Recommended Posts

I just read this here and laughed out loud, so I thought I would share it with you guys. God, I hope this really happened...

Cookies by Douglas Adams (author: "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy")

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong.

I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.

I want you to picture the scene. It's very important that you get this very clear in your mind.

Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.

You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn't because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.

Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. "Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice . . ." I mean, it doesn't really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.

Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line.

(Excerpted from "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" by Douglas Adams)

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/933448-joke-cookies/
Share on other sites

I love it !

Im English but deffinately would have said something like, "Erm Wanna cookie like mate?"

Then he would have said they were his, then I "no mine" etc until I found mine and laughed it off appologising feeling like an idiot, but that I had something funny to post here lol

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/933448-joke-cookies/#findComment-593102942
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Lego Batman 2026 hahahaha. You thought I couldn't reply back???
    • The problem isn't with Epic, it's with the platform holders like Steam and Nintendo, they should be a lot more strict in their review process.
    • Hello, Installed here without issue. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky
    • Microsoft updates Visual Studio Code with easier language model discovery and in-app search by Paul Hill Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.125, its latest weekly release. This week, the company has focused on discovering and installing extra language models via the Marketplace; searching the web and securely browsing over remote connections without leaving VS Code; choosing how long VS Code waits before installing extension updates; and delivering managed Copilot settings through existing device management tooling. In older versions of VS Code, extensions could contribute their own model providers, but to find these extensions, you needed the right tags to search for in the Extension view. Now, the Language Models editor gives you an Install Model Providers button that opens the Extensions view, which is filtered to extensions that contribute model providers, making it easier to find and install them. Once you install a provider, its model will appear in the model picker. If you use the integrated browser much, you can now look up information without leaving VS Code by typing a query into the integrated browser’s address bar. It will use your configured search engine, the same way a standalone browser does. You can use workbench.browser.searchEngine to pick a search engine. When the browser is opened in a remote workspace, it's now possible to proxy HTTP(S) traffic via the remote connection. This allows you to connect to any ports or services that can only be accessed from the remote machine. If you read our coverage from two weeks ago about VS Code 1.123, you might have seen that extension updates have a two-hour delay as a safety measure. In this update, Microsoft is giving you the ability to configure the time of the delay. You can find it under extensions.autoUpdateDelay. Finally, with this update, admins can deliver managed GitHub Copilot settings through native device management (MDM) channels on Windows and macOS, in addition to account-based enterprise settings files. Settings delivered via MDM appear as policy-enforced in VS Code and can’t be overridden locally. Future updates will extend the supported policy keys across Copilot surfaces. You can download the update from the Visual Studio Code website now.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      Classifyskilleducation earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      eurospharma62 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      With What earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      Harris Gilbert earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Vincian earned a badge
      One Month Later
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      543
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      171
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      82
    4. 4
      ATLien_0
      64
    5. 5
      neufuse
      64
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!