Happy March Arizona ASCE members! Thank you for ongoing support of ASCE. Within this newsletter, you’ll find various ways to network with fellow engineers, as well as volunteer opportunities. Please take a moment to read through and I hope you’ll find time to join me at some events! Next month’s newsletter will contain photos and description of the Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge dedication ceremony at the Grand Canyon.

How to be Funny

1. Exaggerate… or point out the obvious. What generally makes something funny is when we exaggerate or when we say one thing… then something ridiculous or opposite. “Where should we go for lunch? I’m thinking tacos or… waffles?” or “What’s with these lists of 10 things to do before you die? Isn’t EVERYTHING we do before we die? It should be, ’10 things to do’”.
2. Dumb and… dumber? Take this line from Seinfield, “It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.” Or when your friends are traveling overseas, “Be sure to tell me the lottery numbers – let me know what happens tomorrow since you’ll be there before me.”
3. Have a go-to joke. Have a decent joke that gets a couple laughs just in case. I like this one from Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Season 3 Episode 3, Jay Leno says, “Two hunters are walking through the woods when they come across a hole. They look down and can’t see the bottom. They wonder how deep it is and go looking for something to throw down the hole.

They see a rusty old anvil and throw it down the hole. The hole is so deep they never hear it hit the bottom.

Suddenly, they hear rustling leaves behind them and a galloping sound. A goat goes flying past them straight into the hole. They are astonished.

Then they hear a guy calling out for his goat. He sees the two hunters and one says, “I’m sorry, but if you’re looking for your goat he just ran into this bottomless hole.”

The man says, “That’s impossible, I tied him to an anvil.”

4. Have a go-to personal story. My sister regular buys me these soft t-shirts and I love wearing them. She once bought me this one that had a rough outline of a guy walking a dog on the front. I loved that shirt and wore it all the time. One day I took my foster dog on a walk, and was wearing my favorite shirt as usual, thinking nothing of it. I walk out the front door and I see young guy walking down the sidewalk. He looks up at me, looks away, then looks back completing a serious double take. He says, “Hey man… you’re doing exactly what your shirt shows…” Huh? I look down at my shirt and realize he’s correct, I’m walking my dog while wearing my shirt depicting a guy walking his dog. I look at the young guy and say, “Absolutely! I have a whole closet of shirts that show me doing my daily activities.”

My Favorite Jokes (from the office)

1. We were getting started on a very large project requiring check-print stamps for an internal quality control process. Someone in the office took the initiative to visit various departments around our office to check to see how many physical check-print stamps we should order. The person gets to my desk and I immediately laugh and say, “This is 2016, we don’t need a physical check-print stamp.” “Are you sure?” “Definitely.” You might be able to guess how this story ends, but the project begins and within the first week I find a need for a physical check-print stamp. I wander over to this person’s area and their check-print stamp is tied down, with a sturdy string, to a wall. On it a note reads, “NOT FOR USE BY ROADWAY DEPARTMENT”. I laugh and think that’s funny… I open the check-print stamp to stamp my sheet, and in permanent marker on the inside of the stamp it reads, “NOT FOR USE BY TED SMITHWICK”

2. A coworker of mine saves this joke for use only about once every 2-3 years. We were making a design change on a project and I noticed that our vertical alignment was off by one inch. We were approaching a submittal, so I sent a quick email – I copied other roadway engineers working on the project in our office, also staff in our bridge department – and I sent the email. “XYZ… this has changed by one inch.”

Within 1-2 minutes of sending the email, I receive an email back from my coworker saying, “Why did you say one FOOT?” I scrolled down to my email and sure enough I had written one foot. I immediately reply all and told everyone that I had made a mistake and that I had meant one INCH not one FOOT. Then, within another 1-2 minutes, I get another email saying, “you did say one inch, what are you talking about??” My coworker had edited my own email such that it looked like I had made an error…

Newsletter Schedule

• March 2019 – How to be Funny
• April 2019 – Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge Dedication Ceremony
• May 2019 – Winning Friends and Influencing People
• June 2019 – An Interview with an Arizona ASCE Member
• July 2019 – How to Save Someone’s Life
• August 2019 – My Thoughts on ASCE
• September 2019 – Thank you
• October 2019 – Breanna Connolly Takes Over the President’s Message