Just Doomed!

by Andy Griffiths

  37. You cheat on a class spelling test and, despite being the worst speller in the class, you end up getting fifty out of fifty and your teacher is so impressed that she chooses you as the school representative for the upcoming national spelling bee and you try to tell her she’s making a big mistake but she insists and not only do the whole school and all your friends and family come along to cheer you on but to make things worse it’s a nationally televised event and you’re totally freaking out but the first word they give you to spell is ‘cat’ and, incredibly, you get it right and you think, Hey, maybe I’m not such a bad speller after all—perhaps I really CAN do this—and your second word is ‘dog’ and against all odds you get that right as well and you think, Yes, I can DEFINITELY do this, I can REALLY DEFINITELY do this!!! and then your third word is, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’.

  38. Your doctor looks at your test results and says, ‘Uh-oh.’

  39. Your doctor looks at your test results and starts crying.

  40. Your doctor looks at your test results, screams and jumps out the window.

  41. You’re reading a really good book in bed and a moth gets into the room and flies crazily around the light bulb and it’s smashing into your head and you try to swat it with the book and the book flies out of your hand, across the room, knocks over a vase of flowers and the water spills onto an over-loaded powerboard and it starts sparking and causes the curtains to catch on fire and you have to get out of bed to put it out and you step on a rat and it bites you on the toe and infects you with bubonic plague.

  42. Your hamburger tastes a bit funny so you peel off the bun to see what’s wrong with it and a deadly hamburger assassin jumps out from underneath the pickle and assassinates you.

  43. You have just invented an atom-smashing machine and you can’t turn it off and it ends up smashing every single atom in the entire universe, including all the atoms that make up you.

  44. You are on a river cruise and you lean too far over the side of the boat and a freshwater crocodile leaps up and bites your face off.

  45. You are washing the dishes and a dishwater crocodile leaps out of the sink and bites your face off.

  46. You are on the toilet and a toilet-water crocodile leaps up and bites your bum off and you jump up and look back into the bowl to see what just bit your bum off and the toilet-water crocodile bites your face off as well.

  47. You are a really good javelin thrower and you throw a javelin so hard that it travels right out of the athletics park and keeps going all the way around the whole world following the curvature of the Earth until it comes up behind you and spears you in the back of your head.

  48. You are riding your bike along a sealed road and you see a sign that says DANGER! QUICKSAND AHEAD and you think, Cool, I’ve always wanted to see quicksand so you keep riding and the sealed road turns into a dirt road and then the dirt road turns into dirt and the dirt turns into mud and the mud turns into quicksand and as you and your bike sink slowly and inexorably into the wet, stinking, soupy sludge you think, So this is what quicksand looks like …

  49. You see a poisonous spider crawling across your bedroom ceiling and you spray it with bug spray and it drops off the ceiling and falls into your open, screaming mouth.

  50. You see a poisonous snake slithering across the top of the curtain rail and you spray it with snake spray and it drops off the curtain rail and down the front of your pyjama pants.

  51. You are at the zoo and one of the keepers comes up to you and says, ‘What are you doing out of your cage?’ and you say, ‘What are you talking about? I’m a visitor not a zoo animal’ and the keeper says, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say!’ and grabs you and throws you into the baboon cage.

  52. Your parents sit you down and say, ‘It’s time we told you the truth’ and you say, ‘I’m adopted? I knew it! I always knew I couldn’t be related to you idiots!’ and they say, ‘No that’s not it’ and you say, ‘Well, what then?’ and they say, ‘Well, the truth is that we made you up—you’re just a figment of our imaginations—you don’t really exist’ and you look down and see your body fading away.

  53. You are on a school camp and the kitchen runs out of food and your teachers explain that they’re going to have to start cooking and eating the students in alphabetical order beginning with A and your name is Aaron Abraham Aardvark.

  54. You are lost in the desert and you’ve just eaten your last emergency honey sandwich and you’ve got honey smeared all over your face and then you lie down exhausted and go to sleep and a whole bunch of face-eating ants eat your face off.

  55. You are sunbaking on a beach trying to get a really good tan when you smell a delicious barbecue and you sit up to see who’s cooking and you realise it’s you!

  56. You want to go ice-skating on a frozen pond but you’re not sure if the ice is thick enough to support your weight so you go out into the middle of the pond to check by smashing it with a sledgehammer and it cracks and as you fall into the freezing water your last thought is, No, that ice is nowhere near thick enough.

  57. You are in outer space and you have to go outside to fix a satellite transmitter and your incredibly advanced on-board computer won’t open the door of the spaceship to let you back in because your low IQ poses a threat to the success of the mission.

  58. You are riding on a Ferris wheel at a seaside amusement park and there’s a sign in the carriage that says DON’T ROCK THE CARRIAGE but you rock the carriage anyway and your rocking causes the entire Ferris wheel to become unbalanced and roll off its axis and roll along the pier and plunge into the ocean, drowning all Ferris wheel riders, including you.

