h a l f b a k e r yThe halfway house for at-risk ideas
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Driving your subcompact auto to the same job and returning to the same home day after day is really a trial isn't it? But these every day heroes are what make the world turn. Here's a way to make them feel more like non-every-day heroes.
This service would intercept all of your paper mail, email,
and office correspondence and make everything much, much more important. The advertisement offering you a chance to win $100 at your local car dealership would be changed to a sinister gambling opportunity from a high-powered rival business owner. The memo advising you that overtime is mandatory for the next two weekends would become an eloquent, polite, but firm notice from one's overlord.
Excuses would be made for all of the every-day physical objects one interacts with. A "subordinate" would send you letters every now and then begging forgiveness for the delay in the building of your palace and making excuses as to why you'll have to stay in your present home for another year. A letter from a Bugatti dealership would explain that your requirement for significant custom upgrades to your supercar will take an additional ten months, given the difficulty of hiring the single best mechanic in the world, who they're trying to smuggle out of an Eastern European nation. Your bank account and also the price labels of items you order online would have extra zeros tacked on, on your side and removed, on the merchant's side.
From peasant to king, spy, business magnate, or villian: cheap!
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But you're a half- baker, [Voice]; what grander imaginary destiny
could you wish for? |
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Some of us would prefer the opposite. The letter from your secret service handler arrives, but it is a postcard from Margate "Dear pocmloc, its lovely on holiday here but I'll be home tomorrow. Can you come round and reach the pressure cooker down from the top shelf tomorrow at 3.07pm please? Love, your dearest aunty Agnes". The butler comes to let you know what the arrangements for the journey will be, but is disguised as the single mother from down the street, and the information is framed as another complaint about the unreliability of the local taxi company. For your orbital flight (you are 3rd after Buzoff and Doors or whatever their names are) you cycle to the bus station and sit on a bench for half an hour before you climb onto a creaking and rattling single decker filled with smokers wearing tracksuits (these are your PR and security crew in disguise). Everyone is sweating and damp so the windows fog up. You don't even notice the transfer to the orbital capsule, launch or re-entry, until you get out and sit in a greasy cafeteria and pick up a used copy of the Daily Mail to keep you from being bored. |
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