250 lbs here on Earth is 94.5 lbs on Mercury. No, I’m not fat. I’m just not on the right planet.

It was our new receptionist’s very first job, and it showed in the way she dressed—her revealing clothes screamed "college" more than "office." As diplomatically as he could, our boss sat her down and told her that she would have to dress more appropriately. "Why?" she asked. "Are we going out to lunch?"

Our family was dazzled by the sights and the bustling crowds during a visit to Manhattan. "This is the city that never sleeps," I told my eleven-year-old daughter.

"That’s probably because there’s a Starbucks on every corner," she observed.

The chef of the upscale restaurant I manage collided with a waiter one day and spilled coffee all over our computer. The liquid poured into the processing unit, and resulted in some dramatic crackling and popping sounds. After sopping up the mess, we gathered around the terminal as the computer was turned back on.

"Please let it work," pleaded the guilt-ridden waiter.

A waitress replied, "Should be faster than ever. That was a double espresso."

Our teenage son, Marc, never misses an opportunity to remind us that he needs his own car. One morning as I drove him to school, it was apparent that we would be late. I asked him to write a note, which I would sign when we arrived.

At school, he handed me a pen and the note, which read: "Marc is late this morning due to car trouble. The trouble is, Marc doesn’t have his own car, and his mom drives too slowly."

While doing renovations in our house, one of the workmen paused to look at a flattering photo of me wearing makeup and a fancy gown. I heard him let out a low whistle and ask my son, Joshua, "Who’s that?"

"That’s my mom," Joshua answered.

"Wow," the man said, "my mother doesn’t look like that."

"Yeah," my son said, "well, neither does mine."

As an airline reservation agent, I took a call from a man who wanted to book a flight for two but wasn’t happy with the price of $59 per ticket. "I want the $49 fare I saw advertised," he insisted, saying he would accept a flight at any time. I managed to find two seats on a 6 a.m. flight. "I’ll take it," he said, then worried his wife might not like the early hour. I warned there was a $25 fee per person if he changed the reservation. "Oh, that’s no problem," he said dismissively. "What’s fifty bucks?"

Ever wonder what medical personnel scribble on those clipboards attached to the foot of the bed? Here are some incredible comments taken from hospital charts:

"The patient refused autopsy."

"The patient has no previous history of suicides."

"She has had no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night."

"She is numb from her toes down."

"Patient has two teenage children but no other abnormalities."

"Discharge status: Alive but without my permission."

Recently I was grading history tests for my fourth-graders. I’d included an extra credit question: "List up to five good facts about Abraham Lincoln."

One of my D students surprised me with this one: "After the war ended, Lincoln took his wife to a show."

A favorite story among color-film processors concerns the negative of a poodle which a woman sent to a photo-finishing lab. When the print was made, the dog came out looking green. Figuring that there must have been a mistake in the color balance, a problem which plagues color processors, the lab tried again and again, and finally got the dog to come out a kind of improbable tan.

The woman who sent in the negative was furious when she got the picture of the tan poodle, which, she informed the lab, she had dyed green.

My husband and I are both in an Internet business, but he’s the one who truly lives, eats and breathes computers. I finally realized how bad it had gotten when I was scratching his back one day. "No, not there," he directed. "Scroll down."

Seen on the door of a repair shop:

WE CAN FIX ANYTHING. (Please knock on the door—the bell doesn’t work.)

The aquarium shop where I work has been in business for more than 20 years. One Sunday a customer called wanting to buy a larger aquarium. "And by the way, I’ve spent a lot of money at your store over the years," he said. "I think I should get a discount."

"Only our owner can give a discount," I explained, "and he won’t be in until tomorrow."

When the customer said that he’d come in the next day, I asked him if there was anything else I could help him with.

"Sure," he said. "Where is your store located?"

It was an unusually hectic evening at the emergency clinic where I work. The doctor on duty was simultaneously bombarded with questions, given forms to sign, and even asked for his dinner order.

I was in the next room, cleaning up a newly sutured wound, when I realized he hadn’t given instructions for a bandage. I poked my head out the door and asked, "What kind of dressing do you want on that?"

"Ranch," he replied.

It began as an innocent game with my toddler son, Robert. I’d get in the fighter’s stance and start shadowboxing. Jabbing with both fists, I’d say, "One-two, one-two," and he would imitate me over and over.

I never thought about the consequences of this little exercise until my wife took our son to a birthday party. When the boy’s mother was handing out noisemakers she leaned over to Robert and asked, "Would you like one too?"

