What To Do When Your Car Gets Hit by a Meteor

Picture this.

A large meteor, freshly birthed from the great ring of eldritch horrors we call the Kuiper Belt, has suddenly—and with great disregard for its future (the poor parents!)—crashed into your car. You, the unwitting homeowner, have stepped outside to get some fresh air and rake in some crusty dough in your ever-so-slightly-unfulfilling job when, in great astonishment, you see that your horrendously plain car (the poor manufacturers!) has been struck and killed by a meteor.

Now, a good middle-class white-collar worker such as you is never panicked. Panic is what happens to people without contingencies, like those darned vagrants you’re always hearing about in the news–(almost unconsciously, your nose twitches ever so aristocratically upward)–but you’re not one of those people. You have a plan. And by you, you mean the people you’ve paid to do the nefarious plotting for you, otherwise known as your insurance agent. You look over the handy insurance guide you borrowed from the local suburban library; the torn and mutilated insurance guide looks back at you, begging for mercy. Your dog stands nearby, wagging his tail happily, the little sociopath. Obviously, the time has come to inter the book in an expensive coffin, decorated with little pageling cherubs, where it will be bleached in papergatory for a hundred years. You pay your respects solemnly, with all the businesslike reverence that the Good Employee’s Handbook of Profitable Behavior necessitates—time to replace that useless sack of paper right away. And you have just the eco-friendly alternative—your plastic computer desk. You’ve heard this model only takes around 2000 years to decompose. The computer is happy to see you; it’s a good thing you can always count on it to provide you with companionship when necessary. You can almost feel the radiant smile coming from the blue, slightly fizzing screen. Huh? Oh, right. Looks like another small meteor has crashed through the roof and hit your computer by accident. The meteor was crushed under the weight of becoming an only child, as it seems. You throw your useless computer out the window before it explodes. Below, you hear the last frantic beeps of a car, then a sudden, damning thud. A neighbor’s shrill scream pierces your businesslike reverie. You hope he has insurance.

Well, now that you’ve finished with all that, you should drive over to your white-collar employee and report on your stunning tardiness. That’s what the backup car is for! Wait, you don’t have a backup car. What you do have, though, is a pair of strange fleshy appendages attached to the bottom of your torso that you can use to fall over and catch yourself on repeatedly to imitate motion. You don’t know what those are called, though. Luckily, you’re able to stumble into your perfectly normal, white-collar business in time. The boss looks up from buttoning his white collar, the picture of confidence and legality, handing you a hockey mask and a crowbar. You hop in the car with five other miscellaneous office workers just like you and race at child-annihilating speeds over to the local suburban bank. The vast golden gates open before you, flanked by some of those new automatic bank guards you’ve heard about. The boss looks down on the knife-wielding Roombas with disgust. You go through the typical routine, clocking the witnesses, punting the children, kicking a few stray puppies for the love of the game, and walking out, bags sagging with money. Enough money to finally repair your car. The Roombas are dueling it out in the front for their honor. The boss hands them the bribes: a pair of huge butcher knives. Seems like the workday’s over. You obtain your cut of the loot and walk out the front door of your white-collar business with the same old tired attitude. Another successful work day, though you do wish your work were a little more exciting. That’s just the lot of office workers, you suppose.

But upon coming back to your beautiful suburban home, you are surprised to find that your lawn is on fire. Furthermore, your house is on fire. Perhaps leaving a flaming rock on your car was a bad idea. You look down at yourself and are unsurprised to find that you, too, are on fire. Not just with physical fire, which is causing you great physical agony, but with a consumerist spirit. The great American spirit that prompts you to walk to the store and purchase a fire extinguisher. Upon walking out of the flaming store, you look at your hands and find out that the fire extinguisher has been killed. Who would do this, you wonder? You look down at your hands, which are burning. But only with pain now. They also seem to be steadily murdering the fire extinguisher, which you suddenly decide, for moral reasons, is an inanimate object. After disposing of the ordinary, nonsentient fire extinguisher, you walk back to your beautiful house. It is a charred husk of its former suburban glory. It’s a good thing two insurance agents are nearby! As they get out of the blaring car, they look to you like they’re holding paperwork. You sure hope the paper works. You begin discussing the terrible state of your home as they lead you into the white-and-blue van. You would continue to complain, were it not for the handcuffs keeping your poor tethered hands from properly gesticulating. Good thing you can still use your legs for gesturing. You look. Your legs seem to be burned off. You are filled with a sense of moral responsibility, which you unfortunately take the brunt of because of the inconvenient aliveness attribute of your legs. The insurance agents, upon leaving the van, lead you to an inconspicuously deadly building. From above, the constant whirr of air conditioning keeps the guards from overheating. They watch, robotic brushes narrowing. A meteor suddenly and unexpectedly crashes into one, which sends the rest into a bloodthirsty frenzy, cleaning up the remains and returning to their posts. Vicious. Below, a deadly moat awaits, sizzling with malice. The insurance agent tells you to jump over the puddle. You fail to gesture at your legs. The agent nods in understanding and throws you over. Then, balancing precariously at the edge, he leaps. The man’s fully alive and sentient legs leap over the inch-deep puddle, poised to clear it. Unfortunately, the legs decide to commit treason and drop him into the puddle. He is utterly humiliated. The other agent leads you into the office, where you sign some paperwork. Lots of paperwork, in fact. The walls and floor are covered in it. You decide to start marking out the days you’ve been doing paperwork on the southern wall. You don’t know if it’s the southern wall, but it’s inscribed with a cowboy hat, so it’s close enough. In fact, one day you realize all the paper has been used up. What a disaster! Your old white-collar business would never have allowed such a precious office supply to be depleted. You sit back and wonder how you got to this point. Looking back, in fact, you can clearly identify where everything went wrong. You don’t have to look back far-it just happened. The paper is not functioning anymore. You wish there was a word to describe the property of “functioning”, but struggle to come up with one. Well, no matter. You go back to sleep in your suburban padded cell.