Whatever Happened to the Test Tube Babies?

If you're like me, you're starting to wonder if they're ever going to come out with a pill that makes everybody beautiful, or if that was just the Twilight Zone blowing smoke up our asses. You also thought that by now the world would be overrun by test-tube baby freaks, babies with super powers or at least alarmingly rounded skulls like built-in helmets from gestating in a big glass tube. Isn't that some scary shit? You bet your cold sweat nightmares it is! I'd probably be the president by now if I hadn't lost so much precious sleep to the threat of a test tube baby creeping up out of my toilet tank with piano wire in hand, yikes.

But, unless you're living on the set of a Korean horror flick or you're the late Howard Hughes, that's a future that never came true. Why?

Finding an answer to that question involves a lot of legwork spent freak hunting, which is sort of like freak dancing except you don't get to rub your crotch on a girl. The reason this freak hunting is necessary is because you can't answer the question of why there aren't any test tube baby freaks running around until you've made sure there actually aren't any. After all, for all you know your neighbors could all be test tube babies grown up, and while you're at work they have meetings in each other's living rooms about how creepy it is to live next door to the freak who got squeezed out of a vagina thirty years ago. No wonder they never invite you to their BBQs, that's a disgusting image.

After a quick poll of everyone who happened to be in the commune offices this afternoon, I determined with statistical certainty that there aren't any grownup test tube baby freaks out running around. Nobody in the office was a test tube baby, anyway, though editor Red Bagel recently appeared on television eating babyback ribs and Lil Duncan once was allowed to skip a roadside sobriety test because she was wearing a tube top. Granted, the commune staff constitutes a limited (in more ways that one) sample size, but it's hot outside. Also, there was a Fed-Ex guy here who was on the wrong floor and he wasn't a test tube baby either, so I say that seals the deal pretty convincingly.

So what happened to all of them? Were they rounded up as infants and processed into lunchmeat? Or did they grow up together as a bizarre clan in a cloistered and secretive governmental environment, like Utah?

While this would explain an awful lot about Utah, there's no way the government would ever leave evidence of such an Orwellian conspiracy in plain sight of any random Olympics spectator or people who got lost looking for Colorado. The government likes to save that "in plain sight" hiding trick for when aliens crash land right at the same time SNL needs a new batch of writers for the season.

Long story short, it turns out all the test tube babies are now working at McDonald's. Well, not all of them, some work at Arby's and the other fast-food chains, but they're not allowed to run the giant meat slicer so they have to have at least one normal human on the staff there to make sure nobody gets very gradually decapitated. But nine out of ten test tube babies are now plugged in behind the counter at fast food restaurants; the tenth is making sure the salad bar at Old Country Buffet has twice as many olives as anything else.

How did this come about? In recent years, all the recent immigrants with poor English skills have been opting for higher-paying customer service jobs, leaving the fast food industry in need a cheap and unreliable workforce that could be made into McNuggets if the freezer ever crapped out unexpectedly. The first test tube babies began to come of age in the late 90's, but were generally useless since it turns out the mother's umbilical cord transmits some kind of nutrients that are important for fetal brain development. So the test tube kids were basically permanently stoned all the time.

What had been a frustrating problem for the government and their caretakers was a gold-shitting goose for the fast food industry, since they'd been looking for replaceable bands of idiots to run their restaurants for years. A few small changes had to be made to accommodate the new workforce, as the tubers' domed noggins required the addition of embarrassing foam mesh baseball caps to the standard fast food uniform to keep customers from flipping out and screaming uncontrollably mid-meal. But in the end the fast food chains got their wish: workers with no will to break who were willing to scrub Horsey sauce out of booster seats for eleven cents an hour and no benefits.

And really, terrible as the jobs might be, it was a step up for the tube babies, who'd lived most of their lives in lockers like the cast of You Can't Do That on Television. The only real losers were consumers, who haven't got a fast food meal right since 1997. You ever try to order something without pickles at one of these places? I rest my case. You'd have better luck getting them to notarize your living will. One time the guy just handed me a big bag of pickles that was stapled shut, it's like dealing with the rejects from a mannequin factory. Come to think of it, I think that was in a Twilight Zone episode, too. Eerie.

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