It took my wife a while to explain her way out of what happened next.

Students at Iowa State University proved once and for all that the computer just can’t replace human calculations. They held an "IBM mixer" dance, where each student fed his vital statistics and interests into a computer and was then paired off with a member of the opposite sex who, the computer said, was most suited to him.

Imagine the chagrin of one coed who ended up with her twin brother.

On vacation my nine-year-old son, Ryan, and I were at the pool, where two attractive young women wearing thong bikinis were sunning themselves. I noticed that Ryan kept staring at them, but he would occasionally glance back at me.

When they got up to leave, Ryan watched them particularly closely. I was bracing myself for questions he might have when he turned to me and whispered, "Dad, can I take that candy bar those girls left behind?"

A client recently brought her two cats to my husband’s veterinary clinic for their annual checkup. One was a small-framed, round tiger-striped tabby, while the other was a long, sleek black cat. She watched closely as I put each on the scale. “They weigh about the same,” I told her.

“That proves it!” she exclaimed. “Black does make you look slimmer. And stripes make you look fat.”

  I thought I had finally found a way to convince Susan, my continually harried friend, that she needed to find ways to relax. I invited her to dinner and, while I was busy cooking, she agreed to watch my videotape on stress management and relaxation techniques. Fifteen minutes later, she came into the kitchen and handed me the tape.

"But it’s a 70-minute video," I replied. "You couldn’t have watched the whole thing."

"Yes, I did," Susan assured me. "I put it on fast-forward."

To keep their active two-year-old from roaming onto the busy street in front of their home, my sister and brother-in-law decided to put a gate across the driveway. After working over two weekends on the project, Robert was ready to attach the lock to complete the job. He was working on the yard side of the gate, with his daughter nearby, when he dropped the screwdriver he was using and it rolled under the gate, out of his reach.

"I’ll get it, Daddy," Lauren called, nimbly crawling under the newly erected barrier.

Walking through the hallways at the middle school where I work, I saw a new substitute teacher standing outside his classroom with his forehead against a locker. I heard him mutter, "How did you get yourself into this?"

Knowing he was assigned to a difficult class, I tried to offer moral support. "Are you okay?" I asked. "Can I help?"

He lifted his head and replied, "I’ll be fine as soon as I get this kid out of his locker."

After years of using the same perfumes, I decided to try something different and settled on a light, citrusy fragrance. The next day I was surprised when it was my little boy, not my husband, who first noticed the change. As he put his arms around me, he declared, "Wow, Mom, you smell just like Froot Loops!"

When a fellow piano tuner was ill, I took over his assignment of tuning a piano in a girls’ boardinghouse. While I was at work, several of the girls strolled casually through the room in various states of undress. The climax came when a young lady in startling deshabille appeared to pay the bill.

As I was writing the receipt, she suddenly gave me a bewildered look, then fled, screaming, “That’s not our regular man!”

Their regular man is blind.

I was working as a short-order cook at two restaurants in the same neighborhood. On a Saturday night, I was finishing up the dinner shift at one restaurant and hurrying to report to work at the second place. But I was delayed because one table kept sending back an order of hash browns, insisting they were too cold. I replaced them several times, but still the customers were dissatisfied.

When I was able to leave, I raced out the door and arrived at my second job. A server immediately handed me my first order. "Make sure these hash browns are hot," she said, "because these people just left a restaurant down the street that kept serving them cold ones."

I work as a nurse’s aide in a large hospital. One morning as I began to bathe one of my patients, she put out her hand to stop me.

"Do you have a small boy in your family?" she asked.

"Why yes," I said, looking rather puzzled.

"I thought so," my patient said. "That’s exactly the way you’re washing my face."

Working as a secretary at an international airport, my sister had an office adjacent to the room where security temporarily holds suspects. One day security officers were questioning a man when they were suddenly called away on another emergency. To the horror of my sister and her colleagues, the man was left alone in the unlocked room. After a few minutes, the door opened and he began to walk out.

Summoning up her courage, one of the secretaries barked, "Get back in there, and don’t you come out until you’re told!" The man scuttled back inside and slammed the door. When the security people returned, the women reported what had happened. Without a word, an officer walked into the room and released one very frightened telephone repairman.

My older son loves school, but his younger brother absolutely hates it. One weekend he cried and fretted and tried every excuse not to go back on Monday. Sunday morning on the way home from church, the crying and whining built to a crescendo. At the end of my rope, I finally stopped the car and explained, "Honey, it’s a law. If you don’t go to school, they’ll put Mommy in jail."

He looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, "How long would you have to stay?"

As an obstetrician, I sometimes see unusual tattoos when working in labor and delivery. One patient had some type of fish tattoo on her abdomen. "That sure is a pretty whale," I commented.

With a smile she replied, "It used to be a dolphin."

I was on duty as an emergency-room technician when a father brought in his son, who had poked a tire from one of his toy trucks up his nose. The man was embarrassed, but I assured him this was something kids often do. I quickly removed the tire and they were on their way. A few minutes later, the father was back in the ER asking to talk to me in private.

Mystified, I led him to an examining room. "While we were on our way home," he began, "I was looking at that little tire and wondering, how on earth did my son get this thing stuck up his nose and…"

It took just a few seconds to get the tire out of Dad’s nose.

The boss placed a sign directly over the sink in the men’s room at work. It had a single word on it: "Think!"

The next day when the boss went to the men’s room, he saw another sign had been placed immediately above the soap dispenser.

It read: "Thoap!"

Being the office supervisor, I had to have a word with a new employee who never arrived at work on time. I explained that her tardiness was unacceptable and that other employees had noticed that she was walking in late every day. After listening to my complaints, she agreed that this was a problem and even offered a solution.

"Is there another door I could use?"

My sister was busy getting ready to host our entire family for Easter. On her to-do list was a hair appointment for her daughter. "So, Katie," said the stylist as the little girl got up in the chair, "who’s coming to your house this weekend with big ears and floppy feet?"

Katie replied, "I think it’s my uncle Brian."

The 104-year-old building that had served as the priory and primary student residence of the small Catholic university where I work was about to be demolished. As the wrecker’s ball began to strike, I sensed the anxiety and sadness experienced by one of the older monks whose order had founded the college. "This must be difficult to watch, Father," I said. "The tradition associated with that building, the memories of all the students and monks who lived and worked there. I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you."

"It’s worse than that," the monk replied. "I think I left my Palm Pilot in there."

Faculty members at Texas Christian university were urged to become familiar with the timesaving machines of the new computer center. Basic courses in their use were given, and research projects were accelerated.

The faculty was enthusiastic—except for one veteran professor. Not only did he flunk the primer course, but on his first project, when he asked the machine simply to separate the names of students by sex, the cards came out in three stacks.

Another man and I share a locker at work. Noticing that it needed a new combination lock, my partner said he would pick one up on his way to work the next day. It occurred to me later that I might not see him in the morning. How would I find out the combination? I needn’t have worried.

When I arrived at work I found that he had used the locker before me and had left a note reading: “To find the first number subtract 142 from your high score the last time we went bowling. The second number is 16 less than that. To find the third number subtract 1.87 from the amount you owe me.”

Hard to believe, but many of our customers at the bank still don’t know how to swipe their card through the ATM card reader. Because of this, my fellow tellers and I often find ourselves having to explain how it’s done. One teller complained that she kept getting odd looks every time she explained it. I found out why when I overheard her tell one man, “Strip down facing me.”

Pulling into my service station 45 minutes late one morning, I shouted to the customers, "I’ll turn the pumps on right away!" What I didn’t know was that the night crew had left them on all night. By the time I got to the office, most of the cars had filled up and driven off. Only one customer stayed to pay. My heart sank. Then the customer pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and handed it to me.

"We kept passing the money to the last guy," he said. "We figured you’d get here sooner or later."

My fellow teacher called for help—she needed someone who knew about animals. As a science teacher, I filled the bill. "Oh," she added, "bring a net." Expecting to find some kind of beast as I entered her classroom, I was greeted instead by the sight of excited kids watching a hummingbird fly around. Rather than use the net, I suggested they hang red paper by an open door. The bird would be drawn to it, I explained, and eventually fly out. Later, the teacher called back. The trick worked. "Now," she said, "we have two hummingbirds flying around the room."

My brother Jim was hired by a government agency and assigned to a small office cubicle in a large area. At the end of his first day, he realized he couldn’t see over the panels to find his way out, so he waited until he saw someone else leaving and followed him. He did the same the next day. On the third day he had to work late, long after his colleagues had left. He wandered around lost in the maze of cubicles and corridors, but then, just as panic began to set in, he came upon another employee in a cubicle.

"How do you get out of here?" Jim asked.

The fellow looked up from his desk, smiled and said, "No cheese for you."

