New Invention to Take Americans to New Heights of Laziness

he invention has been creating a buzz around the world before it was even revealed. Its inventors and investors guaranteed it would be the next big thing. And it’s finally revealed—the Segway HT, or Human Transporter, and it will forever change the world. Especially America, where Americans are barely walking on their own feet or engaging in any natural cardio exercise at all. The Segway HT promises to reduce American voluntary movement by up to 100%.

The Segway was invented by Dean Kamen, and its being hailed as the world’s first dynamic self-balancing human transporter.

In a recent commune poll, when asked about the major problems facing their lives, most Americans responded, in popular order: Terrorism, natural biological illnesses such as cancer and AIDS, lack of income and jobs with high mobility, medical insurance skyrocketing, the uncertain global economy, and random slasher murders. “Walking� received less than 1% of the poll, outranked by waking up nude outdoors and alien invasions.

Through a technology coined Dynamic Stabilization by the Segway LLC company, gyroscopes and tilt sensors calculate the device user’s center of gravity 100 times every second, adjusting accordingly and creating a sense of balance that makes the Segway safer to use than, say, a skateboard or surfboard with wheels. The device is also constructed to sustain the weight of fat people, who will likely be the first major market of the product outside of industry.

The Segway HT is now available for corporate and industrial usage in plants and offices, and will likely make its way to the general consumer by 2002, though those who use the product are expected to be subject to severe ridicule until the Segway HT implants itself in the consciousness of all America.

Once available, the Segway HT will retail for approximately $8,000. In contrast, even most expensive brands of shoes retail for less than $100.

If the device becomes a mainstay of American culture, for use beyond just yuppies and trendy pricks, scientists predict a drop in pollution, an average weight gain of over 80 lbs. per person, and the blood of Americans to contain about 40% butter.

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To those of you out there who think you can bust down my heavily barricaded office door with your flimsy limbs and pathetic, jerryrigged battering devices, I say bring it on. Unless you happen to be a huge and well-built muscleman, in which case I say don't come in here, I'm naked. And if you'd like to pick up some spare change for your supplements and muscle fuel, kindly pound the rest of my staff into quivering, mutinous jelly while you're out there.

Welcome to day two of the commune staff's soon-to-be-unsuccessful coup against yours truly, Acting-Editor Ramrod Hurley. They may think they can outlast me out there, what with their access to the outside world and all, but I have a secret weapon those dolts don't even know about: a case of army rations from WWII that Red Bagel had stashed away under the suspicion that they contained alien fetuses. Whatever kind of fetuses they have in them, they're delicious.

So don't expect me to crawl out of this office on my hands and knees waving a white flag any time soon, communers. Sure, I could use some medical attention for a gangrenous paper cut on my ankle, and using the windowsill for a toilet got old about 30 hours ago, but they can have this office when they pry my stiff, emaciated corpse out from behind the file cabinet, where I've built a makeshift fort in case the outer wall is breached.

It all started last week, when I found the office staff gathered around a television set playing grainy home-video footage of a mysterious figure striding across a street in some unnamed US city. Nobody wanted to say anything while I was in the room, but it was obvious everyone knew what this was.

Red Bagel. Alive.

It was then that I began to feel my igloo of lies collapsing in around me. Sure, I'll admit it, I'd been telling the staff Bagel died within a month of his disappearance, in a gas station bathroom during a botched abortion attempt. It was the only way I could demand the respect and obedience of the staff, get them to stop calling me "dickface" and end the childish outbursts of "You're not my real editor! I'll stay up as late as I want!" all the time. And now my roosters had come home to roost. Proof of Bagel's survival, writ large on the small screen.

Leave it to the commune staff to get all up in my head with mind games, like pretending there hasn't been a coup at all. That the coffee has always been this bad and that the staff was just watching Signs last week, the creature seen waltzing across the street on TV just some bugged-out space alien from the film. Nice try, commune staff. But anyone who's sat a mile in Red Bagel's office chair knows that he would never risk techno-viral infection by setting foot on a Hollywood movie set. Hurley: 1, Coupers: 0.

Besides, I've seen the effigy of my likeness they had strung up in the office last week, and I don't buy the claims that it was just a piñata. I know a piñata when I see one, and that thing was clearly a jackass, an obvious reference to the staff's term of endearment for me, Acting-Editor Ramrod Hurley.

So let's drop the charade and bring the noise, commune staff. I'm stocked to weather this storm. And I'll be here waiting to accept your unconditional surrender once you realize the hopelessness of your situation, on one condition: That you bring pizza, beer and toilet paper with you. And don't forget the TP.

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"As Jerry Springer said when announcing he was about to have dinner with a loyal viewer, 'It's time to take out the trash.'"

Is there a real Tony Soprano? I'm just asking because my neighbor says he knows him. And I've seen the TV show before and I don't want to get on the bad side of this guy if my neighbor goes mouthing off to him like he threatened to. Either way I guess it's in my best interest to stop throwing the garbage into the hall.

Garbage men are like Winston Churchill: They get no respect. A bunch of guys whose job it is to ride around on the back of a truck. That's the only highlight of their day. Then they have to haul your messy garbage to the truck and dump it in the back. In some cases. In other cases, the truck can do all the work. They hire Transformers or something, I don't know, but sometimes I watch through the blinds and see the truck pull up and the garbage can is lifted up by robot arms and dumped in the back. I always wonder what happened to the garbage men. I guess the real question is, is it a friendly Transformer or one of the evil ones? Like the Tony Soprano thing, I don't care to find out.

Being a garbage man is the worst job in the world. That's what I told myself when I was working at Trojan as a condom taster, and I stand by it. Sure, I went home feeling weird at the end of a long shift and you can't really get the taste of banana-flavored rubber out of your mouth, but at least only my tongue was worn out. With being a garbage man, that's probably a worse smell, and you have to move a lot. At least at the condom tasting job the other guy was the one doing all the moving.

What's even worse about being a garbage man, people always use you in negative examples. Some shithead kid doesn't do his homework and all of a sudden his mom is threatening to give your job to him. That mom better watch out. 'Cause if she's right and the kid becomes her garbage man one day, I bet she'll never get any furniture or boxes taken away. And the kid will be lapping it up. "I'm sorry, ma'am, that refrigerator box isn't officially in the dumpster, so we're not allowed to take it. Fuck you, mom. You should have shelled out the money for a tutor if you wanted your boxes picked up."

I wonder if you can even pick up garbage on your own home route, or if they assign you to some other route on purpose. Like it's a conflict of interest or something. Like a doctor can't operate on her own son. The garbage manager stops the guy as he's on the way out the door, all like, "I'm assigning you another route, Bill. You're too close to this case." That would be pretty cool, I guess. The other highlight of the job. Then you're right up in the ranks with doctors and lawyers. Because if your mom comes into the Burger King and wants a Whopper, you still have to wait on her. No matter how much she's making fun of you.

There's got to be some mobility in being a garbage man. Better routes or something. Like if you get in good with the boss or get a lot of letters of recommendation from people on your route, you can get reassigned to the rich people's routes or something. The kind of routes where people just throw out hundred dollar bills because they got dirty and shit. But then you probably couldn't even take them. Some kind of garbage collectors' code I don't know about. You see perfectly good sea food lying right on top, not even dirty, but you're bound by honor not to eat it. That's gotta suck.

There's so much I don't know.

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