Few would disagree that the Coronavirus pandemic fucked a lot of shit up. The overburdening of a fragile healthcare system. The physical and mental anguish suffered. The being deemed an unfit father and losing visitation rights for my kids. All directly caused by COVID-19. Some say a silver lining that arose was employees having more leverage to demand better working conditions, higher pay, and more flexibility when it came to working from home. But if all that were true, why did my boss scream at me for printing out hundreds of pictures of Mewtwo?
Much like the novel Coronavirus, there is something deeply disturbing about Mewtwo. Maybe it’s the unbridled rage that lurks behind his cold eyes or maybe it’s how apprehensively horny he makes me. Whatever it is compelled me to print out hundreds of pictures of him at work to hang up and study. I contemplated how I could kill this monstrosity if he were to come to life. He had psychic powers, but I had a 2006 Toyota Camry that I could use to run him over, so we were more or less evenly matched.
I worked for a company that designed lighthouses and I was not paid to study Mewtwo. I was paid to write reports on how to make the big light bulbs brighter (other than making the bulbs even bigger, I was all out of ideas). At the time when I printed the pictures, the office didn’t want us coming in yet. I was supposed to be working from home. Technically, I still was though, because ever since my wife kicked me out, I’d been living in the office. Therefore, the work printer was my home printer. And a boss telling an employee that they’re not allowed to use their home printer to print out pictures of Mewtwo? A blatant violation of labor laws.
Which brings me to the real reason my boss was mad. It wasn’t that the printer was on fire due to a severe paper jam nor was it that he caught me living in the building when he came to allegedly “get the office ready for us to return,” even though I knew he was just on the Upper West Side and needed a better place to take a shit than The Strand. It was that I knew my rights as an employee. Each picture of Mewtwo I printed out (some erotic, some not) wasn’t just an opportunity for me to study humanity’s potential enemy. It was an act of defiance against the exploitative labor I had only just begun questioning.
I asked him why he got annoyed when I used the vacation days to which I was entitled. He deflected by asking why there were pictures of Mewtwo in every urinal. I asked him why he oversaddled his employees with additional unpaid work after someone quit instead of backfilling the position. He said he wasn’t ready to move on from the pictures of Mewtwo in the urinals yet. Typical bureaucratic bullshit.
Things only escalated from there when my boss realized I had infected the computers with a virus that turned all their files into JPEGs of Mewtwo. As he screamed until his face turned as purple as Mewtwo’s sinewy and sensuous tail, I realized America would sooner let itself be destroyed than sacrifice even a fraction of its capital gains. This rotten system had to be burned down so something new could rise from its ashes. It would require more strength than I possessed, but there was one being powerful enough to do so. The hundreds of hours I spent studying Mewtwo was preparation not to destroy him, but create him.
Building a Mewtwo that would bring society to its knees proved to be relatively easy. What was difficult was preventing Mewtwo from appointing himself supreme commander of the world and enslaving humanity. But it’s actually not so bad. In all honesty, it’s more or less the same as before, except at the beginning of sporting events, we have to pledge allegiance to Mewtwo instead of singing the National Anthem.
Plus, I’ve got a much better job now. The lighthouses got too bright, so now I write reports on how to make them less so (my boss is really impressed with my idea to make the bulbs smaller and says that a promotion could be on the horizon). I suppose I could still try to run over Mewtwo with my Camry, but I make way more money at my new gig, so why mess with a good thing?