The generation gap proved glaringly obvious at the mail-order music company where my wife works as a customer service representative. Some college students, who were working part-time inputting customer information, wrote the following notes regarding some golden oldies: "Customer is looking for two song titles: ‘Shovel Off Two Buffaloes’ and ‘Honey, Suck a Rose.’ "

My musical director wasn’t happy with the performance of one of our percussionists. Repeated attempts to get the drummer to improve failed. Finally, in front of the orchestra, the director said in frustration, "When a musician just can’t handle his instrument, they take it away, give him two sticks and make him a drummer!"

A stage whisper was heard from the percussion section: "And if he can’t handle that, they take away one of his sticks and make him a conductor."

A solar-powered computer wristwatch, which is programmed to tell the time and date for 125 years, has a guarantee—for two years.

During a shopping trip to a department store, I was looking around for a salesperson so I could pay for my purchase. Finally I ran into a woman wearing the store’s ID tag. "Excuse me," I said. "I’m trying to locate a cashier."

"I can’t help you," she briskly replied, barely slowing down. "I work in customer service." And she walked away.

250 lbs here on Earth is 94.5 lbs on Mercury. No, I’m not fat. I’m just not on the right planet.

Unfortunately, we humans don’t come equipped with delete buttons for our mouths. My friend and his rock band were playing a concert at the psychiatric hospital where he worked as a musical therapist. The audience was a little too quiet for his taste, so the guitarist decided to do something about it. He grabbed the microphone, pointed to the group and yelled, “Are you ready to get a little crazy?”

The company where I work provides four-foot-high cubicles so each employee can have some privacy. One day a co-worker had an exasperating phone conversation with one of her teenage sons. After hanging up, she heaved a sigh and said, "No one ever listens to me."

Immediately, several voices from surrounding cubicles called out, "Yes, we do."

As a promotional gimmick for my restaurant, I send out coupons offering people a free dinner on their birthdays. One day an anxious-sounding man called. "I got your card. How did you find me?"

"From a mailing list I purchased from a supplier," I told him. "Why?"

"It used my real name, and I’m in the Witness Protection Program. What’s the name of the company?"

I didn’t want to say it, but I had to tell him the truth: Moving Targets.

A friend of mine has an adopted son who, at six-foot-one, loves to play basketball. The boy was applying to basketball camp, and a section of the application called for him to write a brief essay about himself. My friend got a lump in his throat as he read his son’s words: "Most of all I am thankful that I am adopted…"

Then my friend got a cold dose of reality as he continued: "because my dad is so short."

On duty as a customer-service representative for a car-rental company, I took a call from a driver who needed a tow. He was stranded on a busy highway, but he didn’t know the make of the car he was driving. I asked again for a more detailed description, beyond "a nice blue four-door."

After a long pause, the driver replied, "My car is the one on fire."

I’m an attendant in a Laundromat. A woman came in, sat near my counter and chain-smoked cigarette after cigarette. The smoke was bothering me, so I turned on a fan. "Could you please point that thing in another direction?" she asked. "I’m just getting over pneumonia and the last thing I need is a breeze blowing on me."

On the back of a septic-service company truck:

“Satisfaction guaranteed, or your merchandise cheerfully refunded.”

Our family took shelter in the basement after hearing a tornado warning. My husband told everyone to stay put while he got his cell phone out of the car, in case the lines went dead.

He didn’t return for the longest time, so I went looking for him. I was upstairs calling his name, when I heard our phone machine click on.

"Hi," a voice said. "This is Dad. I’m locked out of the house."

I thought I wanted a tattoo, so I had a friend come with me to the tattoo parlor. As I nervously paused outside the door, I noticed the T had slipped off their sign. Now it read "Creative ouch."

On a demographics survey given at our high school, students were asked, "What disadvantages do you see in having children?" Usual answers included "It’s expensive to raise kids" and "They take up a lot of your time."

But one boy was not worried about money or responsibility. He wrote, "If I have children, I might have to drive a minivan."

After being on the phone forever with a customer who had been having difficulties with a computer program, a support technician at my mother’s company turned in his report: "The problem resides between the keyboard and the chair."

The day before my graduation from Soldan High School in St. Louis, the principal called an assembly. He wanted to say farewell informally, he explained, as he reviewed our years together. There was hardly a dry eye among us as he concluded, "We will remember you, and hope you will remember us; more importantly, we want you to remember each other. I want all of you to meet in this very auditorium 25 years from today."

There was a moment of silence; then a thin voice piped up, "What time?"

