I was reminiscing the other day about how my group of friends in high school had what we thought was an inside joke. It was this thing where somebody would say something that was obviously a lie. Immediately after, the speaker would make direct eye contact with the listener and very conspicuously shake their head, "NO!" but not actually say anything else.
An example: my friend would ask if I needed a ride home and I would take on a really monotone, evenly paced voice and respond, "Nope, I got the DoLorean on loan from Marty." And then I would look directly at him and shake my head. This would be like a hybrid communication, as I would have made a Back to the Future joke/reference and simultaneously indicated that I would, in fact, like to get a ride home.
Eventually, the joke began to permute into further categories. This first started to happen when we would be driving. Whoever was driving would pull up to the red light, in the left turn lane, and put their left turn signal on. When the light would turn green, the driver would point right in a very exaggerated way, as if to indicate they were making a right turn, but then proceed to execute the left turn without incident.
It reached a point between some of us that we could tell when these unspoken physical actions were happening without actually seeing them and we would have entire phone conversations where one person would do nothing except tell complete lies, but because of the nature of the joke, nothing was misunderstood (the tone of the liar's voice did become more pronounced in these cases, making it a bit easier to distinguish what was going on).
It reached its apex one weekend when my best friend was driving to San Francisco by himself. This was in the pre-smart phone, pre-GPS days. He had a cell phone, but no access to a printer. So, we devised a plan that involved him calling me when he got into the city and I would pull up and relay the directions from MapQuest on my computer to him over the phone. Seamlessly, without even thinking, I just started giving him the exact opposite of the correct directions. He made it to his hotel without issue.
It wasn't until many years later when I was working at Tower Records that I did it with one of my coworkers that I realized it wasn't just me and my group of high school buddies that would have a similar running joke. We were open until midnight at Tower on Fridays and Saturdays. One Saturday night around 930pm, it was especially dead and my coworker asked if we could close up early. Without even thinking, I said, "Yep, and then we're all off to the bar for a round of Fireball whiskey shots" and then I turned to him and he turned to me —almost as if he expected it— I made direct eye contact and just shook my head slowly, indicating no. We both started laughing and he actually said something like, "I can't believe you know that joke."
I guess, you could say that this kind of translated into early 2000s internet as the HTML "<sarcasm>" tag, but the less HTML became an integral part of the internet, the less that was used. I've actually caught myself on more than one occasion typing text that was the complete opposite of what I actually meant to say while simultaneously shaking my head.
Only to realize, of course, that such a joke would never translate into text, ever.
― he doesn't need to be racist about it though. (Austin), Wednesday, 30 August 2017 18:47 (eight years ago)