by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology Writer
Industrium Plantagenet has sued International Widgets (a wholly owned subsidiary of MultiNatCorp – “We do hard to define, yet nonetheless exciting stuff”), creator of the Floss Dross Zapper, for gross negligence and emotional suffering after his right hand was burned beyond recognition by their device. Charred to a cinder and smoking lack of recognition.
“And that was my crokinole hand!” Plantagenet plaintively complained.
“That’s not possible!” International Widgets spokestarget Amaranta Tudor protested. “To burn one’s hand so badly on the Floss Dross Zapper, you would have had to have shorted its failsafe programme and Goofy Glued your hand to the mirror for several hou – oh, no. Really?”
Really.
Plantagenet’s lawsuit claims that he was happily gluing shards of China (“It was the crokinole China!”) together after an earthquake had caused them to smash on the floor, when an aftershock caused some of the pieces to fly out of the kitchen, down the hall, left into the bathroom and up over the sink, where they affixed themselves to the mirror. It was when he tried to remove them that the shit stuck to the fan.
“But, the failsafe -” Tudor started.
The failsafe had been scrambled by the earthquake, the lawsuit interrupted. Or, Plantagenet’s cat, Enery the Eighth I Am, got high on fumes from the Goofy Glue and rewrote the code. Either way, the failsafe failed.
“Oh, crap,” Tudor exclaimed.
Several hours later, Plantagenet’s hand was crisper than bread that has just come out of a toaster turned to 11. Enery the Eighth I Am, concerned that its food bowl was only half full and that it was in imminent danger of starving to death, was drawn towards the smell of roasting meat in the bathroom. From the doorway, it dispassionately assessed the situation and did what any feline in its position would do: grabbed a credit card out of Plantagenet’s wallet and ordered a truckload of anchovy flavoured Killbe from the nearest MultiMaxiMegaMart.
Then, it called 911.
The Floss Dross Zapper (“A technological marvel of the age – if your age happens to be 87!”) was a complex solution to a simple problem: how your bathroom mirror, after all of the members of your family have flossed, looks like the windshield of a truck that has just been driven through a swarm of locusts. The device projected a small electric charge across the mirror; whenever stray bits of food were flung out of somebody’s mouth during the flossing process, they were zapped into their constituent elements.
“Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a problem of biblical proportions,” allowed Floss Dross Zapper creator Cheyenne Borgia. “Still, ZAAAAPPPP!”
Borgia’s original line of research to deal with the problem involved sonic floss which would atomize food particles in users’ mouths rather than flinging them at poor unsuspecting reflecting surfaces. The first trials were not encouraging: the rhesus monkeys preferred to use the sonic floss to whip their rivals, and, when encouraged to use the floss for its created purpose, ended up having to have dentures.
“This was a low point in out research,” Borgia allowed.
Displacing the food scrap zapping from the mouth to the mirror was the breakthrough the researchers needed; their budget for false teeth had already been strained to the limit. At first, the monkey test subjects mistook the mirror for some sort of massaging machine – or possibly a frisky member of their family – and touched it until their fur was singed. This prompted the creation of the failsafe mechanism, which would shut down part of the Floss Dross Zapper if it came in contact with anything larger than a gristly bit of steak or a half-chewed bit of popcorn.
What Borgia and her researchers had not counted upon was the lengths human ingenuity could go to mess up a well designed system.
International Widgets has moved promptly to deal with the problem. The Floss Dross Zapper will now come with a warning: “WARNING: Do not operate your Floss Dross Zapper after an earthquake or suspicious behaviour by your cat if you have been using Goofy Glue. Reboot the Floss Dross Zapper operating system and wash your hands – thoroughly – with soap and everything – to ensure that you can continue to have a safe flossing experience.”
A bit wordy, but it should do the trick.
“That’s all fine and well for future flossers,” groused Plantagenet, “but what about me? How am I supposed to hit the 20 hole, now? With this charred remains of a tossing hand? That, and I’m going to lose my job and my girlfriend, and I’ll never be able to play the piano again.
We decided to take the high road and ignored the obvious joke.