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I was listening to NPR the other day and a story about the carpenter’s union strike in Washington DC came on. The union members could not be bothered with picketing buildings in which the contractor used non-union carpenters, so they hired homeless people to picket the lines with union signs. The reporter for NPR asked, under cloak of anonymity, a homeless picketer whether they had ideas of unionizing themselves. I thought this would be a great job for a character in one of my short stories.
Bub was an organizer, a man of letters. He was the head of the Homeless Picketers of America, or HPA. As a member of HPA, you could get $8.50 an hour to picket some other union’s cause. However, interestingly, you would not get a cent picketing for the rights of homeless people. Since HPA could not pay its own union members as strictly stated in its by-laws. As such, an odd thing arose out of the organization of HPA. It removed the ever present homeless people from within the Beltway of Washington DC. The homeless of HPA were carted here and there, to serve at the pleasure of other unions’ picket lines. They were found a lot these days in Detroit, working the UWA’s recent contract negotiations. Much to the dismay of Bub, the average HPA member only made about $25.50 in Detroit, since the UWA was only on strike for about 3 hours. That wasn’t even enough cash to get the HPA members back to Washington DC. So, without the homeless presence in DC, the legislators soon forgot about the problem of homelessness. Soup kitchens began to lose funding. Goodwills went out of business. Salvation Army only collected $4.68 that Christmas for lack of bell ringers to stand in front of Wal-Marts. It was indeed a national crisis.
An even more disturbing trend appeared. The homeless now had to spend their meager earnings on fast food for lack of funded soup kitchens and food pantries. Unfortunately, the Green Peace movement to push bio-fuels made the McDonalds fryers very expensive to run. Bub told Green Peace that hydrogen was the way to go, but they did not listen to him, so he quit to start up HPA. Well, back to the point….we all know that the average HPA member consumes about 3.681 lbs of fries a week (A recent Medical Journal of Paraguay confirmed that large quantities of fries can actually generate enough body heat to keep someone warm in temperatures well below freezing)..…. But with the medium package of fries, which use to be the large pack until the advent of the super size, costing $4.89, the HPA member was vast becoming even poorer than he was before unionizing.
Bub really felt bad about this and one night he was thinking really hard of how to solve the world’s problems. Then, it hit him like a bolt of lightening….he had the ultimate answer. He had it in the clutch of his inner brain, the answer that would solve the world’s energy crises and provide a home for every single person on the planet. However, given that he had six Doctor Peppers before he went to bed, he really had to pee badly. He decided he would right the answer down and email it to the President upon finishing with his nocturnal pee. Unfortunately for mankind, Bub died from a sudden stroke… which was triggered by the bang of the toilet seat falling down whilst in mid-pee. He would have likely survived the shock if he knew it was coming, but Bud was too busy smiling at himself in the mirror above the urinal, yes, Bub had a urinal in his house and nobody knows why it had a toilet seat on it…
Yeller'
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Ask not what the wanker can do for you, but what you can do for your wanker!
Bub was an organizer, a man of letters. He was the head of the Homeless Picketers of America, or HPA. As a member of HPA, you could get $8.50 an hour to picket some other union’s cause. However, interestingly, you would not get a cent picketing for the rights of homeless people. Since HPA could not pay its own union members as strictly stated in its by-laws. As such, an odd thing arose out of the organization of HPA. It removed the ever present homeless people from within the Beltway of Washington DC. The homeless of HPA were carted here and there, to serve at the pleasure of other unions’ picket lines. They were found a lot these days in Detroit, working the UWA’s recent contract negotiations. Much to the dismay of Bub, the average HPA member only made about $25.50 in Detroit, since the UWA was only on strike for about 3 hours. That wasn’t even enough cash to get the HPA members back to Washington DC. So, without the homeless presence in DC, the legislators soon forgot about the problem of homelessness. Soup kitchens began to lose funding. Goodwills went out of business. Salvation Army only collected $4.68 that Christmas for lack of bell ringers to stand in front of Wal-Marts. It was indeed a national crisis.
An even more disturbing trend appeared. The homeless now had to spend their meager earnings on fast food for lack of funded soup kitchens and food pantries. Unfortunately, the Green Peace movement to push bio-fuels made the McDonalds fryers very expensive to run. Bub told Green Peace that hydrogen was the way to go, but they did not listen to him, so he quit to start up HPA. Well, back to the point….we all know that the average HPA member consumes about 3.681 lbs of fries a week (A recent Medical Journal of Paraguay confirmed that large quantities of fries can actually generate enough body heat to keep someone warm in temperatures well below freezing)..…. But with the medium package of fries, which use to be the large pack until the advent of the super size, costing $4.89, the HPA member was vast becoming even poorer than he was before unionizing.
Bub really felt bad about this and one night he was thinking really hard of how to solve the world’s problems. Then, it hit him like a bolt of lightening….he had the ultimate answer. He had it in the clutch of his inner brain, the answer that would solve the world’s energy crises and provide a home for every single person on the planet. However, given that he had six Doctor Peppers before he went to bed, he really had to pee badly. He decided he would right the answer down and email it to the President upon finishing with his nocturnal pee. Unfortunately for mankind, Bub died from a sudden stroke… which was triggered by the bang of the toilet seat falling down whilst in mid-pee. He would have likely survived the shock if he knew it was coming, but Bud was too busy smiling at himself in the mirror above the urinal, yes, Bub had a urinal in his house and nobody knows why it had a toilet seat on it…
Yeller'
---
Ask not what the wanker can do for you, but what you can do for your wanker!
