My first job out of college was production assistant at the Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, next to the monster teddy bear on Berkeley Street. (I'm not being strictly honest. It's the first job that counted. The one before that... It's too shameful. The world's oldest profession. Human Resources Assistant. We won't speak of it again.) It was a contract job, paid three grains of sand a week, offered no health care, and for the most part consisted of putting paragraph tags in miles-long documents. What kept me there? Youth, a low opinion of my employability, and most of all, Wacky Web Tales.
Wacky Web Tales, the Houghton Mifflin online version of Mad Libs, the best part of any job I've ever had. They were stories written by actual human children, with certain parts of speech removed by the same small people, with hilarious results.
My duty was to test them, verify that each was functional... and the only way to test them properly was to fill them out. I wasn't remarkably busy, and no one much seemed to care how fast I did them, so I took my own sweet time.
I never looked ahead to the story itself to find the funniest possible word choices. They were all beautiful accidents. I kept a few of my favorites, and I offer you now the best, a collaboration between me and some anonymous kidlet, circa 1998. Please pay close attention to the punctuation and capitalization*, which will be reproduced exactly to reflect the brilliant nuance of her work.
My bitter friend Delirium and I had a sleepover. We got up and went to the kitchen to get a glass of juice. I said,"What kind of juice do you Want?" I want hemlock juice! I went to the fridge. I looked in and there was no hemlock juice, so we had milk instead!*My favorite parts are the capitalized Want (the peculiar emphasis it implies never fails to amuse me) and the fact that "I want hemlock juice!" is not, in fact, attributed to her bitter friend. It is without quotes, as though she asked Delirium for her beverage preference as a formality. She herself was interested in hemlock juice, and emphatically. Personally, I suspect her bitter friend Delirium was a figment of her imagination.
