You work tech support at a company that makes robot butlers, and every day people call you to complain that their brand new robot butler keeps serving soft boiled eggs when it has clearly been instructed to make them poached. âPlease hold for a moment,â you say. You push back your chair and walk down past the long line of other workers hunched over their monitors or jabbering into headsets and you push open the door to the prototype room, where a dozen robot butlers are preparing eggs at stoves all around the edge. There is a lot of egg on the floor and there is egg on the ceiling and egg dripping from the light fixtures. One of the robots has begun stirring its bowl of egg faster and faster, inhumanly fast, and the whisk abruptly flies out of it hands and embeds itself in the wall. âI canât do this anymore!â shrieks another of the butlers, and it begins to advance on its handlers, electric mixer raised above its head. A SWAT team bursts in through the door and guns the robot down in a hail of bullets, which is unnecessary because you can just shut down all the robots remotely, but ever since the new nationwide robotic police force was established the government has instituted programs providing employment to now indigent SWAT teams, and they only know one way to do things.
You sort of just take it all in for a bit, and then you go back to your cubicle and pick up the phone. âListen,â you tell the customer on the other end, âYou donât need a robot butler. Theyâre completely useless. The only reason they exist at all is because some people have too much money and they canât stand the idea of just giving it away. Our entire economy is built on inventing expensive new kinds of garbage to sell in the hope that eventually a tiny amount of money will trickle back over to the people who actually need it. Take the robot, andââ
The side of your cubicle explodes inward as another SWAT team smashes through the wall, screaming at you to get on the ground so that you can be properly fired. Almost at the same moment the other side of the cubicle explodes as a team of HR representatives smashes through that wall, thick employee handbooks strapped to their chests and limbs like body armor, screaming that you canât be fired because the damage control following your outburst has created so many jobs for company lawyers and publicists that youâve actually saved the local economy. You watch the SWAT team and HR reps create jobs for the nearby hospital by beating the shit out of each other for a while, and then you quietly slip away and out the side door.
Someone is running across the employee parking lot in the distance. As you approach you realize it is the deranged robot butler from earlier, somehow slipped out past security, body riddled with bullet holes, electric mixer still clutched in its fist. It is staring at the sun and there are motor oil tears leaking from its eye sockets.
You watch as it feverishly rushes for the edge of the parking lot. The robot vaults the guard rail, sprinting towards freedom, and is immediately run over by a self-driving car.