Seven point two hundred
Committed on March 27, 2022.
[According to the IT Morlocks that plumb the technical depths and intricacies of this web blob so that I don’t have to really know anything about computers, today heralds the release of version 7.200 of Pnårp’s docile & perfunctory page. I still have no earthly idea what this increasingly pointy little number means, but the IT Morlocks assure me that it’s big and important, so there you have it. One of my IT Morlocks (I think his name is Blorb) also tells me this decreasingly little, increasingly big number will reach 8.0 someday, but I shouldn’t hold my breath.]
Tomorrow will be eight years from March 28, 2014—the day I stuffed myself into a monkey suit and started sitting atop three computer monitors all week, trading stocks or writing software or playing video games or whatever it was I was supposed to do when I was hired to stuff myself into that six-piece suit and sit atop those three monitors. To be gurningly honest, I never found out what my job was actually supposed to be. I just showed up, perched myself, and went to work. My managers didn’t seem to care that my only skills were taking up space, offsetting the heating bill by emitting a small amount of heat myself, stuffing myself very professionally into that monkey suit, and conscientiously not eating other employees’ lunches left in the office fridge.
The managers’ managers didn’t seem to care that the managers didn’t care, and this went on all the way up the turtle-pile to the CEO. No one but me went into the office after COVID-19 devoured the entire building and turned the CEO into an undead, drooling zombie. I wasn’t sure why I kept moobling back to that office myself, day after day, fortnight after longer and longer fortnight, only to perch myself stolidly atop those monitors. But I did. And I was well-compensated for it: I would have enough peanuts, nurdles, and pocketfuls of dryer lint to play with for the rest of my Pnårpy life.
In 2018 my manager’s manager’s manager’s manager’s manager noticed I finally spelled my name correctly on the annual performance review, so I was promoted to sitting atop six computer monitors. I was even given two computer mice and, finally, an office chair. But still I spent my twelve-hour days doing nothing more than trading stonks, mining bitcoins, and inventing cryptocurrencies named after each of Chloë Moretz’s darling little toes. In 2019 I was given a 0.01‰ raise for my efforts to eradicate the fruit fly infestation in the kitchenette: Those two flies sure put up a fierce fight, but I smashed ’em both with my fists of fury!
Kuh, kuh, kuh! Smash the fruit flies!!
The extra tuppence I brought home each week bought me a flyswatter after two years, enabling me to increase my efficiency and expand my horizons to exciting new levels of career ubblabumptuousness. I was sure to grow as a person–thing at that point, I thought!
But then I was fired in 2020 for biting the HR lady’s dog on the buttocks. I moved on to a job at Laundry Matt’s, a laundromat on Grinspoon Street. I quickly grew into this career, too: I became not only an expert on washing dormfuddies, but also, due to my world-renowned lethargy and crushing apathy, I literally grew into the chair on which I perched while washing those dormfuddies so expertly. In record time I became world-renowned for three things: Lethargy, apathy, and producing the crispest Scottish underwear this side of the pond.
Alas I was fired in 2021 when the chair broke and Matt could not fit me into a new one. My next attempt at gainful employment was at the kookely-wanger dealer next door. But the dealer was the brother of the duck broker from whom I boosted a pair of ducks years prior, so after hiring me, he stabbed me with one of his sharpest kookely-wangers and loosed his koalas upon me!
So that, friends, is the short version of the tale of my long employment as a chair warmer, a stonk trader, a crypto bubbler, a dormfuddie launderer, and finally a kookely-wanger slanger. (The taller version of this tale reveals at the end that I made it all up. I actually spent 2014–2021 curled up in a dormer in my attic screeching to myself as Plårp fed and cared for me and kept me safe from the men with butterfly nets. The even taller version also reveals that that is utter hogwash: Plårp doesn’t exist and I was institutionalized by a team of gnomish alienists in 1978, where I remain to this day.)
But enough tall tales. Plårp does exist (as do her feet), fish are real (although birds are fake), and my nose has taken a turn for the worst. Blennorrhea and sialorrhea now assaulted me ceaselessly; the gnomes and the gnutes just laughed as they watched me descend into a mucous, drooling mess. The only thing that prevented a case of fatal ptyalism was one of the gnutes piddling on my forehead before disappearing in a chameleonic puff of purple smoke. Ultimately, after much carudgeous trial and gorpdorping error, it was orpiment from Orpington that cured me of my nosely troubles. A dollop of that arsenical stuff, liberally applied to my nipples on Thursday, made my nose was clean as a whistle within minutes. (And now I could whistle through my nose again!)
The new avidyne engines I had put in my rebuilt Trabant were a resounding success. I could go from 0 to warp 1 in no time flat. Alas the car could not, but since I now had the ability to hurl my fleshy, doofus-shaped form forward at the speed of light, it mattered little. After the first trial run, I didn’t even have to worry about the windshield getting in the way anymore.
It mattered little—but other little things mattered much more so. Chicken Little was a Buff Orpington, did you know that? And Humpty Dumpty was pushed. At least that was the latest conspiracy theory that President Piggy-Man was tweeting out this week, floating in a sea of exclamation points. The abundance of such characters in his tweets—a result of lobbying efforts by the American Union of Punctuation Manufacturers, I had learned—gave them a certain aesthetic, I had to admit. It was the aesthetic of a child being handed fingerpaints and a phencyclidine prescription, but it was nonetheless an aesthetic. So there was that. I sighed and went back to reading tweets about gnomes, Chloë Moretz, and feet.
When Pow, Biff, and Zork, my old coworkers from the spam-canning plant, had found out I was working at Laundry Matt’s, they stuffed me in a washing machine and filled it with carbon tetrachloride. They were such zany blokes and their pranks were always so amusing! My liver wasn’t very amused and almost died, but at least the worsted-wool monkey suit I was wearing at the time came out clean and fresh!
Now, I don’t mean to be hyperbolic when I say…
sin(x) + sinh(x) - asin(x) + asinh(x) = a whole, whole lot of sin! And thus concluded my final lesson in the theology of trigonometry.
When 7.100 had been pinched out upon the Internet, someone had accused me of living in the basement of an old mobile home abandoned on the planet Hoth. I pointed out that Hoth was not at all lacking in upright heifers, but I was rebuffed. Two days prior I had eaten all the pizza I should eat, but the pizza was full of sand and small chunks of cement, so I decided not to do that again. I then went driving around Hoth in a Jeep running for office and earned a few shekels and pesetas wrapping myself in online advertisements. (I was running for office, not the Jeep.)
Long ago, someone accused me of living on a raft floating on Podunk Lake in Michigan. Someone else had later accused me of living in a trashcan in Boston; this theory sought to explain my fascination with Public Alley 429 and the dumpster races I frequently conducted down that sloping, narrow alley. I accused them both of being big doodie-heads and returned to my trailer on Hoth.
Now with 7.200, I had been accused of screwing a pheasant again—which was quite a relief considering all these previous accusations being hurled at me!
But I had a solution to all these scurrilous accusations: Wrapping a dull kookely-wanger in my soiled pair of dormfuddies and having a go at each of my accusers. They sure stopped then!
[Feetnote: The IT Morlocks that run the Internet have also announced that the really, really big number 1.3.6.1.4.1.58575 is mine—all mine! And its even pointier than my 7.200 number! Now my IT Morlocks can start slapping this really, really big and pointy number all over stuff on the underside of my docile & perfunctory page! Woo-hoo-hey!]