Knight of the Pips
Accidental Fame
The bad idea floated into his head and got stuck, like one of those campfire insect stories where your brain gets eaten from the inside, larva, eggs or something hatching and turning your grey matter into a buffet.
Smyrna Printing and Graphics did a lot of charity work. Not pro-bono, but deeply discounted, and that made Josh Carbone angry.
Angrier.
Josh Carbone, Josh Carbone would tell you, was going to be the world’s premier, numero uno, genius cubed domino toppler.
He apprenticed under Bronson Yu at Clackland Engineering and Spectacles until he, at 19, ignored his doctor’s advice to come in about a slight abnormality in his lab work and had a nosebleed topple Yu’s Musical Madhouse, a 5 million domino attempted topple that played Ride of the Valkyries on a piano, through a series of strings attached to the tiles.
Dismissed and ridiculed by Yu, he wound up at Smyrna Printing and Graphics, where Mike Smyrna would scream at him to hustle out the programs for the St. Anne’s Smash Hunger Dinner or the Rotary Club Prosthetic Eye Drive.
Josh told Mike that he was going to stay late to lay out the Welcome Banner for the Memori-Ale Disc Golf Tournament, and Mike agreed, though he would admit he was skeptical, at best.
Josh ran out placards for a crisis hotline.
Placed them, like political signs, on vacant lots all over town.
Mike Smyrna and Bronson Yu both might have been proud, had their troubled little underling had the world’s best interest in mind.
Josh Carbone owned the phone number that belonged to the crisis line.
There were no counselors, no live operators, no helpful words of encouragement.
There was just the voice of one very disgruntled young man, telling you how to neatly wrap your problems, and which nearby orifice in which to shove them.
Someone recorded the message, remixed it to music, and played it on their Tik Tok.
The unkind message was traced to Josh Carbone, and Keenstar Communications disconnected the number.
Josh lost his job at Smyrna, gained hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and now makes a comfortable living, suggesting profane messages to leave for your boss when you quit.
Most of the people who follow him never go through with using Josh’s words verbatim, if at all, but Josh doesn’t care.Â
He toppled another domino in his life, again accidentally, but this time to wealth and a very comfortable infamy.
***
This story is #900 without a break. Thanks for being here. Tell your friends.
A good one!
900! Huge congratulations, Jimmy!