underwaterminefield:

“It looks like somebody sneezed on a turd,” Susan thought.

Do you know what Susan did? She worked as a Quality Control Specialist at Rold Gold Pretzel Rod Factory. She updated her Facebook profile to reflect her views on the matter. This job was terrible in the same way that teaching kindergarten was terrible: it was entirely useless and unnecessary. She added that comment to the bottom of her status update. Susan wore low cut shirts to work everyday, though at this point it was more a product of habit. Early in her career, the loathing she had for her boss, Harris Cayburn, prompted her to concoct a scheme in which she would wear low cut shirts to coax Harris into something she could qualify as sexual harassment and get his ass fired. And if she was crafty, move into his cushier and better paying job. As her luck would have it, though, Harris was entirely oblivious to anything sexual. Not, to be clear, from any sort of religiousness, but from a pure absence of libido. He had as much libido as a fly has an aptitude for high-level mathematics. Harris needed to learn to be more in tune with his fly-ness and ram into a closed window every so often. Currently, Harris was in his cushy office while Susan was leading some bozo electrician around the plant. He was changing a light bulb or some stupid thing, who knows. It shouldn’t have been Susan’s job to lead this guy around. At one of the machines, Bozo stopped and made a face like a shrill violin electrocuting a horse, frozen on his head just long enough for me to register the metaphor, and then he sneezed all over Salting Machine Number 1.

Can robots catch human diseases? Well in this story they can. I don’t think I want to anthropomorphize it or anything, but when Bozo sneezed it infected Salting Machine Number 1 with the equivalent of a perpetual hiccup. This hiccup was regular, you could set your watch to it it was so specific, as is usually the case with robots. The effect on the product, Rold Gold Pretzel Rods, was to produce a gap two inches in length where the rod would not be salted. Just pure turd. All across the country, these defective rods, which only numbered in the thousands out of millions of potential rods, were distributed to individuals who, if they were even awakened to the deficiency from their normal unconscious lifestyle, rarely gave a fucking shit about it. They had more important things. So many important things. But, thanks to the power of statistics, there was one individual who did give a shit.

Donald Fleck had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was also a huge fan of Rold Gold Pretzel Rods. On Tuesday’s at 12:13pm just after watching The Price is Right and nailing every answer, Donald would walk to the bodega down his block and purchase a bag of Rold Gold Pretzel Rods. When he got home, he would dump the bag out and on his giant, spotlessly clean dining room table, he would create a pretzel rod mandala. Triangles. All triangles, and triangles inside of triangles. Geometry was very soothing and made him forget that he had severe obsessive compulsive disorder that kept him from getting a job that paid him enough to save up and move out of the city, which was filthy and exacerbated his problem exponentially. His mandala, aside from the aesthetic, also helped him choose which rod to eat first, because inevitably there would be one or two rods left over that could not complete a triangle. If it was two left over, he placed one by each hand and played himself in rock paper scissors, as he also had mastered the ability to play the game subconsciously, picking a throw for each hand without in his mind coordinating which one would inevitably win. Donald Fleck was just all around fucked up, and evolution should have killed him. Anyways, he would start with the odd out rod then work his way through the mandala systematically. The point of all of this, of course, is to provide context for the man who would be writing daily letters informing the Rold Gold Pretzel Company of their deficient pretzel rods. They were not fully salted, again, he would write, and he provided the Polaroid pictures to prove it.

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I had time to contemplate pretzel rods recently. Wtf am i doing with my life.