Unanswered Questions

This was spotted on one of my trips to Dollar General with Sam. I have a few questions about this.

First of all, how does a company decide to go into the Glow-in-the-dark poop making business. Are there a bunch of board members sitting around the conference table, brainstorming over what their next great product should be? Did the idea start off as just regular poop and then, to make it “better”, someone came up with the high-five worthy idea of having it glow in the dark?

How does this get produced? Is each one squirted out of some machine over a conveyor belt thus making each one unique- like a snowflake. Or are they made from a mold? If they're made from a mold, they must have gone through some process of having to do mock-ups- each to be evaluated by those same board members.

I feel bad for that mold maker. It’s not his idea to be doing this. He’s just following orders. I hope he earns enough to be paying off his student loans from all of those years of art school he probably attended.

Do these things ever touch human hands? However these things are made, how do they get packaged? I picture poor, Chinese laborers sitting on either side of a conveyor belt, having to grab one glow-in-the-dark poop at a time and package it up. They must have a quota they have to meet. Do they get reprimanded for not bagging enough poops per minute? And how do these workers feel when they go home at night? What do they think about? I wonder if this could this cause them to think less of us as Americans.

At some point, salespeople have to get people to buy these things.
  Salesman, opening his briefcase: “Let me show you our latest line of poop.”
  Manager: “Not interested. I already have some on the racks.”
  Salesman: “Yes, but is it Glow-In-The-Dark Poop?
  Manager: “...Well, no… actually it isn’t. This sounds like a winner! Let’s start with a thousand units!”

The sad thing is, I don’t think these are selling at all. I took the above picture several months ago. When Sam and I went to the store the other day, it looked almost exactly the same. Perhaps it is the choking warning that is scaring people off, or perhaps it’s because the manufacturer has limited their market to people above the age of three. Maybe. But I think the problem is more basic than either of these reasons. I think there’s an inherent design flaw in this product.

While making a glow-in-the-dark version of pretty much anything is almost always a good idea, it seems to me it’s counter productive in this case. The whole idea of buying fake poop is not for the poop itself- it’s for the shock value of fooling someone into thinking it’s real poop. With fake, non-glowing poop, you can leave it on the floor next to a toilet, in someone’s lunch bag- pretty much anywhere, and the reactions are almost guaranteed to be hysterical.

But with this glow-in-the-dark version, I don’t think so. And here’s why.

When I first saw this, Sam and I were browsing through the store, not really looking for anything in particular. I was strolling along, looking at the various high quality items strewn across the shelves- and then I came upon this thing. For a second or two, I was standing there thinking “What the hell is this?” Then I noticed the label.

And this is the problem. I think the same thing would happen “out in the field”- especially with no label at all. In pretty much any situation that I can think of, people might stop when they see this thing sitting somewhere, but not because there was a poop where it didn’t belong (hilarious), but because they would be trying to figure out what they were looking at (not hilarious). Jokes are never funny if you have to explain them.

This, to me, is a giant faux pas by the fake poop industry. I’m guessing that all of this could have been avoided if the manufacturer had gone through a rigorous research & development process- like one of those tests where scientists and engineers sit in a darkened room on one side of a one-way mirror, while on the other side, a test subject is led into a sterile looking, white room- containing nothing but a table and a chair- and a lump of glow-in the-dark poop. I’m guessing that something like this never happened.

I feel kind of bad about it. There are a lot of people who put a lot of effort into getting this lump of glow-in-the-dark poop onto store shelves. And sadly, there are a lot of people whose livelihood depends on producing vast quantities of fake poop every day. But these things aren’t selling.

I picture this thing surviving long after mankind has disappeared.

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The planet is desolate - long since ravaged by war and pollution. An alien probe lands and scratches at the dusty brown earth - digging through the rubble - searching for signs of life. Eventually, this is what it finds.

The specimen is gingerly picked up by the probe’s claw, and then bagged and taken to the alien home world, where it is probed and tested.

What happened to the specie that produced this? Were these beings intelligent? Were they killed by war? Perhaps it was it their diet. The questions remain unanswered.

Eventually, the specimen is sent to a museum where it is placed on a shelf, protected by a glass case. Accent lights shine down on the case and velvet ropes separate the artifact from the curious visitors. One by one the aliens shuffle by and study the foreign object. And one by one the aliens ask themselves, “What the hell am I looking at?”