that's just the way it is....

If my colleagues ever had any reason to doubt how someone as exalted as my wife ended up with someone as humble lowly as me, then they may have been confounded yesterday when they had an unexpected demonstration of why we work as a couple.

It went like this:

One of my colleagues was given a "Fact a Day" calendar as a present for Christmas.  Every day we've been in the office this year, she has delighted in sharing the latest nugget of information.  Today, for example, we learned that Hitler was Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.  FACT.  She was given the calendar by our boss, I think because she's young and doesn't really know very much (she's one of the ones who believed that I grew up in a time before electricity) but she actually really enjoys learning and is always hungry to learn more.  Over the last few months, she's been delighted to learn about things as diverse as non-newtonian fluids, Schrödinger's cat and, just recently, how there's no such thing as a fact.

To keep things interesting, I've been inserting the odd "bonus fact" into the calendar for her to discover as she tears off a sheet to read the next day.  I started out with things like "you have 50% or your DNA in common with a banana", but soon wandered off into things that patently aren't true because it's a lot more fun.  This girl has a bit of a thing for Channing Tatum, so I've started riffing on the theme of "Channing Tatum Facts".

Channing Tatum Fact #1 was as follows:

Channing Tatum is never going to dance again because, he said, "guilty feet ain't got no rhythm".

She didn't get it.  No matter how many times she read it out loud, she just didn't get it.  "But he is going to dance again because he's making Magic Mike 2.  He didn't do that song either. Did he?  No.  He didn't do that song."

As is often the way, her failure to see the humour only made the joke funnier.

My wife happened to be up at my desk having her lunch, and when the "fact" was read out to her, she immediately burst into a fit of giggles, becoming more hysterical with every attempt my colleague made to locate the humour, my wife's laughter making my colleague even more desperate to see the joke.  Before long, my wife was laughing so hard that everyone around us in the office was staring at her with wonder and, I think, a new insight into why we work as a couple.

Channing Tatum Fact #2 is due tomorrow.  I can barely wait to find out what my colleague will make of the fact that "Channing Tatum has unusually small hands, which is why is rarely seen doing jazz hands...."  FACT.