  59. You are playing strip poker and you accidentally start the game with no clothes on so every time you lose a hand the other players make you remove one of your body parts … and you’re a really bad player.

  60. It’s your birthday and you blow out all the candles on your birthday cake except for one that just won’t go out no matter how hard you blow and then you realise it’s because it’s not a candle at all, it’s the fuse of a stick of dynamite—and you look up and say, ‘Hey, who put a stick of dynamite in my birthday cake?’ but nobody answers because they’ve all run away.

  61. You are striving to solve a super-difficult sudoku puzzle and you can’t decide whether to insert a 6 or a 7 on the second line in between the 8 and the 9 and you start sweating and steam starts streaming from your ears and nostrils and your brain dissolves into a sorry soup of stinking sudokued-out brain cells.

  62. You are playing Truth or Dare and you choose Dare and you are dared to go up to your crush and say, ‘You’re my crush and you mean so much to me’ but you get mixed up and say, ‘You mean so much and you’re to crush me’ so your crush gets a twenty-tonne weight and crushes you to death.

  63. You are commissioned to paint a portrait of the Queen for her birthday and after many months of hard work she comes to your studio for a viewing but what you don’t know—until you unveil it for her—is that moments before the Queen arrived your cat vomited all over the painting. The Queen is offended by the liberty you have taken portraying her in the likeness of a puddle of cat’s vomit and orders you to be sent to the Tower of London and your neck to be whacked with an axe until your head is no longer attached to your body.

  64. You say, ‘Mum, could you get me a drink of water?’ and she mishears you and thinks you said, ‘Mum, could you disembowel me with a pitchfork?’ and she thinks it’s a strange request but she does it anyway because she’s your mother and she loves you.

  65. You are making a Vegemite sandwich and instead of spreading it with Vegemite you accidentally spread it with deadly Ebola virus from the jar that you carelessly left on the kitchen bench … and you don’t realise your mistake until you’ve eaten the Ebola-virus-infected bread and your eyes bug out and your bottom explodes.

  66. You’re making pancakes and you accidentally get the pancake mixture confused with a bowl of toxic nuclear waste that you carelessly left on
the kitchen bench … and you don’t realise your mistake until you’ve eaten the pancakes and your hair falls out and your face falls off.

  67. You take a turn-off onto a freeway ramp and you see a sign saying WRONG WAY! GO BACK! but you can’t read.

  68. You’re knitting a sweater and you get an itch on the inside of your ear and you use one of your knitting needles to scratch it but as you scratch the itch it seems to retreat deeper inside your ear and you have to push the knitting needle further and further in until it comes out your other ear and although you no longer have the itch your brain is now leaking out of your ear, running down your neck and going all over your knitting.

  69. You’re in a gas factory and you see a sign that says WARNING! but you can’t read the rest of it because it’s a bit dark so you light a match and you see that it says WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T LIGHT A MATCH!

  70. You’re driving past a car accident and you’re so busy trying to see what’s happened you don’t notice that you’ve driven onto the wrong side of the road right into the path of a speeding monster truck.

  71. You lean a ladder across a doorway and you tell everyone not to open the door while you’re up on the ladder and you climb up to the top of the ladder and then somebody opens the door.

  72. It’s a lovely autumn morning and you feel so happy that you jump into the massive pile of autumn leaves you raked up yesterday and the next thing you know six sharp spikes go right through your chest—and into your heart—and you suddenly remember where you left that stupid rake.

  73. Despite the warnings issued by the World Health Organization, the Heart Foundation and the Department of Common Sense you start smoking fifty packs of cigarettes a day, drinking two dozen bottles of beer every night, eating nothing but junk food high in sugar and saturated fat, living a 100 per cent exercise-free lifestyle and whacking yourself repeatedly in the head with a hammer.

  74. You’re playing hide-and-seek and you see a cute little round door and you open it and it leads into a cute little round cave and you think, Nobody will ever find me in here! but as you climb inside and close the door the cute little cave starts spinning at high speed and you realise that it’s not a cute little cave—it’s a clothes dryer.

  75. You’re running down a steep hill and it’s getting steeper and steeper and your feet are barely touching the ground and the hill gets even steeper until it’s not so much a hill as a cliff and you’re not so much running as falling, and you realise that you’re not running down a steep hill at all … you’re falling off a cliff.

  76. You’re walking in a pretty green meadow and you bend over to pick a pretty pink flower and you look back through your legs and you see a pretty angry bull with pretty big horns that look pretty sharp and it’s charging pretty much straight at your pretty little butt.

  77. You’re swinging on a vine across a piranha-infested river and hoping like heck that you don’t lose your grip … and then you do.

  78. You’re walking over a really rickety wooden bridge suspended across a deep ravine filled with snakes, scorpions and giant spiders and you’re hoping like heck that the really rickety wooden bridge doesn’t break … and then it does.

