We’ve Got Your Back LOL: The Saddest Story Ever Told

This is the saddest story ever told about the happiest blackboard ever made. It may have only lived a short while, but in that time it brought joy, happiness and lulz into our humdrum lives.

Today, we celebrate the all-too-brief existence of the little blackboard. Damn, we loved that niglet. All that’s left is to write its epitaph, dry our eyes and somehow attempt to rebuild our shattered lives.

Back pain: No laughing matter

Once upon a time there was an osteopath clinic in Edinburgh. Osteopathy – the art of alleviating back pain – is a noble profession. Unfortunately, it’s not a very exciting one. Surgeons get plaudits for saving lives; doctors get handsome paychecks for fingering prostates. Osteopaths get nothing more than quiet thanks and a pat on the back. If that sounded like an execrable pun, by the way, that’s because it was. As you’re about to discover, bad puns and bad backs are inexorably linked – you could say they go back to back.

Tired of operating a walk-in clinic that no one walked into, its owners hit upon an inspired idea: They would position a blackboard on the street to lure in passing trade. There was just one problem: how to make osteopathy exciting?

The solution was devastatingly brilliant: Back pain would be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century with a series of ‘Uh-uh-they-di’unt!’ ‘Uh-huh-they-did!’ puns. Puns that were so bad they were almost good.

Step 1: Read blackboard.

Step 2: Laugh so hard you slip a disc.

Step 3: Require osteopath.

Step 4: ???

Step 5: PROFIT.

And that was how one clinic went from being an obscure business to an obscure business that everyone could laugh at.

Active X was the name of the clinic. But to my flatmate and I, who were particularly enamoured with the pitiful puns, it would forever be known as We’ve Got Your Back LOL.

Each week, when passing the clinic, I would snap the blackboard’s latest witticisms and text them to my flatmate. Some of them were shockingly bad. Others were just bad. But all of them caused us to lol far harder than two men ought to be loling at an osteopath’s blackboard.

So caught up were we in the spirit of We’ve Got Your Back LOL, we even took to conjuring our own puns: “Are you feeling spine today?” we chortled.

They were shockingly awful, but no worse than anything that graced the osteopath’s blackboard.

Months went by, with the clinic churning out winning slogans on a regular basis. Either the board was generating serious amounts of business, or business was so slow they had nothing better to do than chalk up cartoons.

Either way, it didn’t matter to us: all we knew was that we were deriving more fun from an osteopath’s clinic than ought to have been humanly possible.

Until today that is.

This morning, as I approached the clinic, I whipped out my phone to capture the latest street art. To my horror, the chirpy blackboard was gone. In its place stood a sombre, sorrowful notice:

Who could do such a thing? What sort of a callous brute would conspire to remove that ray of sunlight from our lives?

We here at Ed Uncovered would like to issue a plea for the return of the cheeky wee blackboard. Its absence leaves a gaping void in our lives – one that can only be filled by comfort eating and fapping to David Cameron-approved porn.

Wherever you are now, little blackboard, haste ye back. Haste ye back.

—★★★—