The Pun Also Rises

"Back Dating"

    I threw my back out last week. I probably should have kept it, or at least recycled it instead, but it was too late. Once you've thrown out your back, it takes effort to, well, get it back. I decided to see a chiropractor, on the theory that if I saw a doctor, I'd just end up throwing oranges at him. (If you were a longtime reader, you'd understand.)

    Anyway, I went off to see the chiropractor, and in spite of having some advantages over doctors, they still follow the basic diagnosis principle of Nope Nope Ouch. Nope Nope Ouch, I presume, is taught as a required course at medical schools across the country, because almost any medical professional I have been to with a complaint of muscle or bone pain seems to use the Nope Nope Ouch method.

    How it works is very simple. I make an appointment with the appropriate person and begin by saying, "I think I injured myself." The medical professional then says, "Does this hurt? Does this hurt? Does this hurt?" while bending me in different directions and poking me. My responses, in order, tend to be, "Nope. Nope. OUCH!" This is repeated four or five times, until I have said "OUCH!" a sufficient number of times.

    By the use of this method, they can usually deduce that I have injured myself. In this particular case, I injured my spine. The only advantage to this is that it proves, contrary to what people may say, I do have one. I sometimes feel spineless, especially in regards to dating, which is a very tricky business.

    It's also a very profitable business, judging from the number of dating sites online. The dating sites tend to use matching algorithms that try to find compatible people.

    This is very different from how other Web sites on the Internet tend to work. Some of the airline Web sites have you choose how many stars you want, and then they select a flight for you. There's no reason this couldn't work with dating. Just choose how many stars you want for your date, and pay accordingly.

    Or better yet, combine dating sites with eBay. You could just bid on the people that you want a date with, maybe replace the big B with a big L, and ... well, maybe that would be illegal.

    But to get back (ha) to my main point, I was at the chiropractor playing Nope Nope Ouch, and we had determined that my spine was both existent (yay) and in pain (boo). On the bright side, chiropractors also have another game in their repertoire, called "Bad Cop, Good Cop."

    You've seen this game on television, and in movies. It works like this: One cop beats the suspect, the other one offers him a cookie. Apparently my spinal column was under interrogation, because the chiropractor would massage the part of my spine that hurt to make it feel slightly better, but then "adjust" it.

    Adjust is a secret chiropractor code word for "Cause large amounts of pain without leaving marks." And if that weren't enough, the chiropractor also had machines. One of them looked like a horizontal electric chair, and the other one was like a giant solid wave machine.

    Interestingly, the electrodes ended up being the Good Cop, and the solid wave machine sent bumps under my spine that hurt.

    The odd thing about the wave machine is that the waves moved from top to bottom. So sometimes they were raising my top, and sometimes they were raising my bottom. By the time it was raising my bottom, I felt that rather than massaging my back, it was exercise of a different nature, perhaps more useful if I used one of the aforementioned innovative dating Web sites.

    But I don't have much luck with Web sites like that. On the contrary, the responses I get tend to leave me with a very familiar string of reactions: Nope. Nope. Ouch.

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    Seth Brown is a local humor writer dating back to 1997, and the author of "Think You're The Only One?" His Web site is www.RisingPun.com

All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.