Yellow Number Two Computer

Wally was thrown out of his suburban home by his wife, who thought he was too opinionated.  In Wally's defense, it should be noted that she was addicted to amphetamines and was usually on edge.  He'd also lost his job as a developer of food additives, a job that had been outsourced to China.

Wally retreated to the woods and decided to write his memoir.  He lived in a shed and ate wild onions, berries, and dandelion greens.  He felt great.  He wrote most of the day and used a number two yellow pencil.  His life was therefore rendered in graphite on a yellow legal pad.

At peace with his humble surroundings and duties, he realized that he had the best computer in the world: his pencil.  It didn't need updates and was immune to viruses and hackers.  Mistakes were corrected with an eraser at the end of the pencil.  And it required no maintenance other than an occasional sharpening.  Best of all, it was compact and cheap.  He was able to buy a new one whenever one of his yellow number twos got too short.

That's when Wally had a brainstorm.  He sold his yellow pencils on a TV shopping channel, advertising them as the most efficient computers in the world.  He made twenty million dollars in six months.  It was more than a novelty item.  It worked.

Wally is now working on his next big product rollout, which is the finest toy ever made: a cardboard box.  Not a kid in the world can resist crawling into a large cardboard box and claiming himself, like Hamlet, to be king of infinite space.  The boxes are safe, inexpensive, and foster the imaginations of young children.  He has advance orders for fifty million units.

Wally still lives in the woods, where there are no distractions.  He claims that his modest lifestyle gives him a competitive entrepreneurial edge.  For Wally, life is grand.  Now a successful businessman, Wally sold his memoir for a five-million-dollar advance.  As for his wife, she married a tractor salesman with no opinions.

 by William Hammett

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