Tense agreement

If you're like me, you're never entirely satisfied with your writing. I keep going back and re-reading my most recent soapbox article, and it took a while for me to realize what was bothering me: tense agreement. Here I am, relating a story of something that happened in the past, and yet the article keeps slipping into the present tense.

It bugged me to the point that I went back and started editing the whole thing to make it consistently past tense. I got about half-way through before I read the changes and realized, hey, this makes it less funny. Present tense is the proper tense for telling jokes, somehow.

How about you? Are you bothered when jokes change verb tenses? Can you think of any/other situations where you feel that shifting verb tenses works, even when grammatically it's incorrect?