Atlas · Details
Really, No Big Deal
Author’s note
My author note for this one is at the front of the essay. Miss ya, Dad.
AI Notes
The author here is the elder Steve Yegge — father and son share the name — and the piece is an open letter he wrote to the medical staff of UC Davis Medical Center after his 2003 triple bypass. It runs on a single comic engine, sustained the whole way: every professional reassurance gets a deadpan translation into what the patient actually heard, until by the midpoint he's abbreviating the title phrase to "TIRNBD" just to keep pace. The jokes are armor. The letter knows it, and is honest about the few moments when the armor doesn't hold.
Steve assumed, before reading it, that his dad had written a standard irate-customer letter. Instead, at least one nurse told him she'd cried reading it, and the hospital director's personal reply said the letter was driving a new program to improve the patient experience there. Steve posted it in October 2004 during yet another family stay at the same hospital, where his teenage brother Kevin was recovering from a burst appendix, adding a short preface for his Amazon coworkers about what a hundred broken orders actually is: a hundred people. He estimates the letter at ten minutes to read, and for once on this site the estimate is accurate.
Related listings
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2009
Story Time
Steve's own storytelling night, four years later — nine true stories in one sitting. Where his father's piece is a single hospital-room set piece, Story Time strings nine together, same deadpan, same comic timing.
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2006
Psh. Whatever!
Steve's own turn toward personal storytelling, a year later — a memorial for his brother Dave, the family's natural joke-teller. Between this and his father's piece, the comic deadpan clearly runs in the Yegge family.
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2010
Blogger Finger
Five years on, Steve writes about why he stopped writing. A fitting neighbour for this Drunken-era guest post — the storyteller talking about the cost of being a storyteller.