You will be elected Pope.
You will be dressed up as a medieval drag act.
You will bless the City of Rome and the world.
The US president will call and describe you as "my bitch in the Vatican".
After these festivities, you will spend the rest of your life assisting the Cardinals in finding a rug large enough to sweep all the Catholic church's stuff under. Â
Happy hunting.
Unbeknownst to you, you have been secretly recorded for the past few decades and have been heralded as a perfect example of what not to do. Future generations will be able to learn from your mistakes and historians will marvel at your incompetence.
The monitoring first began as a prank, in the hope of catching some slapstick moments, but soon evolved into an existential experience in ennui, that would make Sisyphus look productive. The warning signs were always there, from what you choose to wear to that time you voted for austerity, everything about you is calamitous - including your use of the word woke and how you pronounce scone.
At least now, future selves will be less reliant on software updates, podcast banter and artisanal coffee to improve your life. Perhaps civilization can take a turn for the better by not getting a holiday henna tattoo or wearing crocs with socks. Your sacrifice of dignity and purpose, will save others, or at the very least make a great bloopers reel.
Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash
A roofer in Wolverhampton has astonished a homeowner by doing exactly the job he was hired to do.
'I called him in because we had a leak,' said Colin Sawdust of 33, the Cul de Sac. 'I was bracing myself for a WhatsApp video showing my roof with the tiles off, with his voiceover saying that now he’d looked at it properly it was much worse than he thought, there was no point attaching new felt to rotten timbers etc etc, so it was a much bigger job and would cost way more.
'Instead he just did the job I asked him to and charged exactly what he quoted. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even suck air through his teeth and shake his head, or throw in meaningless words like ‘architrave’ to confuse me.'
A spokesman for NARC, the National Association of Roofing Contractors, said they took this sort of allegation very seriously and would be investigating the contractor for possible breach of ethics.
'Job inflation is an essential part of the trade,' said the spokesman. 'If this practice of just doing what you were hired for were to spread throughout the industry, it could result in a massive loss of profits, leading to thousands of redundancies.
'I suspect when we look into it, we’ll find this guy actually has some roofing qualifications, and isn’t just a building site labourer who thought ‘How hard can it be?’
Photo by David Cashbaugh on Unsplash
