Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [43]
(It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454, that all mechanical or electrical or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind-, steam-or piston-driven devices, are now required to have a certain legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn’t matter how small the object is, the designers of the object have got to find a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their attention that is being drawn to it rather than necessarily that of the user’s.
The legend is this:
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of the Breathe-O-Smart systems. To begin with, this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-O-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-O-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day, with the resulting evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day, “Thank you for using BS&S” to every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city, rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of “Get off the line, asshole! I don’t care what number you want, what extension you’re calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!” and a variety of other animal noises that they didn’t get a chance to practice in the normal line of their work.
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a constitutional right to say “Use BS&S and die!” at least once an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.
Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-O-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves could now just clamber out onto their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.
Another completely unlooked for result was that Ford Prefect, stranded thirteen stories up a heavily armored building armed with nothing but a towel and a credit card, was nevertheless able to clamber through a supposedly rocket-proof window to safety.
He closed the window neatly after him, having first allowed Colin to follow him through, and then started to look around for this bird thing.
The thing he realized about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place.
Hey ho, it’s a funny old life, he was just thinking to himself, when he suddenly realized that the room he had gone to all this trouble to break into was not a very interesting one.
He stopped in surprise.
Where was the strange flapping shape? Where was any thing that was worth all this palaver-the extraordinary veil