Used to scribble on napkins, now I use voice memos

I used to carry around a stack of napkins from fast food joints just to scribble down my dad jokes. I’d shove them in my glovebox and forget about them until I was cleaning out trash. Last month I was driving down I-5 and thought of a pun about a broken vacuum, so I grabbed my phone and recorded it on a voice memo while I was stopped at a red light. That changed everything for me because I don’t lose them anymore, plus I can replay the joke when I’m testing it on my kids. Now I have 20 memos saved from just the past few weeks, and I actually remember the punchlines. Has anyone else switched methods for keeping track of their material?

3 comments

3 Comments

william_torres11d ago

My voice memos are a mess, honestly. I've got grocery lists mixed in with jokes about my neighbor's barking dog, and one time I accidentally recorded myself snoring for 45 minutes. My wife found it and played it at Thanksgiving dinner, which was pretty embarrassing but also got a laugh. At least with the napkin method, the jokes were biodegradable if they bombed. Now I've got digital proof of every terrible pun I've ever thought up, and they're all backed up to the cloud for posterity.

vera_palmer8d agoMost Upvoted

Funny how nobody mentions the real risk of accidentally uploading those snoring recordings to your work cloud account instead of your personal one. That's a whole different level of Thanksgiving dinner embarrassment.

nancythomas10d ago

Snort laughing over here @william_torres because I've totally been there with the accidental snoring recordings. Tbh, my phone is a graveyard of half-baked jokes I thought were genius at 2am, mixed in with reminders to buy milk and a 10-minute rant about my neighbor's leaf blower. Ngl, the cloud backup thing is real - my wife found a recording of me trying to rhyme 'pickle' with 'nickel' for a comedy bit and now she threatens to play it at every family dinner. Honestly, I'd rather have my terrible puns on a napkin that I can burn than have them floating around in the digital ether forever. At least with napkins, you've got a shot at plausible deniability, but with voice memos, you're just one accidental share away from embarrassment.