They Need To Go On Gardening Leave

(It’s a sad fact that libraries often have to remove and delete old books from the shelves to make way for new ones, as we don’t have the space to keep all our books. We tend to call this process “weeding.” I’m on pretty friendly terms with my supervisor, and we occasionally talk about gardening and other things. Since I’ve been assigned a large weeding project just at the beginning of gardening season, I suppose it was inevitable that the following would happen:)

Supervisor: “How’s the weeding going?”

Me: “Oh, we haven’t started yet.”

Supervisor: “…”

Me: “Oh, you meant weeding the shelves! That’s going pretty well. I’m sorry; I thought you meant our garden.”

(We had a good laugh, at least.)