Synaptic Snaps, Crackles & Pops

Testing...testing... [30 DBC entry]

30DBC November 23 Prompt: In your blog today, tell us your favorite joke. It can be long, short, it does not matter. What makes this particular joke your favorite one? C'mon, show us your sense of humor!

The joke -
Jim and Jeff are walking along the railroad tracks, when Jim spots a foot lying on the ground.
"Say, Jeff," he says, pointing at a mermaid tattoo above the ankle, "that kinda looks like Joe's foot."
"Yeah, it does," Jeff agrees.
They walk a little further and then Jeff points to the other side of the track and says, "Hey, that arm over there has a triangle tattoo just like Joe's!"
"Sure does. Spooky, huh?"
A little further on, they both spot the trunk of a man's body lying on the tracks.
"Joe's got a bowling shirt just like that one!" Jim exclaimed.
"Yeah," said Jeff. "I don't like how this is going."
Another fifty feet down the track, Jeff spots a head lying next to the tracks. He rushes up to it, lifts it by the ears and yells, "Joe! Joe! Are you alright?"

The reason -
When I was in the Army, we had to take annual tests to verify certain basic skills common to all soldiers: map reading, field sanitation, first aid, etc. Each testing station had a scorer, at least one training aid (map and compass, M16A2 rifle, etc.) and, of course, the person being tested. At the First Aid station, the training aid was either a rubber dummy or a fellow soldier.

The set-up can vary, anything from a compound fracture to a sucking chest wound—it even sounds horrible, doesn't it?—to a nerve agent victim. The part about this that always made me smile (or just shake my head) was that it didn't matter if you tied the world's greatest splint, performed world-class thoracic surgery with your P38 (Army-style folding can opener) right there in the field, or stuck the dummy with enough atropine to fell a moose, if the first thing you did upon coming up to the victim was not to shake him/it by the shoulder and ask, "Are you okay?" - you failed the task. Period.

Oh, yeah: you weren't told you had failed, until you told the scorer you were finished.