE TO HEAR

REALISTIC COMICS