It had started out as a joke “make a terrible decision… get a stripper!” An in-joke between friends, nothing more. I can’t remember why we even started that joke, it was just one of those thing that got said at a party or something that ends up getting repeated verbatim until it took on a life of its own… But like an idiot I made it something more, I thought I saw an opportunity, a chance at greatness. What I got was a nightmare.
I realised other people found it funny and though I’d start up some kind of post-ironic stripper-gram. Your friends made a stupid decision? Send them a stripper and a card. It was surprisingly easy to get off the ground, lots of people were unemployed and the work wasn’t hard; just turn up at someone’s house and take your clothes off. Easy.
Within six months we’d gone nationwide, we went “viral”, we were the in thing and we were rolling in it. Competitors tried to muscle in but we sued them into the ground. Within 2 years we were international, I was in the Forbes list, time man of the year. The world was going crazy for terrible decision strippers and what some people had written off as a fad showed no sign of slowing down. Every bad decision meant another stripper, the problem seems obvious now but back then I was so blinded by our success I couldn’t see it.
Think about it there are what, 7 billion people on earth? And every time one of them made a decision someone thought was bad that meant another stripper. Millions… Billions of bad decisions every single day, we couldn’t keep up. Our operators were exhausted, our strippers were bushwhacked, and tired people don’t make good decision so that just meant even more strippers.
We needed a solution fast and only the greatest minds on earth could provide it.
And I mean the greatest minds, we had Nobel prize winners working round the clock to solve the stripper crisis, people were practically rioting in the streets because we had such a massive stripper backlog. But we were the biggest company in the world, we had more money than most countries and we were throwing cash at the problem until it went away.
Finally they came up with the solution that would change the world: a totally automated stripper factory.
The whole thing would be controlled by a huge computer, the most powerful ever created, which would calculate every bad decision and every time one was made it would clone a new stripper to go and deal with it. At first it went perfectly, people were happy again and the system ran perfectly. Whenever and wherever a bad decision was made a stripper would appear, after a while the computer was so good the stripper would turn up before you even had a chance to do something wrong!
But of course it was too good, just a temporary fix. The computer was too smart you see? It was what you would call a paradox I guess because the computer knew that every time it was cloning a new stripper it was making a bad decision. It was exponential, a constant stream of bad decision and strippers.
It’s the end now. I am writing this trapped in a bunker with the last few survivors, our food is running out and water is low. We can’t escape because the door is blocked shut with a pile of strippers. They have started clogging up the air ducts so we may suffocate before we even manage to starve. This is a cautionary tale but god knows who will ever get to read it? At least it might explain to the aliens why the earth is covered in bow ties and bunny ears.
