“Hi there! I don’t often get visitors, please stay.
“It’s really quite boring; being a life-maker, that is. I’ve watched wealth and fortune pass my subject by many times, he never seemed lucky enough to get it. But it hasn’t been too boring, there are plenty of other things that kept me busy. Did you know? I used to work as one of the top manufactures of lives. Yep, that was me: Marley B. Sullivan, executive chairman of the Lives firm. Of course, there was the knee injury and the economy drop-off: so many people didn’t want new and fresh lives. I was demoted a few times, and then fired. Freelancing was my main resource after that, right on through my big ‘five-O’ birthday, that’s right, never retired.
“Maybe it started when the term ‘celebrity’ was coined by some brilliant genius. Maybe he didn’t mean for it to become what it is now, maybe he did; who can tell? But somehow celebrities became everything: there were freeze-fried celebrities, packaged-for-your-satisfaction celebrities, even do-it-yourself-celebrity kits. Tailored lives became a thing of past as everyone sought to be someone else.
“Am I boring you? Have some tea.
“Anyways, it wasn’t long before our firm dwindled to a small collection of visionaries and important leaders. Sure, our quality hadn’t changed, but people didn’t want what we had anymore. Just think about the logic: why work hard for something that might be rejected when you can get something already accepted by the general public for a much cheaper price?
“And now you see me working here, trying to raise a simple, low human through his life to new heights. He’ll benefit from it much more than the others with their pre-planned lives, but it’ll cost him a lot. For instance, he had to wear Woody Allen glasses while his classmates were decked out in the coolest and latest. He struggles to pay the bills and his college loan, but in the end it’ll a make a man out of him. He’s eating ramen and macaroni now, but it won’t be long before he can afford things others can only dream about. I know: I’ve tailored many lives before I worked on his.
“Perhaps you would like to take the path he’s on now? I could arrange something for you. Sure, it won’t my job, but it won’t be a bad job: our company only has the best of the best in their ranks.
“Maybe you’ll come again…you’ll come again, right? There’s always plenty of tea, or coffee if you don’t like that. Working on this project gives me a lot of free time: you’d never believe how many hours I spend playing count-the-cracks-on-the-ceiling.
“Well, then, I suppose it’s goodbye now, I’ll see you around.”
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