The Box Tender
Entry posted by malign
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Once there was a man who was a box tender.
Now, you might not think that boxes need much tending, and in a sense, you'd be right. Individually, a box is fairly self-sufficient and well suited to its basic function, which is to enclose something. But in large groups, the situation becomes more complicated.
When there are different boxes, you have to keep the different kinds separate. You have to keep them lined up in neat little rows, with their labels facing out so people know which box they want.
Still, you might think, what's the problem? Boxes don't move around, so just do it once and you'll never need to do it again. But that's where you would be wrong: though no one ever sees them move by themselves, somehow every day when the man came to work, the boxes would be all messed up again. If the man had needed further proof of the concept of entropy, that things naturally tend toward disorder, he would have been able to prove it just from his observations of the boxes.
So the man's day was divided between coaxing the boxes back into their proper locations, and helping people find just the box they needed. This too was a more complicated task than you might think, because people frequently asked for boxes that the man had never seen before, or that he remembered seeing but had forgotten where. Often, the man was reduced to searching in likely places, which of course the people could have done all by themselves if they had wanted to.
And, sometimes, the man came across a dead box, torn and discarded carelessly, or tucked in carefully behind other boxes, as if embarrassed to be seen in that state. The man always grieved at the waste, and then disposed of the remains in a respectful way.
The result, in the long run, was that the man became very discouraged. Boxes, after all, rarely express gratitude for the efforts of their tenders. The people might thank him for helping them find their box, but not for all the work it took to keep the boxes tidy and separate. In fact, the people didn't seem to care about the boxes at all; for them, boxes were just a means to an end, just a shell for their contents.
{To be continued, once I know what happens.}
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