Thread by @HZiauddeen

When one door closes...
The day started like most days did, with waking up. He was in his bed, which was, he looked around, yes, still in his house & he wasn't screaming. So far, it was looking like a good day random shit-wise.
He wondered if should pray for it to continue.
1/25

Then he remembered he was an atheist and went to take a shit.
15 minutes later, he's dressed and surprisingly over-caffeinated & checking his inbox for the day's jobs. There's just one. Maybe it'll get busier later.
On the way out he spots the dog curled up in the armchair.
2/25

In about 40 minutes, he'll suddenly remember that he doesn't have a dog.
He makes his way to the address in the job email.
He knocks on the door.
There is no response.
A second knock is no more successful.
This is baffling.
3/25

He checks the address and there is no mistake, this is the right place.
He checks the job details and again, he has not made a mistake.
It says very clearly that he should be here for 9:30am to perform a knock-knock joke.
4/25

He was particularly looking forward to this one as in the script section, the job sheet had contained the words that every joke performer longs to hear, ‘you can ad lib’.
With a mounting sense of annoyance he ponders the cruel & unfortunate nature of his current job.
5/25

Despite being very one sided, the knock-knock joke is a 'two-person' job. Mind you, one person could easily be replaced by a parrot but the customers don't like that. Neither do the parrots for that matter.
But them's the breaks, this business isn't a barrel of laughs.
6/25

He's more than a little annoyed now. He has trained hard for this.
He's spent long hours on the knock-knock joke simulator app on his smartphone.
He's written loads of material, stuff he's sure cleverly subverts the form
He's practised hard at his own front door.
7/25

(After 2 months he made the wise decision to move to practising on the inside of his front door. Sure, it shocked and confused the hell out of the postman occasionally but at least the neighbours didn't look at him oddly for talking to his own front door)
8/25

With just a ‘who’s there?’ he could carry the show, with no further assistance, of this he feels sure. But with no answering who’s there?, there is nothing here. He curses his lost chance, with this ad lib opportunity he could have shone.
9/25

He could have been noticed, got his ticket out of here. This is not the life he had dreamed off.
He was just biding his time doing this, what he dreamed of doing was leaving this all behind and doing his own ‘man walks into a doctor's office’ jokes.
10/25

He decides it is worth another shot at the door, perhaps the other performer had merely stepped away for a moment. And where the hell was the camera crew?
He wonders briefly whether he should just say ‘knock-knock’ & wing it but dismisses this for two very good reasons.
11/25

First in the presence of the door, it would amount to a dog saying woof to accompany a bark.
More importantly however Harbingdon’s Rules and Statutes of the Knock-knock joke (7th Edition, 1977) section 13, subclause 7 is emphatic on this point.
12/25

‘The acoustic and visual physicality of the door is integral and must be respected and violations thereof would constitute grounds for review of licence. The spoken phrase ‘knock-knock’ may be used by licenced practioners only for purposes of rehearsal and narration.'
13/25

'Don't be a crazy maverick man', he mutters to himself as he knocks again. There is no response but to his surprise the door falls open.
This has never happened before and in truth he does not know what to expect on the other side.
It's an odd thing about this work.
14/25

Everyone knows knock-knock jokes are 2-person jobs. But neither he nor anyone he'd ever known on the circuit had ever met someone who'd been a 'Who's there?' guy.
'It's strictly need to know', his teachers had said with the 'no more questions' never needing to be said.
15/25

He decides to step in.
The door closes behind him. He goes to open it but there is no door handle on the inside. In fact there are no surface features on the otherwise incredibly smooth surface of the door barring a small label saying ‘guaranteed scratch resistant’.
16/25

The door is locked. Random shit-wise, things had taken a bit of a turn.
He turned around and looked at the room and felt a momentary relief. It was a pub! It must have been some sort of admin error, he'd been sent to a 'man walks into a bar' joke.
17/25

The momentary relief was immediately eclipsed by the realisation that, as a recovering alcoholic, he had never managed to pass that NVQ.
This was then rapidly eclipsed by the panic of 'Am I insured to do man-walks-into-a-bar jokes?'
He ran to the bar.
18/25

He didn't need a drink that he couldn't have but he could use a friendly barman to ask for some advice. And about the smell, which had a lot more character than most pubs, even in this part of town.
Unfortunately the barman was too far gone to be of any help.
19/25

Sometimes even in the tsunami of terror in our minds, there are tiny islands of calm lucidity. One such island marveled at how his brain had gone with 'too far gone' as a sanity saving euphemism for 'advanced state of decomposition'.
20/25

Another island observed 'well, that explains the smell'.
The tsunami carried on with an animalistic wail that he managed to trace back to his mouth.
They say impending death sharpens the mind.
Just death will do the same, unless it's your death.
21/25

He ran down the one passageway he could see, part of him hoped the toilets were down that way. The rest of him gibbered on about doors.
At this point it suddenly struck him.
'I don't have a dog!!'
Followed by 'Who let the dog in?'
Followed unhelpfully by 'Who?! Who?!'
22/25

At the end of the passageway was a door like the other one, only the the scratch resistant label was slightly diminished by a handwritten sign that said 'Please do not scratch the door'.
He wondered if scratching doors was a far more popular pastime than he'd known.
23/25

There seemed to be no way of opening the door. He looked around but the passageway was bare apart from a small table which had a pile of cards and a single pen on a chain, but with a far more serious chain that made it more even useless as a door opener than most pens.
24/25

And the cards in the pile...were forms.
Organ donor forms.
Many questions raced through his mind but the surprising winner was 'Why is the pen on a chain?'
But urther questions were arrested by 2 sharp short knocks on the door.
Shocked, he could only say:
'Who's there?!'
25/25