UnNews:Local shepherd displaces workforce
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23 March 2007
SEA OF REEDS, EGYPT -- As a tired man looks over his people, he sees a group of children straying from the herd. He rushes over to them, grabs the oldest, pulls his finger out of the water and tells him in a firm voice not to set a bad example in front of the other children.
With their leader bested, the pack of young return to the mass of Hebrews making their way, as slowly as possible, across the desert floor. The man sighs, slumps to a heap, and laments that he should have just backed away slowly from the burning bush he had seen and been done with the thing before it started.
"If I must be brutally honest, kids like him are making me sick to death of this whole ordeal," said Moses himself, approximately one-fourth of the way through the ferrying. "You start to wonder if a crowd this stupid can really be God's Chosen People. I mean, forget parting a little water here and there--the real miracle is getting hundreds of thousands of these soon-to-be-Israelite sheep-humans to cooperate long enough to get across and out of this blasted desert." He then went back to stopping small children from poking their fingers into the seemingly mile-high walls of watery death and ferrying them over to the small, light brown spot on the horizon that meant salvation.
The Israelites' former masters, the Egyptians, were not taking the news well.
"Yes, well, you can't exactly blame a man for going insane, now, can you?" explained one of Pharaoh's security guards after denying our reporter's entrance into the Palace. "I mean, he just lost everything he's sat on his ass and ruled so hard to--"
"You don't understand!" butted in the Pharaoh himself from behind the guard, grabbing onto a table and struggling to get up, clearly drunk. "You try filling out the bloody tax forms with half of your nation missing! How do you expect to do that? Huh? What do you put under 'revenue?' Just answer me that!", demanded a demented Pharaoh, shoving a papyrus spreadsheet onto this reporter's face. He then collapsed on the floor, let out one last royal belch, and lost consciousness.
Most of the Israelites themselves were less than enthusiastic.
"I just don't know about this whole 'milk and honey' thing." said Zipporah, wife of Moses, tired after having made it across the sea. "How exactly is that better than all the nice wine and sugar that we had back in Egypt? Not to mention the root beer. Oh God, I love root beer."
"The man's clearly psychotic," one observer who wished to remain anonymous said of Moses' plan. "There is simply no way he can pull something like this off. Do you know how many people he has to get across? I do. Look, I've got the calculations right here and everything." When asked why he spent so much time and papyrus proving that it would in fact take over a month to get the 500,000+ Jews over the sea, he replied, "I was the first one over. Sometimes you just have nothing better to do than find out exactly how long it'll be before you'll have something better to do."
"How exactly do you keep going back and forth across the sea without interrupting the flow of traffic?" he then asked this reporter.
Some, however, remained optimistic at the thought of escaping oppression at long last.
"What'ya mean, not doing so well?" demanded Aaron, brother of the shepherd Moses. "We're doing fantastic! Fifty thousand guys a minute across all that water! Plus a few girls, too. We'll make our quota for sure." When asked how he planned to appease dissenting parties among his group, Aaron replied that this reporter and any dissenting parties could "shove all their complaints up their hindquarters and keep 'em there 'till Leviticus."
"Who exactly is dissenting, anyway? Is it Zipporah again? When'll that woman learn to keep her mouth shut..." he rambled on, grumbling and walking away.
Moses himself, though weary, continues with his quest.