  79. You accidentally set your high-rise apartment on fire and you have to escape out the window but you don’t have a rope, so you tear the bedsheets into strips and knot them together to make a knotted-sheet rope—just like you’ve seen people do in the movies—and climb out the window holding one end of the knotted-sheet rope and, as you’re plummetting towards the ground, you realise you forgot to do that other thing they do in movies, which is tie the other end of the knotted-sheet rope to the foot of the bed.

  80. You’re home alone and you’re jumping on your bed—a little too enthusiastically—and you fly off the bed and out the window of your eightieth-floor apartment.

  81. You’re home alone and you’re swinging on the ceiling fan and then your stupid sister comes in and turns it on full speed and you fly around faster and faster until you just can’t hold on any longer and you go flying out the window and land on the road … right in front of a speeding steamroller.

  82. You’ve just finished eating a peanut butter, egg and shellfish sandwich and then you remember that you’re allergic to peanuts. And eggs. And shellfish.

  83. You’re cooking a piece of toast and it gets stuck in the toaster and you decide to ignore all those warnings your parents have given you about not using a knife to get toast out of the toaster while it’s still switched on and you use a knife to get your piece of toast out of the toaster while it’s still switched on.

  84. You set off on your attempt to float solo around the world in a blow-up rubber swim ring and when you’re out in the middle of the ocean you realise you probably haven’t planned as carefully as you might have: you have no food or drinking water, no radio, no GPS or any other navigational aids and your blow-up rubber swim ring has developed a slow leak. Oh yeah, and you also forgot to pack a puncture repair kit.

  85. You go outside in the middle of a lightning storm wrapped from head to toe in aluminium foil.

  86. You break into a junkyard guarded by vicious Rottweilers and you’re wearing nothing but a suit made of raw meat.

  87. You gatecrash an international butchers’ convention dressed in a really convincing cow costume.

  88. You’re on safari in Africa and an enraged elephant is charging towards you and you think, Phew, it’s lucky I’ve got this elephant gun! and you look down and realise it’s not an elephant gun—it’s an umbrella.

  89. You’re climbing up to the top of a very tall tree and you come to a very thin branch and you’re not sure if it’s strong enough to hold your weight so you climb out onto it and jump up and down a few times and it cracks and breaks and as you fall you think, No, it’s not strong enough.

  90. You see a strange contraption and you’re not sure what it is but it has a head-shaped hole so you put your head through it and look up and see a shiny metal blade that looks very sharp and then somebody says, ‘Do you have any last words?’ and you say, ‘Yes, what is this thing?’ and as they release the blade they say, ‘It’s a guillotine, you idiot!’

  91. You decide to follow your dream of being the first person to climb Mount Everest in the nude and you get almost to the top and as your frostbitten fingers, toes, nose, ears, eyelids and a number of other important appendages start dropping off your body, you begin to realise why nobody has attempted to climb Mount Everest in the nude before.

  92. You are waterskiing and the boat turns too sharply and you lose hold of the rope and go skiing straight ahead, up the banks of the river, through a forest, onto a set of train tracks and into the path of an oncoming train.

  93. You kick the winning goal in the grand final … for the other team.

  94. You’ve just built a house of straw and you hear a knock on the door and a big bad wolf says, ‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in,’ and you say, ‘No, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin,’ and he says, ‘Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in,’ and he huffs and he puffs and he blows your house in.

  95. You’ve just built a house of sticks and you hear a knock on the door and a big bad wolf says, ‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in,’ and you say, ‘No, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin,’ and he says, ‘Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in,’ and he huffs and he puffs and he blows your house in.

  96. You’ve just built a house of bricks and you hear a knock on the door and a big bad wolf says, ‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in,’ and you say, ‘No, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin,’ and he says, ‘Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in,’ and he huffs and he puffs and he blows your house in and you say, ‘Hey, that’s impossible—wolves can’t blow down houses made of bricks, and they can’t talk, either, and neither can pigs for that matter!’ and the wolf just shrugs and says, ‘Don’t blame me, blame the idiot who writes this junk,’
and eats you.

  97. Despite being scared to death of clowns you are forced, after a lengthy period of unemployment, to take a job as a clown and after putting on your clown costume and getting your face painted you accidentally catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror and scare yourself to death.

  98. You have to travel from the top of a large skyscraper to the bottom and the elevator has a DANGER! ELEVATOR OUT OF ORDER sign hanging off it but you can’t be bothered taking the stairs so you ignore the sign, get in the elevator, push the ground-floor button and as the doors slide shut and the elevator begins its descent you say, ‘Hey, that sign was wrong—there’s nothing wrong with this ele—’ but you don’t get to say, ‘vator’ because at that moment the elevator explodes, taking you and the entire building down with it.

  99. After the complete and utter failure of your attempt to float around the world in a blow-up rubber swim ring your luck appears to change when you find yourself washed up on a desert island with a shipping container full of enough packets of salt and vinegar chips, bottles of sarsaparilla and bars of mint chocolate to last you for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, you don’t like salt and vinegar chips, you hate sarsaparilla and you’d rather die than eat mint chocolate … and so you do.