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Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Slightly Amusing Tale of Desperately
Boring Mike
Dear Ned,
First of all, let me tell you how much I enjoy reading your
column 'Ned's Guide to Feeling Socially Adequate', which I read religiously every weekend. The advice you so freely dispense
to all the misfits that write you, dear Ned, has been a great help to me over the years, so now, finding myself in the midst
of a personal crisis of my own, I figure you're the only person who could possibly help me. Here's what I'm worried about.
I have no sense of humour. My inability to be funny really interferes with my social life as I never get to be the life of
the party. 'There goes boring Mike' follows me like the plague and I'm told that I'm just as deadly if not as popular. I try
to learn jokes but I always forget the punch line; when we play charades, I have the bad luck of getting things like 'rotting
wood' (what do you do?) or Richard the Third (I don't have to tell you what I had to do for clues for this one, suffice to
say I was thrown out of the party for making lewd gestures). Really, my social life is nothing but a trial.
Only last week I asked this nice girl (she was temping at
the Tax Office where I work) out for a meal as I reckoned since we hadn't had a chance to talk during office hours, she wouldn't
have figured out she'd be bored by me at dinner and she would accept out of sheer ignorance. Well, of course, the evening
was a disaster. As usual, I was too nervous to talk about any of the amusing topics I had prepared earlier, such as the flying
patterns of migrating geese or the many intricacies of the reproductive system of the common shrew, so instead I talked about
work. I went into the nitty gritty of computerized account keeping and even threw in complaint handling procedures for good
measure; it was such a boring evening even I surprised myself, I reflected later, when I went over the details as I walked
home alone, having put the unfortunate girl half-dead into a cab right after the main course.
Predictably, she ditched me as soon as she could. She wouldn't
hear of ordering a dessert, citing a strict diet regime, and I had no recourse but to go along with it, even though she clearly
was lying, being a girl with such a healthy appetite. Indeed, she had ploughed through her meal with extraordinary speed;
one would have thought she hadn't eaten all week. Anyway, at the cab rank, I didn't get my goodnight kiss because I suspect
she didn't want to give me one and, at any rate, I was too busy talking about the induction we all had to go through when
we first started at the Tax Office, and I even told her she'd have to undergo a fire drill, and I was just about to say she'd
have to use the fire exit steps and not the elevator but I didn't get the chance because she just opened the door of the car
and jumped right in, and the driver took off as if he too had a fire drill to complete. I don't even know if this was a proper
cab. It might have been but who knows? She might have just jumped into someone's car willy nilly just to be rid of me. Ah
well, there you have it, Ned. I'm boring myself now reiterating this to you, so please, help.
Desperately Boring Mike
Ned's reply:
Dear Desperately Boring Mike,
Having read your letter with a great deal of intere........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 
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