Responding to the
trauma inflicted on animals in labs, the animal kingdom hits back where it
hurts most – at technology.
It was the ultimate tale of revenge ever planned and
executed. For centuries, man had indiscriminately used animals for his
experiments. And one fine day, the animals decided that enough was enough, as
opposed to man's firm belief that the world is not enough, a philosophy he
imbibed from an entity appropriately named Everything Or Nothing.
So the entire zoological universe went to the asinine
community for advice because they knew exactly how man thought – after all, man
was spending most of his life making an ass of himself. "We need to make
him powerless,” announced the head ass. “What is the one thing that he can't do
without?" "Mobile phones, internet, social networking sites..."
the answers came, fast and furious. “In other words, technology,” the ass declared
triumphantly. "So let's take that away from him by infiltrating into the tech
domain and making him redundant."
The move had to be slow, but persistent. The bug was sent in
first, in 1946. No one suspected a thing. Soon, the mouse scurried in, followed
by the virus and the worm. Meanwhile, the dog felt terribly insulted at his
exclusion, so the three-headed dog from Greek mythology, Kerberos, became a
network authentication protocol. Python, a programming language and Tomcat, a
web server, too got in unobserved. The penguin moved in as Tux, the Linux
mascot, computer data storage was taken over by RAM and the gnu became an
operating system. The infiltration process was complete. It was now time for takeover.
The dove interrupted the proceedings. "What we are
doing - it isn't fair." "Really?" the ass sneered. "Do you
know that the humans pinched all their technology from us? They took
echolocation from bats, navigation systems form pigeons, industrial adhesives
from geckos, cancer-detecting microchips from jellyfish, streamlined Bullet
trains from a kingfisher's bill and highway reflectors from cats' eyes? And
what have we got in return? Send our troop of monkeys now."
The question 'How many monkeys would it take to type out the
entire works of Shakespeare?' started off being an extension of the light bulb
joke, but what man didn't realise was that the apes had taken it seriously. Soon,
they collaborated on 'Going simian with Shakespeare', a virtual project
involving virtual keyboards, and virtually came up with the entire unabridged
collection - okay, they had succeeded in recreating 99.990% of it. Suddenly, the
data entry industry found a new source of entry level operators, and by making
themselves available in large numbers, the chimps not only solved IT's constant
problem of manpower shortage, but also agreed to work for peanuts.
Meanwhile the ass, while playing Donkey Kong, accidentally
clicked on a web banner for Flipkart and ended up ordering a book titled 'The
Pragmatic Programmer'. To his delight, he discovered a life-altering fact - a
programmer had used a rubber duck to debug code. (Actually, the programmer
would carry the rubber duck with him and explain the entire code line by line
to it, during the course of which he would figure out the problem himself, but
attributed the final results to his rubber duckie.) This was wonderful news. If
rubber ducks could repair Java code, imagine what live ducks could do! And it
was thus that the animals took to technology like a duck to water.
What's going to happen when the animals take over the tech
world entirely remains to be seen. But rumours are abound that once the monkeys
are through with Shakespeare, they will be working on an original book, titled
Man Farm, where men will be playing the roles of pigs, horses and other
animals. A hi-tech movie is also on the anvil, featuring lots of special
effects and a giant human being venturing into a forest, tentatively titled
Manzilla.
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