I was inspecting communications facilities in Alaska. Since I had little experience flying in small planes, I was nervous when we approached a landing strip in a snow-covered area. The pilot descended to just a couple hundred feet, then gunned both engines, climbed and circled back. While my heart pounded, the passenger next to me seemed calm. "I wonder why the pilot didn’t land," I said.

"He was checking to see if the landing strip was plowed," the man replied.

As we made a second approach, I glanced out the window. "It looks plowed to me," I commented.

"No," my neighbor replied. "It hasn’t been cleared for some time."

"How can you tell?" I asked.

"Because," the man informed me, "I’m the guy who drives the plow."

My nephew, a flight attendant, split the back of his pants one day during a flight. To save embarrassment, he decided to work in front of the beverage cart, facing forward.

The arrangement worked perfectly until he got to the last row and a passenger leaned over to him and said in a low voice, “Your fly is open.”

Each new patient at the clinic where I work must fill out a questionnaire asking basic health and personal-history questions. One query that inevitably gets a "No" answer is, "Do you now use or have you ever used recreational drugs?"

We were unprepared for the response of a young newlywed who wrote: "Yes—birth-control pills."

A co-worker asked if I knew what to do about a computer problem that was preventing her from getting e-mail. After calling the help desk, I told my colleague that e-mail was being delayed to check for a computer virus.

"It’s a variant of the I Love You virus, only worse," I said.

"What could be worse?" my single co-worker asked wryly. "The Let’s Just Be Friends virus?"

Blood may be thicker than water, but baseball beats them both. I learned this after explaining to my two boys that they were half-Lithuanian on their father’s side, and half-Yankee, meaning their other set of parents came from an old New England family.

My younger son looked worried. "But we’re still a hundred percent Red Sox, right, Mom?"

I was halfway through a meeting with a photocopy salesman, when he suddenly mentioned his wife and children, and how contented he was. I was puzzled, but let him continue. It was only when I glanced down that I understood his reason for imparting this personal information: The table leg against which I had been rubbing my itchy foot wasn’t a table leg at all!

I hate the idea of going under the knife. So I was very upset when the doctor told me I needed a tonsillectomy. Later, the nurse and I were filling out an admission form. I tried to respond to the questions, but I was so nervous I couldn’t speak. The nurse put down the form, took my hands in hers and said, "Don’t worry. This medical problem can easily be fixed, and it’s not a dangerous procedure."

"You’re right. I’m being silly," I said, feeling relieved. "Please continue."

"Good. Now," the nurse went on, "do you have a living will?"

I am an oral surgeon, and once I was scheduled to extract four wisdom teeth from Jim, a high-school football player, who had opted to be sedated for the procedure. As the intravenous anesthesia was being administered, I asked Jim how he was feeling.

"Man," he replied, struggling to keep his eyes open, "I feel like I’m in English class."

My son, age 13, was sick in bed with bronchitis, and although he showed some general improvement, his harsh cough persisted and could be heard all over the house. Worried, too, that he was missing so much school, I went into his room to see how he felt.

There he was, propped up in bed, earphones on, listening to a baseball game—while the tape recorder coughed on and on. The next morning he was in school.

During the mortgage closing on our summer house, my wife and I were asked to sign documents containing small print. When I asked if I should read it, my attorney replied, “Legally, you should. But here’s the bottom line: If you pay your installments on time, there is nothing in there that could harm you. Should you stop paying, however, there is definitely nothing in the small print that can save you.”

Bad weather meant I was stuck overnight at O’Hare airport in Chicago. Along with hotel accommodations, the airline issued each passenger a $10 meal ticket, or “chit.” That evening after dinner I presented my meal ticket to the cashier.

“Is this chit worth $10?” I asked.

Looking up nervously, the cashier responded, “I’m sorry, sir. Was the meal that bad?”

Late one night I stopped at one of those 24-hour gas station mini-marts to get myself a fresh brewed cup of coffee. When I picked up the pot, I could not help noticing that the brew was as black as asphalt and just about as thick. "How old is the coffee you have here?" I asked the woman who was standing behind the store counter.

She shrugged. "I don’t know. I’ve only been working here two weeks."

Sign above the scale in a Mission Hills, Calif., doctor’s office:

"Pretend it’s your I.Q."

Doctors are used to getting calls at any hour. One night a man phoned, waking me up. "I’m sorry to bother you so late," he said, "but I think my wife has appendicitis."

Still half asleep, I reminded him that I had taken his wife’s inflamed appendix out a couple of years before. "Whoever heard of a second appendix?" I asked.

"You may not have heard of a second appendix," he replied, "but surely you’ve heard of a second wife."