zombies.

When I was in high school my friend Nick got a new computer for his graduation gift. It was an Apple laptop, and this was before everyone had them. One summer day Nick, Laura, and myself were lounging around at his house, and he was demonstrating the fancy features of his new fancy laptop. It had this function in which you could say "tell me a joke" and this digital woman would pop up and tell you a joke. The jokes were usually bad, but the feature was novel and thus fascinating to us. On this particular day we hovered around the laptop and instructed it to tell us a joke, and the conversation went a little something like this:

Digital woman: "Knock, knock"

Us: "who's there?!"

DW: "Zombies."

Us: "zombies who??"

....

....

silence.

Us: "ZOMBIES WHO???"

....

....

more silence. Apparently the fancy new laptop had frozen.

At this point Nick began screaming every expletive in his arsenal, which was a lot.

Nick: "ZOMBIES WHO YOU *&^&*&^&87#$$%@#$&*^(%^ YOU @#*&$#(*@(*&%#)"

And we never heard the end of the joke.

Several years later my friend Alex said that he had heard the joke elsewhere, and wondered if I would like to know how it ended. "It's pretty bad" he said. I decided I would just rather leave the joke unanswered, and imagine all the ways it could have ended, rather than be disappointed after all that time. So I still don't know how it ended.

As an adult, I have come to compare the 'zombies who' joke to relationships I have encountered that have ended before they had run the course that I would have thought. Had they not ended abruptly, what would have happened? Do I really want to know how it ends? More often than not, I think I would rather just be left guessing.

...because who answers the door for zombies? you're bound to get your heart ripped out.