Gary Rinsem


A Fly On The Wall
2021

You Need A...
LICENSE
To Sell Hair Tonic
To Bald Eagles
In Omaha, Nebraska

On the door the sign say's "OOWGS." It's a busy hallway in the headquarters of Google, but few people notice the OOWGS office. Nobody ever needs to go in there except the oddballs who work in that place. About ten of them usually, it varies of course... given the nature of the people hired for the jobs in OOWGS. They soon get stressed and move to a janitor job, cleaning toilets on the third floor. It's legitimate work to be proud of. They view it as a major step up in their career.

In a big conference room the suits are gathering. Each sits down in a big executive chair and connects their Chromebook to the infrastructure of the room. There's still five minutes before the meeting begins so everyone is relaxed and joking, having a bit of fun before the bigwigs come along and ruin it all.

In a herd of nerds (YES! NERDS! Geeks bite the heads off chickens in the carnival freak show) three employees enter who are so nerdy they make the rest uncomfortable. Nobody recognizes them, they're new or they're underlings summoned to the meeting to answer for their incompetence. The room is hushed now. All eyes gaze upon the Uber nerds. Out of place and feeling his Uber-Nerdiness, the Uber-Leader awkwardly identifies himself and informs the room that they've been invited to speak at this meeting.

The nearest suit asks the question "What do you guys do?" Uber-Nerd #1 replies "We're from OOWGS." A long pause is followed by the obvious question "What's OOWGS?" Shaking with excitement, Uber-Nerd #2 smiles and raises his hand. He proclaims "When you guys do something new, we respond as fast as possible. We're proud of our response time. We usually do our job within a couple hours. Sometimes within minutes."

The bigwigs enter. No further questions are possible. When all are seated, the Uber-Nerd is asked to report. At the foot of the big boardroom table, Uber-Nerd proclaims "We've finally done it! Last week you guys decided to give every person on earth a free pseudo website. In the Office Of Weird Google Shit we did as we always do. We responded by suggesting the Weirdest Google Shit we could imagine. Free website you said? How weird can we be? I know. Give everyone a free pseudo website... wait a moment... for suspense... but don't even let them choose the color of the pages! Is that weird enough for you? Picking the page color is the first thing a person does when starting a new webpage. So the weirdest thing we can do is... don't let em do it! If that don't excite ya then just look at the long list of Weird Google Shit we're implementing for your New Google Sites project."

Written by,
A Fly On The Wall