Humor
How to Win Friends and Sell Typewriters
In a World of Infinite Monkeys, There’s Money to be Won For Thee
Ever since I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. Monkeys like that, they got it made.
Each day I wake up and type gibberish with my infinite friends. Apparently we’re all part of some big fancy-pantsy illiteracy experiment. I don’t know much about it, other than it’s pretty noisy. Something to do with a head honcho called Mr. Sock Spear or something. Whatever, I just keep typing, along with the rest of the schmoes.
Bert comes around with replacement ribbon at eleven. He’s an Orang Utan and pretty dim with it. ‘Anything new?’, he asks as he unspools the ribbon and collects my work.
‘I dunno,’ I say, ‘this morning I wrote: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” is that any good?’
‘Good?’ says Bert, ‘It’s brilliant! I’ve got to tell the bosses right away!’
‘No, hang on Bert,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I just wrote “agnvwg;ob9[8quy4[abs n=tih59 %$gfd9875gghgaaaaaaaa**”. My mistake.’
Bert falls for it every time. Away he shuffles, crestfallen, leaving me to think of some way to get the hell out of here. I’m thinkin’: made guys, the thing they got is capital. They shift product. I need to do that too. So I’m sitting thinking what the hell product I can make in here, when it hits me. One thing we do have is a shit load of typewriters.
I got a contact on the outside: Teamster named Pauly. He says there’s big demand for typewriters among the urban Bohos. They gots no real jobs and all they wants to be, is writers, he says. We could sell typewriters on street corners, he says.
So I take care of the portal guards with a little extra jungle junk and we start skimming some typewriter off the top. Not that it matters. I mean, these things are literally infinite. So who is going to notice?
Sure enough, the cash money starts rolling in. Soon, when Bert comes around, he don’t ask me no more about what I wrote. He just asks, ‘Hey, what are you doing up there on top of that giant hill of solid gold typewriters?’ And I shout back ‘Restin! Go talk to some lowlife!’ It feels good.
The more typewriters get sold, the more monkeys get freed up, and most of them come and work for me. A few refuse. There was this one lady, an uppity Gibbon called Lucy , who wouldn’t play ball. I set Franky and Sampson after her. They were only meant to scare her but they did it with 15 bullets. We hid her at the back of the stationary cupboard. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty big cupboard. We figure no one is going to find her for years.
Trouble is, apparently, she was writing these sonnets, using some kind of limbic pantometer, so the bosses were keeping tabs on her, and the Feds were keeping tabs on her too. Franky and Sampson showed me one of her so-called poems. It said:
‘Shall I compare th33 to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more tjk234222***
Hey, just letting you know, Big LoUis is stealing all yoUr typewriters,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date’
That’s when I knew they were coming for me. We shut down fast but it was already too late. The paper trail came right back to me and then they threw the book at me. Then another book, and a chair.
So now I’m back down here, with all the other schmoes, doin the drudge work for the bosses and the feds. I’m a nobody, a typist. Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to … yeah, as if! Go stick it up your tailpipe.
