A woman found herself standing at the Pearly Gates. St Peter greeted her and said,
“These are the Gates to Heaven, my dear. But you must do one more thing before you can enter.”
The woman was very excited, and asked of St. Peter what she must do.
“Spell any four-letter word,” St. Peter replied.
The woman promptly replied, “Then the word I will spell is love. L-O-V-E.”
St. Peter said, “Good, you do not have a dirty mind.” Then he welcomed her in, and asked her if she would mind taking his place at the gates for a few minutes while he took a break. So the woman is left sitting in St Peter’s chair when a man approaches the gates, and she realizes it is her husband.
“What happened?” she cried, “Why are you here?”
Her husband stared at her for a moment, then said, “I was so upset when I left your funeral, I got in an accident. Did I really make it to heaven?”
“Not yet,” she replied, “You must spell a word first.”
“What word?” he asked.
The woman responded, “Czechoslovakia.”
It’s wise to remember how easily this wonderful technology can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.
Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory.
Unfortunately, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly woman, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked here e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a d e * d faint.
At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
Dearest wife,
Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
PS: Sure is hot down here.
Kathryn’s 5-year-old
developed a strong interest in spelling once she learned to spell STOP. After that, she tried to figure out her own words. From the back seat of the car she’d ask, “Mom, what does FGRPL spell?”
“Nothing,” Kathryn said.
Sitting at breakfast she’d suddenly ask, “Mom, what does DOEB spell?”
“Nothing,” Kathryn answered.
This went on for several weeks. Then one afternoon as they sat coloring in her room she asked, “Mom, what does LMDZ spell?”
Kathryn smiled at her and said, “Nothing, sweetheart.”
The 5-year-old carefully set down her crayon, sighed and said, “Boy, there sure are a lot of ways to spell ‘nothing’!”
