Outsourced!

by Alfred P. Loafward IX
President pro tempore, Erratum Terrium Board of Directors

Today is a sad day for me, and a happy day, I must imagine, for Hernando de Soto. When I inherited the post of President pro tempore of the Erratum Terrium Board of Directors from my late uncle-in-law, who also happened to be an oft-needed tax attorney, I never imagined a day like this might come. To lay this narrative more squarely in the vein of honesty, this inheritance fell to me several weeks before my emergence from the womb, and my imagination was limited to the sequencing of kicks I delivered to the inside of my mother's swollen midsection. One such kick disturbed her so that she spilled her cup of tea all over her conversation companion, her suitor-of-the-moment, A. Mitchell Palmer. I have been made to believe that this incident, and the ensuing cloth-napkin intervention debacle, led almost directly to the First Red Scare.

Current international affairs have been with me all my life, and so, as previously stated, today is a sad day for me. Just hours ago I dispatched a courier with a parcel of signed papers, with the result of my signature on said papers being the final sale of all Erratum Terrium assets and properties to an international consortium of nose-hair-trimmer salesmen (very popular in Turkey, I understand). This consortium, in turn, transferred everything to a shell company in the the Bahamas, who in turn collateralized our substantial debt into securities backed solely by the mortgage on my third cousin Debbie's St. Augustine, Florida BBQ restaurant -- which, to remain in the vein of honesty, was run out of business and burned down in 1964 after she attempted solve race relations by refusing to serve both whites and blacks equally. These collateralized debt obligations were passed like hepatitis C from one investment banker to the next. To the best of my information Lloyd Blankfein used them accidentally as toilet paper on a restroom break from sworn testimony in front of the U.S. Senate, and then, upon realizing his error, tweeted "...using crap to wipe up crap". This was 30 minutes ago.

The papers, now covered in Blankfein crap, were found in the unflushed toilet 3 minutes later by Justo Rufino Estrada Cabrera, a Guatemalan national employed under a false Social Security number to clean restrooms in the Capitol building. Not speaking more than a few choice words in English, Mr. Estrada Cabrera immediately understood the value of the papers he held in his wisely-gloved hands, wiped off the Blankfein crap, and faxed a copy to his third cousin, a lawyer in Guatemala.

And so, as of May 1st, 2010, Erratum Terrium has been outsourced to Guatemala. I can only hope they continue the same worthy journalistic tradition. After all, neighboring El Salvador was the first country in the world to elect a former CNN anchor as its head of state! And what higher tradition of journalism is there than that found at CNN!

Please excuse the sarcasm. I get cranky when I don't take my daily fish oil supplement. Last night, in the midst of my anxious decision-making process, I went to see my speech therapist (my late mother, spurned in her youth by a haughty Carl Jung, forbid anyone in my family from seeing psychiatrists, speech therapy is the closest I can get) for some advice. "Erratum Terrium is like my child," I told him, "I have put my whole life into it, and I don't want to see it changed." The good doctor took a few long pulls from his thick, dark cigar, removed his sunglasses to reveal his bloodshot blue eyes, and asked the topless masseuse to leave the room. Exhaling smoke dramatically, he said: "If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves." He then leaned towards the glass table and, using a rolled-up $100 bill, snorted a line of cocaine from South America imported by Mexican cartels through Guatemala. The significance of which, lost at the time in the contemplance of the good doctor's wise words, is clear to me only now.



Dictated, not read
May 1st, 2010
Location undisclosed