Category: Beginner’s Guides

A Beginner’s Guide to Accidentally Alarming Your Spouse

By Ann

What you will need:

  • A profound level of exhaustion
  • A series of disconcerting decisions
  • Your unsuspecting spouse

 

Steps:

  1. Get home after long hard day.
  2. Immediately retreat to bedroom.
  3. In your hurry to get into bed, forget to turn on lights.
  4. Set yourself up with a heating pad and prepare to watch TV.
  5. Be so tired, forget to turn on heating pad.
  6. Sit there so long the sun sets and now you’re in the dark.
  7. Hope your Amazon firestick crashes right as spouse comes in to check on you.
  8. Spouse finds you sitting in the dark, lying on an unplugged heating pad, staring at blank TV screen.
  9. Mission accomplished.

Pilling Your Cat: A Beginner’s Guide

By Shawn

What you will need:

cat (alive)
pills for the cat
pill pockets

Steps:

  1. Make sure you have a cat and that it’s alive (see “What you will need”).
  2. Check that your cat has some kind of medical problem—if it doesn’t, you can stop right here.
  3. Get the pills that are supposed to fix whatever is wrong with the cat.
  4. Make sure that the cat doesn’t like the taste of the pills, because that will increase the challenge.
  5. Try to feed pill to cat and fail spectacularly.
  6. Go out and spend a bunch of money on pill pockets.
  7. Make sure that the cat doesn’t like the taste of the pill pockets; this should be easy, because you own a cat, and it wants this to be terrible for you.
  8. Put the pill in the pill pocket and feed it to the cat.
  9. What a surprise, the cat won’t eat it.
  10. Attempt to force feed it to the cat.
  11. What’s that? The cat spit it out? As though it were a complete waste of money? As though your time and effort mean nothing?
  12. Hey, I know. The cat likes treats. What if you mashed up some treats and coated the pill in the treat dust?
  13. Sees right through your ruse. Hates the pill. Hates you.
  14. Maybe force-feeding wasn’t working because the pill keeps sticking to the inside of the cat’s mouth. What about coating it in a little olive oil and giving it another try?
  15. Okay, toooo much olive oil.
  16. No, stop spitting—stop spitting the pill out. You’re getting covered in olive oil. You look like an otter caught in a BP spill.
  17. Look, here’s a treat. Here’s a normal treat. Mmm. Good, right? Maybe the next thing I feed you will be a treat? Maybe give it a try, huh?
  18. No more treats until you take this. Stop meowing. Real treats are for closers.
  19. For the love of Moses, this pill is to fix your stupid bowels! DON’T YOU WANT TO POOP LIKE A NORMAL CAT?!?
  20. Oh come on, don’t run away. Don’t track your oil-stained body through the—no, get off the couch. Oh god, it’s covered in—no, not the blanket, it sheds—you’re tarring and feathering yourself, just—
  21. You’re an oil slick covered in blanket fuzz, and you’ve wedged yourself under the couch.
  22. Mmkay, well, I guess we’ll have to try this again later. How many pills a day are you supposed to take again?
  23. FIVE?
  24. …
  25. Sell cat. Purchase plant.

An Open Letter to the Hamburglar

By Shawn

Dear Mr. The Hamburglar:

I want to start by saying that the suggestions I’m about to relate are coming from a place of immense respect. Having observed you for many years now, I can tell that you’re a hardworking man, and your sense of purpose in life is enviable. I don’t know if you want to eat all of the hamburgers or if you just want to have them, but either way, you’re not afraid to follow your dreams, and I admire that. Nevertheless, I feel there are several key areas in which there’s room for improvement, and that’s why I’ve decided to write you.

First, I get that your whole raison-d’être is to steal hamburgers and you want to share that with the world. But I think a key part of being a successful criminal is getting away with it, and there it really helps to be inconspicuous. Accordingly, one thing you might want to consider is not wearing an old-timey prison outfit. Imagine some hamburgers go missing, and everybody’s looking around, and there you are, proudly bedecked like you broke out of jail in the 1890s. Aggravating matters further, the hat, mask, and cape make it very clear that you don’t simply happen to like stripes but are instead some kind of aspiring supervillian. And, last but not least, you’re literally wearing a tie with hamburgers on it. I can’t stress enough how counterproductive it is to have a picture of the thing you like to steal prominently displayed on your person. It’s just not going to be that difficult for everyone to work out what happened.

On a related note, I have reservations about your habit of muttering “robble robble robble” as you go about your business. For one, “robble” is not a real word, and this, in conjunction with your clothing choices, paints a portrait of severe mental instability. For another, even though “robble” is nonsense, it does contain the word “rob,” which, again, kinda gives the game away. If you saw a man walking around with a knife mumbling “stabble stabble stabble,” you’d be alarmed, wouldn’t you? I’d be like, “Is he going to stab someone? I don’t know, but it seems like a good idea to get the police involved sooner rather than later.” This, in a nutshell, is how you’re coming off.

Finally, the location. You’ve chosen to lead a life of burger-crime in McDonaldland, one of the very few places, real or imagined, in which both the mayor and the chief of police are hamburgers. Don’t you think you’ve picked a spot that’s going to take your shenanigans far more seriously than a non-burger-run jurisdiction? In America, for instance, our municipal authorities love their hamburgers, but they’re not related to them. Here, if you steal some hamburgers, it’s petty theft. In McDonaldland, those hamburgers are taxpaying citizens. As far as Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac are concerned, those could be their kids or grandkids you’re abducting. I think if you don’t get the hell out of there, it could be the chair for you.

Anyway, all this isn’t to minimize the things I think you’re doing right. Your enthusiasm? Wonderful. Your desire to stick it to the man, as exemplified by that self-satisfied asshole clown? Love it. I just think there are ways to go about it that don’t see you executed by a pissed-off cheeseburger avenging his comrades. Just think about it, okay?