I was outside again today; dripping wet. And you know something else? I fear for my survival; I really do. I’ve glimpsed others like me, thrown unceremoniously in the bin without any regard whatsoever. That could happen to me. I just know it. And it seems so wrong really. It certainly isn’t my owner’s fault. She so carefully placed me in a protective bag, lovingly put a friendly note and order slip into my glossy pages and I could sense her hope when she slipped me through a letterbox. She was so tired; she’d walked miles with my brothers and sisters, delivering them through similar letterboxes and occasionally very hostile humans would grimace at her, even shout abuse. One actually slapped my brother onto the top of a car! I don’t envy her her job, if you can call it that. I mean, she spends hours preparing my relatives and myself for others to view our pages, then she goes and collect us and most of the time (and this is just between you and me, mind) we’d hardly even been looked at. My older sister got munched by a dog! My baby brother actually got used in a bathroom and I have never seen many of my brothers and sisters again. I can only imagine what awful atrocities they faced.
I sympathise with my owner. I have watched her sigh with disappointment when she flicks through us to see if a customer has filled in our order slips. She has to have a certain amount of orders to earn anything and she looks so dejected when she realises that yet again she hasn’t earned even a penny. All that work and no reward. It makes me so angry when I think of the people who created me. They certainly aren’t short of a bob or two!
I wish with all my heart that she would give it up. Maybe then I could reside in a bookcase or perhaps on a table. I really wouldn’t mind being jammed between paperwork or for my glossy surface to be adorned with coffee mug circles; it has to be better than what I think fate has in store for me. I’m very lucky, I know, that I haven’t been lost already. I have been delivered three times in total and all those occasions I was left outside for my owner to collect me. I can recall her gazing at me with relief. At least me being outside meant she didn’t have to ring the doorbell and receive a torrent of abuse.
She has to pay for me, you know, and my brothers and sisters. That certainly cuts into her nonexistent commission. Daylight robbery! We are only used once and then disposed of, unless we are very lucky and she keeps us to refer to.
Then it takes time for my owner to put any orders through online, even more time to put the products together and then off she trots again, only to face the same chaos similar to when she picked up my relatives; people aren’t in, they haven’t got the money, they will never have the money, they have gone to Africa, the dog ate their money, they have suddenly realised they are actually allergic to what my owner is selling, they are allergic to my owner, they’ve gone to prison and they won’t be back for a few weeks; and she smiles graciously and reassures them that she will return for more punishment the following week.
She has exploited all means of earning extra cash such as giving us out to pubs, colleges, hairdressers, prisons, fire stations and strip clubs...
She smiles constantly (in fact her face is frozen in that way now; she looks a little like Jim Carrey on a bad day) and she is bubbly and friendly but I know she feels conned by the company she ‘works’ for; she’s not really self employed; she is their lowly paid, downtrodden slave.
I think she’s beginning to realise that persisting with this venture is as pointless as granny using age defying cream to rid her of her deeply embedded wrinkles...but will she give it up, I ask you? With the shortage of jobs around, does she have a choice?
All I know is that it is pelting down with rain again and I realise that no one will be able to look at me now; I’ve lost my glossy look, my pages are all stuck together and I await with a dismal, pathetic expression on my very faded, colour run face for my owner to pick me up and take me home where its warm and dry.
But I get a feeling that today is the day she’s decided to give it up and I’m happy for her, but not for me. I’m not happy for me, not when there is a dog coming my way; a dog that looks keen to take his revenge out on the products that used to be within my pages that were tested on animals at some point...my fate wasn’t what I thought it was going to be after all...
The End
