First I had to work late. Then I discovered that I'd locked my keys in the car. But the last straw was learning that roadside service couldn't get a locksmith to me for at least two hours. Finally the guy showed, looking exhausted.

As he struggled with my door, I joked, "Do those Slim Jim tools come in purse-size?"

"Yeah," he muttered. "They're called keys."

I was a percussion major when I was in college, and during a rehearsal of the student orchestra, my section kept making mistakes.

"When you're too dumb to play anything," the professor conducting us sneered, "they give you a couple of sticks, put you in the back and call you a percussionist."

A friend next to me whispered, "And if you're too dumb to hang on to both sticks, they put you in the front and call you a conductor."

A nurse friend of mine took a 104-year-old patient for a walk in the hospital corridor. When she got him back to his room and sat him down, he took a deep breath and announced, "That was great! I don't feel a day over 100!"

Our new commander was the gung-ho type, determined to shake things up on the base. No detail was too small, not even the IN and OUT trays on his desk.

"Get rid of them," he told me. "I don't want them on my desk."

As the supply sergeant, I knew that the company clerks relied on those trays to process work. So I offered him an alternative, which he liked. After that, one tray read CHALLENGES and the other CONQUESTS.

My mom moved into a new condo, and I went to visit for a couple of days. Searching for a coffee cup one morning, I sighed, "It seems like I'm always looking for something in your kitchen."

"That's good," Mom said. When I looked confused, she explained, "Because when you know where to look, it's time to go home."

Then you need a catchy logo:

Our local window tinters tell it like it is: "We stick it where the sun shines."

Heading down the interstate,  our car passed through a huge swarm of gnats so dense that their bodies made popping noises as they hit the windshield. "I can't get over how loud they are," my wife said.

"Well, we are hitting them at 65 miles an hour," I pointed out.

Her reply left me speechless. "I didn't know bugs could fly that fast."