And Now for Something Completely Different

Remember the good old days of Monty Python? If not, you likely have no sense of humor and should stop reading this immediately.
 
I know from my experience of meeting hundreds of self-storage professionals over the years that many of you do, truly, have a funny bone. This is one of the reasons weve added a monthly comic to the magazine, Adventures in Storage, by John Roser. If youve missed any of Johns monthly slices of storage humor, visit www.insideselfstorage.com and type Adventures in Storage in the search box.
 
For those of you who miss the days of John Cleese and his holy grail of comedy, I bring to you a gift that has absolutely nothing to do with self-storage. Below are excerpts from an e-mail that arrived in my inbox last week. If it strikes a chord with you, feel free to go online and read the whole letter. Do it just because we all need to take advantage of something completely differentat least once in a while.

 
To: The citizens of the United States of America
From: John Cleese
 
In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President of the U.S.A. and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

The letter U will be reinstated in words such as favour and neighbour. Likewise, you will learn to spell doughnut without skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise.

Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels (look up vocabulary in the dictionary). Using the same 27 words interspersed with filler noises such as like and you know is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication.

There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter u and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

Guns should only be handled by adults. If youre not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then youre not grown up enough to handle a gun. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every 20 seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Dont try rugbythe South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game that is not played outside of America.

You must tell us who killed JFK. Its been driving us mad.

An internal-revenue agent (i.e., tax collector) from Her Majestys Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).
 
God save the Queen.