DE PROFUNDIS; OR: IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Suppose you are the Managing Director of a large and prosperous biscuit-making company.
One day you are given a tour of the production floor and are mortified to see that none of the staff wear hairnets and that none of the staff wear gloves.
Worse still, a senile old German man with marginally more teeth than hairs on his head is gleefully masturbating and clipping his gnarly toenails into the central mixture.
The colour drains from your face:
You: Who is that man?
Floor Manager: Him? Oh, that’s Clemens von Galen. The health and safety officer.
Seeing red, you immediately fire the octoginarian masturbator and enforce the use of hairnets and gloves for the rest of the staff.
Floor Manager: You can’t technically fire him.
You: Whyever not?
Floor Manager: He’s voluntary.
After your reorganisation of the production floor, your sales decrease, shares plummet and it becomes widely acknowledged in trade newspapers that eating your biscuits is akin to eating petrified horse crap. By this time next year you will have to file for bankruptcy.
Evidently, your hallmarked and much-speculated-upon ‘secret ingredient’ was a combination of dirty hands, stray hairs, strayer follicles and a the health and safety officer’s toenails and gammetes.
What to do? Let the company die? Or knowingly rehire the masturbator?
This is called ‘The Death of Innocence’.
CHILLY BELOW THE KNEE
On the subject of innovation:
I hate how the legs of my pajamas ride up as soon as I get between the sheets. Sometimes I am made very chilly below the knee. Would it be so difficult for pajama manufacturers to add a little loop – a stirrup – to the bottom of each pajama leg to prevent this from happening?
It’s not so different to the loops they put on the bottom of leggings. Do leggings still exist? I want some.
The Plain People of Cyberspace: It’ll never catch on.
Why? Because it would be unfashionable? We’re talking about pajamas here. I’m sure it was once seen as eccentric to own a suitcase on wheels. How many years did we schlep our luggage up and down the stairs and along the boulevards before some great innovator went A Rebours?
I motion for stirrups.
I also motion that we change the spelling of “France” to “Frants”.
Amen.