I got mugged.

I spent five days and four nights in Barcelona last week. It sounds exotic, but it wasn’t. It was a business trip, filled with literally hundreds of pages of reading, twelve- to sixteen-hour days packed with meetings and interviews, and a 70-100 page report that had to be written by the time seven of my colleagues and I returned to our respective parts of the world.

If that weren’t enough to make life interesting, one of my seven colleagues turned out to be a punster. During the first couple of days, I couldn’t decide which was worse: his puns, or my other colleagues’ insistence on reacting to them.

(My personal favorite came when we were ordering dinner one evening. One of my colleagues considered ordering duck from the menu. Our punster noted that it’s great – until you get the bill.)

The punster always deadpanned these quips, such that it wasn’t always immediately apparent that he was joking.

Prior to heading off on this trip, I arranged transportation to and from the airport. My ride was contingent upon returning with a Starbucks mug for the driver. During our trip, we ventured into the city only one time, and even that lasted for only a few hours. We were warned to be extremely careful in one section of town, because pickpockets had struck several recent visitors. When I saw a Starbucks, I knew it would be my only opportunity to purchase my ride home from the airport (with the Starbucks mug).

I made my purchase. A little later, the punster approached me with some information about where he was going – the details were unimportant. With a completely straight face, I told him to keep his eyes and ears open. I had just come from Starbucks, and I got mugged.

He looked truly concerned. Then I held up the Starbucks mug. The look on his face indicated both relief and a realization that he’d been had.