Planned Obsolescence

It's quite natural for you to feel this way. Don't you worry your fragile head, Sir. Nobody's blaming you for such an unexpected outcome – I'm sure they can piece her back together. These things just take time; which is exactly your problem. Time. It's all around.

It surrounds us.

It chokes us.

It's in the rafters, it's 'neath the staircase. It's 'twixt the drywall and it clutters the pantry. Try as you might, you just can't scrape the time out of the drain. It coagulates in the U-bend like old blood, gushed forth from a particularly nasty haemorrhage. Time. It's taken its embarrassingly steep toll on you. Your consequential problem is that you've been obsolete for a very long time, my friend. Your services are no longer required in an age of hand-held telephones and colour televisions. Your dated skills quake and cower in the herculean shadows of self-service checkouts, they stumble dimly in the colossal footprints left in the wake of electrical sewing machines and other such technological marvels. Your antiquated equipment is unfashionable to say the very least.


For starters, your compass is rusty and it always points towards Denmark. Let's face it; you don't want to go to Denmark – you've only just gotten back. Think of the mess you left at the airport. The screaming of the children as you took the power drill to that zebra. How you ever successfully smuggled a zebra through customs to begin with is a mystery best left unplumbed. It's going to take them weeks to clean up all the apricot pulp. Rest assured, they're not going to be in any sort of hurry to let you back into the country, Squire, believe me. The Danes have rules about this sort of thing.


Let's not get started on your wardrobe. In fact, let's. Your trousers are shameful. A corduroy nightmare; they shrink and swell with the eternal shifting of the tide. This is somewhat of an unwelcome complication. You find yourself wearing clothes that just don't match. You'd like to remedy this but you can't; your trousers are far too tight. You can't take them off, no sir-ee. Don't dare to think you can, not even for a moment. Wishful thinking is a dangerous tool, a by-product of hope. You can't afford to hope, not on your budget. You just spent all that money on Danish apricots. Your reckless disregard for judicious spending has, once again, left you in the wrong trousers.


Try as you may, you cannot claw your way back to the top. The times have passed you by and you need to make way for a brighter future. But there's little need to stew in the caustic swill of your welling self-pity. Things could be unfathomably worse. There are debauched levels of archaism esoteric to the average mind. Take, for instance, the Colossus of Rhodes. The lazy lamp-holding dick couldn't even stand up properly. Not that I'd expect much more from a man whose son managed to set the entire planet on fire. What an idiot.