COLUMN: Going Bananas Again

By Tobin Barnes
My brother-in-law, Pat, is an engineer.

There are jokes about engineers, like: How can you tell whether an engineer is shy or outgoing? Answer: During a conversation, a shy engineer keeps looking down at his shoes, while an out-going engineer looks down at your shoes.

(Actually, that joke works equally well with accountants. Same stereotype, I guess. By the way, I don’t tell engineer jokes around Pat, and he doesn’t tell teacher jokes around me.)

Thing is, engineer types study things. They like to figure out how things work. They’re very analytical. Brainy, you might say.

That’s my brother-in-law. For example, long ago he’d figured out the best way to open a banana all by himself, way before opening a banana like a monkey was hip, like it is now.

In a recent column, I talked about how monkeys open bananas. Said humans should copy them by opening a banana from the bottom rather than the stem. It’s much more efficient.

After all, monkeys are analytical, too. They’re the engineers of the animal world. They certainly don’t have the range of human engineers, but they can figure out simple things, like bananas, quite well. They’ve spent a lot of time thinking about bananas, unlike humans, and therefore, they are adept at opening them the right way.

I, on the other hand, had to be told and shown a video. You see, I don’t have the engineering ability of even a monkey.

Well, when Pat was at college, learning to be an engineer, he was in the dorm dining room one lunchtime eating a banana that he had opened, well…like a monkey; that is, the correct way. (Again, that’s nothing against Pat. We all should be opening bananas like monkeys.)

During this, Pat happened to notice, across the way, some guy staring at him. And, of course, this was quite unsettling.

Who was this guy watching him peel and eat a banana? A stalker? A sociopathic serial killer? Was this a fatal attraction thing?

Freaky, Pat thought.

Later, Pat stopped by his girlfriend’s dorm room. Her name was and is Ann, and she eventually married him and just recently emailed me this story.

Anyway, Pat told Ann about this spooky guy in the dining room who was watching him eat a banana.

Huh, they both thought. Weird.

Sometime later, Ann’s roommate Lynne walked in. She said she’d just heard the funniest thing in her drama class. Seems this guy from the drama department likes to watch the strange behavior of other people and kind of study them.

Anyway, Lynne said, this drama person saw this guy at lunch eating a banana upside down. He said it was just stupid the way this guy was eating a banana from the wrong end.

Well, drama guy, as Forrest Gump would say, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Knowing what we know now, who do you think was stupid?

Of course, Pat and Ann immediately knew whom Lynne’s story was referring to—Pat—and they burst out laughing.

Unfortunately, Pat took the drama guy’s derision to heart—he didn’t want to appear weird in the eyes of others, even drama types—so he stopped eating bananas the proper way.

But don’t let this story of eating a banana like a monkey stop you, dear reader, now that you know the correct way.

However, be advised: The down side of peeling and eating a banana efficiently like a monkey is that people are going to stare at you, if not study you like an anthropologist, and report your weird behavior to others.