The first thing that Dr. Foster was told when he first joined the Royal Observatory Museum’s staff was to describe his job as researching and maintain historical timepieces.
“People crack jokes when we say horology, and they never take us seriously,” said the museum’s director.
“When I say I’m the director of a horology institute, they ask me if that makes me a pimpologist.”
The director winked, pressed a button, and twenty beautiful women in various states of undress walked into the room.
“I wind everybody else’s watch all day long,” he said. “So why not have them wind mine?”
Category: My stories
Born into the theater
I was born into the theater.
Literally. My mother, the famous actress, scored a year-long run in Oklahoma! via that infamous casting couch.
Nine months in, she still refused to give up the spotlight to her understudy.
The costume girl eventually went insane.
During the matinee, her water broke in Act 2, but she didn’t miss a line.
She concealed contractions with howls of laughter and screams of joy.
The curtain fell, I was born, and she was holding me to her breast through four curtain calls.
If you think that’s bad, that bastard director added it to the script!
The Alarm
What? Huh?
I wake up to a cat leaping up to the bed, walking along the blanket, and curling up on top of my butt.
I turn to look at the alarm clock.
It’s 5:29. The alarm will go off at 5:30.
I turn to look at the cat.
“That butt’s going away soon,” I say.
Eyes closed, the cat flicks an ear.
The alarm goes off.
The cat, eyes still closed, takes a firm grip with his claws.
I reach for the clock and hit the snooze bar.
We’ll deal with it later.
And I go back to sleep.
Switched
Every so often, you hear about a “Switched At Birth” story in the news where two couples get each other’s babies by mistake.
Usually that gets cleared up with DNA testing, or an out-of-court settlement with the hospital.
However, there was one instance I heard of where a baby was accidentally switched with a janitor’s mop.
The happy couple was a bit concerned that their bundle of joy didn’t cry or eat, but they appreciated being able to sleep through the night without interruption.
The janitor filed a grievance with management because the baby didn’t clean floors all that well.
The Slaughter
The Bugs set off a blanket of electromagnetic pulses over the planet, wiping out our technological infrastructure overnight.
It didn’t take long for them to slaughter billions.
The survivors were rounded up for hunting and experiments.
And then… the Bugs figured out one of our languages.
The hunting and experiments stopped.
They obsessed over books and the surviving recorded material.
“Wow, we sure fucked up,” said a Bug representative. “We’re really, really sorry about that whole invasion thing.”
They cleaned up what they could, built some nice habitats, and left.
Sure, I still have nightmares.
But it’s peaceful now, right?
The Wrong Saint
We needed to dump this house. Quickly.
But the market’s a mess, and everybody’s low-balling us.
Someone told me that burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard will speed the sale of a home.
So, I went to a Christian bookstore and bought a statue.
It wasn’t Joseph, though. It was Saint Winefride, the patron of payroll clerks.
At first, I barely noticed them, but after a week it became difficult to mow the lawn while navigating the colony of accountants camping out on the grass.
But, in the end, one of them offered to buy the house.
Measurement
I worked for a television station when the Internet took off.
I demonstrated streaming video to a salesperson, and then showed them the statistics file.
The salesperson recoiled in horror, like a vampire faced with a cross made out of garlic.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The exact figures?” they asked. “No corrections?”
“Exact,” I said. “Just like Nielsen numbers.”
“But Nielsen corrects those numbers,” she said.
“Corrects?” I asked.
“Fudges,” she admitted. “If the advertisers knew the real numbers, they’d freak out.”
“So did you. Why do we use them if they’re wrong?”
“Because they’re the wrong we agree on.”
Payout
Recently, a fucked-up soldier murdered 16 Afghans in the field.
Some were women. Some were children.
The government paid the survivors fifty thousand dollars for each dead relative.
There are twenty-nine million Afghans.
Do the math, and you come up with a trillion and a half dollars payout if we killed them all.
Then, I realized, that you wouldn’t have to pay a dime if we killed them all. Because there’d be nobody left to pay.
Instead, I’m taking off my shoes and my belt to get on a fucking plane.
While this minimum-wage moron wants to fondle my balls.
Fishy Witness
They say that goldfish only have seven seconds of memory.
They swim by something, see it, and then forget.
Which is why you’ll rarely see a goldfish called as a witness in a murder trial.
Sure, some lesser-experienced and desperate district attorneys will try anyway, and they end up staring at a fish for an hour before the judge tosses their case out the window.
Still, when a Mafia boss says “Leave no witnesses” to his men, they take it seriously.
Flush it.
Cook it.
Feed it to the cat.
I just knock over the bowl.
Accidents can be caused.
Turnover
Most companies have an employee turnover rate of a few percent.
Bad companies to work for have higher turnover.
But our company, Replication Incorporated, has a turnover rate of over one hundred percent.
That’s right. More people left than worked for the company to begin with.
Government regulators are always confused by that number, but it’s easy to explain: we duplicate humans, and our staff are required to act as test subjects.
Every now and then, a duplication procedure goes awry, and the employee and all their duplicates leave.
Which is good, I suppose. Makes the bathrooms easier to clean.