STH Newsletter

Occasional updates, plus bonus idiotic ramblings. (We've never sent more than one e-mail per month.)

FISHPA: The Fairness in Superhero Hiring Practices Act

by Jason Roth

The New Superheroes:

• Welfare Woman - Able to leap tall buildings just by stepping on the backs of people with jobs, this superhero saves incompetent store owners from going out of business by spending government-plundered money on goods she wouldn't have been able to purchase otherwise.

• The Amazing Health Inspector Man - This superhero rescues innocent customers from extremely tasty and nutritious foods by raising the cost of his bribes incrementally until restaurant owners can't afford to pay for quality ingredients.

• Hazard Hag - This supervictim has the power to destroy an entire industry faster than you can say "class action suit". First, she discovers a life-threatening danger in any product imaginable, from pocketknives to turpentine to high-fat salad dressing. Then within moments, she finds a way to attribute her colon cancer, flu, or shoulder cramp to the product in question, and blasts the manufacturer into kingdom come with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit.

• The Minority Maker - "Double M", as he's known by his friends, helps reinstate lazy slobs of all colors and creeds with the jobs they've deservedly been fired from. Rather than wasting precious time training the unemployed individual in any particular job skill, Double M transforms the person in question from a self-responsible individual into a helpless member of a group famous for falling victim to persecution at some point throughout human history.

  Some of Double M's successes include: Joe, the Christian whose poor ancestors were devoured by man-eating lions in ancient Rome, (previously: Joe, the guy from accounting that drank on the job and harassed the female employees), and Harry, the great-great-great grandson of an Aztec chieftain whose toe was stepped on by Christopher Columbus while his tribe was trying to sacrifice the village virgin to the Sun God (previously; "Blind Harry" the china shop clerk).

• LazyBoy - LazyBoy hates being a superhero. He does, however, love sitting in the Hall of Compassion doing nothing but complaining about superhero upper management and bringing home the resulting paycheck every two weeks. LazyBoy's sole function is to give hall-wandering superheroes the chance to vent their frustrations eight hours a day. He's at home by the water cooler and the copy machine, and loves meetings. (He gets to complain with the other superheroes about having to go to the meeting.) He is always on the lookout for new and better ways to avoid the effort of work and the knowledge that taking the job had anything to do with his own choices.

• Ratman - As the world's protector of innocent rodents, Ratman rescues rodents from evil cancer-fighting experiments and inhumane traps designed to curb the spread of various oppressed but fun-loving viruses.

• Ineptitude Girl - Wherever there's ability, Ineptitude Girl will be there to stamp it out cold. Is there a little boy crying somewhere because his big sister can jump rope better than he can? Ineptitude Girl will break both her legs and render her brain dead. Is an elderly lady losing sleep because her friend just won the neighborhood bridge tournament? Ineptitude Girl will poke the neighbor's eyes out and cut off both her hands. Is a company losing market share to a more resourceful competitor? Ineptitude Girl will file an anti-trust suit.

After scanning the article at your desk, you open the classifieds. You try to resist, but the dream of finding a job you love occasionally still floats through your mind. "Is there any field where true ability is still respected?" you wonder. You turn to the comics. Family Circus catches your eye. "No, I guess not," you mutter.