One of the factors that makes my job so tolerable is I'm one of the very few representatives of my company, working in what would be considered The Field. On other projects, in other years, I've played the rôle of a small cog in a big machine, the environment - a large office building containing all the usual hierarchical strata of a big company. Hence there's some regular contact with the big bosses, if only just elevator proximity and the occaisional mandatory large gathering (like presentations). But out "in the field" one is generally spared all that, except for rare visits made all the more intense by their infrequency. Today was one such episode.

Three "suits" descended upon us; one (the leader) was a VP of the neanderthal sort (rather than the other two, who were the smooth, affluent WASP kind). His constant chatter, delivered in a moronic Boston or Brooklyn accent (couldn't quite tell which) was peppered with brutish vulgarity; his hair-do, a particularly hideous example, was the sparse strands swept-over-bald look (why do they do that?) Fortunately I wasn't required to entertain or do much of anything with them except shake hands upon arrival and departure, as they were here for meetings elsewhere, but they did hole up in our office-trailer for a couple hours in the late afternoon, and I had to listen to their shop talk (as I performed system tests, swiveling back & forth between two Sun workstations). At one point it was Joke Time: someone uttered the simile "like a Chinese guy farting in the Space Shuttle" - I didn't catch the context. Then they went into a round of state-bashing jokes; generally I disapprove of these, like Polish (or whatever) jokes, they're cruel at somebody's expense (though I'm only human; sometimes I laugh). So here was the good one, cleverly neutralized:
"You know why the toothbrush was invented in [your least favorite state]? Anywhere else it would've been called the teethbrush!"