The Other Man

A man is driving through the desert and his car breaks down.  He doesn’t know anything about cars, so after he waits for an hour for someone else to drive along the road, with no success, he begins to wander up the road toward the nearest city.  

After an hour of walking he hears the dull, faint roar of an engine in the distance, and sure enough a van pops up over the horizon, covered in rust and sand.  A man with a thick, gray beard drives the van alone, and sees this other man walking down the center of the road.

            He stops and asks, “Where’s your car?”

            The other man says, “It broke down, it’s an hour back that way.”

            The bearded man says, “How long is an hour?”

            The other man says, “It’s sixty minutes.”

            The bearded man shakes his head and drives away.  And then the other man stands alone in the middle of the road once more, coughing up dust.

            “Asshole,” he sputters into suffocating air, “It was just a joke.”