One of Our 50 is Missing New Mexico Magazine Humor Column

One Of Our 50 Is Missing

New Mexico magazine's cartoons of the month Two decades after its launch, the One of Our Fifty Is Missing humor column remains the magazine's most popular recurring department. To submit your anecdotes, e-mail us at fifty@nmmagazine.com.

Zipping Along:
When Chris Linn, of Santa Fe, recently tried to set up a second e-mail account with Yahoo, he was tossed some curveballs by the Internet giant. “On the sign-in page, they request the country of origin and a zip code, so I selected ‘United States’ and entered ‘87505,’ a Santa Fe zip code,” Linn says. He immediately received an error message stating that “the zip is not for the country selected.”

“I tried ‘87501’ and ‘87504’ [both Santa Fe zip codes], but received the same error message each time,” Linn says. “So, thinking of your ‘One of Our Fifty Is Missing’ column, I changed the country selection to ‘Mexico.’ Bingo! No error message, and the signup was complete! Perhaps their last web programming was outsourced to another country. Or perhaps knowledge of the 50 states is not a job prerequisite.”

Fiddling Around:
Maria Wiemann, of Dallas, says that as she prepared a trip to Santa Fe to attend the Suzuki Violin Institute with her two children, she made preparations with her local bank to use her credit card away from home.

“I have had trouble using my bank credit card when I travel because the bank often thinks it is stolen,” Wiemann says. “So I decided to call the bank and have them issue a travel warning on my card so that I would not have any problems using it in New Mexico.”

Over the phone, the customer-service representative assured Wiemann that there wouldn’t be a problem with the card, then asked her where she was traveling, and for how long. When Wiemann said that she would be traveling to New Mexico, the banker shot back, “I’ll issue a warning that you’re traveling out of the country.”

After absorbing what she had just heard, Wiemann emphasized that she would still be traveling in the United States because New Mexico is part of the Union. The banker was unfazed. “I’m not sure what the exchange rate will be on your purchases,” she said.

“Again I told her that Texas and New Mexico use the same currency, as both states are in the same country,” Wiemann says. “All I could hope was that the reason for her ignorance was that she was in another country herself.”

Towering Faux Pas:
J. O. Johnson, of Organ, had to do a double-take when poring over Time magazine’s latest book, Portraits of the Planet: Nature’s Wonders(Twenty-First Century Books, 2008). Showcased in the volume were some of Earth’s most stunning geographical gems, including an expansive half-page aerial photograph of Ship Rock, in northwestern New Mexico.

But Johnson got another storyline after reading the caption: “Rising above it—Shiprock in Mexico, a sacred site to the Navajo, towers 1,583 feet over the surface of the high desert plain.”

“The photo is well laid out and stunning to see. But the amazing thing is (according to Time) that this edifice has been relocated without anyone being told,” Johnson says. “I was traveling through the Gallup area just two weeks earlier, and had I known that they were going to move Ship Rock, I would have taken many pictures to remember it by.”