My Jaunt to the Boredom Factory
In a faceless building in a sprawling industrial park there is a place that is the source of all boredom in the world. Its walls are eggshell white, and its windows have large bars. Row after row of soulless middle-aged women, made lifeless or obese by a chutzpah-draining power impossible to explain by modern science, type into millions and millions of keyboards.
Will they ever write the great literary masterpiece we're all waiting on from those damn typing monkeys?
I can't say. I signed a confidentiality agreement.
But I will tell you this: As surely as every child would have laughed at the idea of the Bum-Poop Factory, every grown adult, unfortunate enough to have lost his way on the road to Career City, would cry in terror if he knew what lay within Boring, Inc.'s facility.
With a start time of 6:00 a.m., your body is already off-guard. Boredom seeps into your pores as you stand emptily next to a machine that opens envelopes very quickly. But you are not allowed to touch this machine. No. Your job is to make sure a string of numbers printed on the front of millions of envelopes are right-side up. For all eternity, you turn envelopes over. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the envelope is also facing the wrong way. Joy! A turn and a flip!
Your coworkers, Joan, Jane, and John (seriously) work diligently and far too quickly on their letter opening machines, as you look at the pile of envelopes before you. It's neither high, nor small. It's the most boring amount of envelopes possible. Behind and around you, more and more envelopes are being delivered. Touch them. Feel their loneliness. Suffer. Forever.