Monday, January 5, 2015

We Remember Your Birthday

This is a get-rich-quick scheme I thought of, in honor of my own birthday coming up. Being close to 62, I know how much birthdays mean to people. I light a little candle, pray for my soul, smear blood on the door, and I'm ready for another year. Beats shivering in the dark, doing nothing proactive, just waiting for the Reaper.

The idea is along the same line as the flags you can buy that have "flown over the United States Capitol." Sounds very impressive, till you realize there's someone raising and lowering flags all day and night -- my understanding. If I'm right, they might fly for a few seconds, then they're down again. Meaningful stuff, especially when you think of the halfwits working below. Are you much smarter? Apparently not.

My idea isn't as crass as that, really. It would actually provide a good service for folks who don't have many friends. And our sentiments would be absolutely sincere -- guaranteed no cynicism. You send in an easily affordable $9.99 ($10 if you will), and we spring into action. We read the card you filled out. Say your birthday is February 12, so bright and early that day we light a candle and offer a prayer on your behalf. Touching.

And since not many people are born in February, because it's such a short month, I believe we could do it up really good, plumping up the festivities with an extra helping of sincerity. You, back home, are feeling the love, somehow, probably after receiving the email letting you know it's all been accomplished.

The problem, of course, would be that eventually we'd be getting cards by the truckload, and it'd be much more of a logistical problem. Some folks wouldn't have the sense to put in the right amount of money; you'd always get them; so we'd have to come up with a policy of how to handle it. If we sent it back, maybe they'd just give up and we'd end up with nothing. So we'd probably go ahead and do something for them and let it go.

The other big problem would be keeping up with the candles and prayers. With big volume, I can see us just methodically lighting candles and blowing them out all day and figuring that covers it. As for the prayer, sooner or later we might have a prayer sticker printed and just be slapping it on top of the previous 40,000 stickers. It's easy to imagine myself going for the Guinness record for successively applied stickers. You could literally have the stack 6 feet tall and it wouldn't topple!

Everything's going great. We're honoring the terms, and pocketing the ten dollar bills, along with the occasional person shorting us, until a disgruntled employee secretly records the system. I'll admit it up front, there's always going to be a bad apple. Like the restaurant guy who bathes in the sink. One of these bad apples will have his shorts stuffed with money, then be seen "lighting" the candles with a blowtorch, and, in place of the usual prayer sticker, be affixing some rude sticker he got from a gum machine, like a Hell's Angels skeleton head or something.

A video of this shows up online and we're immediately shut down. There's a class action suit and I'm sent to prison, which I could never stand. I don't know if I've ever mentioned on the blog, that I once toured an actual prison. The restroom is a big open room, bright white, with stools lining the walls, disgusting in every way. That'd be terrible, along with whatever else goes on there. I'd hate to wake up someday, like on my own birthday, going, "Why couldn't I have just celebrated my own damned birthday and left well enough alone?"

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