Maybe YOU Are Responsible for the End of the World
Have you ever sent your child to school when they had a sore throat?
You probably thought it wasn’t too serious. You probably didn’t want to have to deal with them being home sick. You probably didn’t want to have to take a day off work or cancel your lunch date with your girlfriends. (By the way, if that last one applies to you, I hope you are a girl, or not married.)
Anyway, you sent your child to school with a sore throat.
Well, guess what, Mr. Selfish-Pants? Your child has strep throat! Yep. You didn’t even know it.
And then, since your child has strep, and since your child is in class with my child, now my child has strep.
And guess what else? Maybe my child reacts differently to strep. Maybe instead of just getting strep throat, my child gets a much more severe infection. Did you know that thousands of children under the age of 12 are hospitalized each year for strep infections?
I’m not really sure if that is true, because I just made it up.
Nevertheless, maybe my child has a severe reaction. Maybe my child ends up having some form of vasculitis or a fever or severe muscle and joint pain or pneumonia or swelling in her abdominal organs! Maybe my child ends up severely ill and hospitalized for days and days while doctors try to figure out what is wrong! Other than the fact that she gets to take narcotics, almost nothing good has come out of this! All because you sent your child to school with strep throat.
That’s not all. Maybe I had to miss several days of work to help take care of my sick child in the big scary hospital. Maybe this happened right at the end of a project deadline, so as a result maybe my project missed its delivery date. Maybe that means that our software product is not going to ship on time. All because of you.
If that were to happen, maybe Microsoft misses its earnings projections. (In seriousness, please see below. Really.) As a result of reporting bad earnings, our stock tanks, costing thousands of Microsoft employees and other shareholders thousands or even millions of dollars. Revenues in Best Buy stores in the Redmond, Washington area drop 50% over the previous year due to unrealized bonuses. The economy plummets as the S&P drops hundreds of points in a single day due to Microsoft’s bad numbers.
People all over the country lose their jobs due to the tanking economy. This death cycle continues as one company after another fails to meet revenue targets. More and more people lose their homes. Homeless rates skyrocket. Anarchy reigns as people band together in small militias to stay alive, using force to raid convenience and grocery stores for food and water. Larger militias take over entire towns and enforce their will through starvation of those who will not align under their rule.
Martial law is put into effect as the entire country becomes a military state in attempt to maintain some semblance of peace. Basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution are lost as the military takes over. Local militia groups band together under an evil leader and take over the government by military coup, installing that leader as a supreme fascist dictator in a new communistic government. Millions are needlessly slaughtered in public executions in order to bring the rest of the populace under control.
Then a huge asteroid is discovered, hurtling through outer space and heading straight for Earth. And since the government has been overthrown and the new government no longer has any money, we can’t hire the world’s best deep-water drilling team to come and learn how to be astronauts in two weeks and fly up into outer space, slingshot around the moon at 35 g’s and drill into the asteroid, put nukes in there and blow it up. The asteroid hits earth and everyone and everything on earth dies.
All because you sent your child to school with a sore throat. You selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish little self-centered selfish-person, you.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Microsoft, but I don’t speak for Microsoft. I already said this before, but I’m just making sure you know, in case you don’t know how to tell when I am joking around. Seriously, I have no idea how our earnings will go. I have absolutely no inside information. I’m just a peon. Whatever you do, don’t make investment decisions based on my blog posts. If you saw my portfolio you would know what I’m talking about.
