You did what to the whom? When was that again? Christ on a bike – I thought you agreed to stop running these freaking rogue operations out of the basement. What’s that? You ran it out of the attic? That’s not the point!
Ah, hello. Just caught me in the midst of yet another dressing down of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who, apparently, has some kind of crackpot entrepreneurial streak wired into him. (I need to talk to his inventor, the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, about this.) Every time I turn around … and I mean every time, like, if I were to turn around right now it would happen … he’s got some new racket going. It’s like living with an audio-animatronic P.T. Barnum. Only with slightly less calliope music.
What’s the latest? Well, Marvin has been taking advance orders on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, a collection of Norwegian carpenter songs … I mean, songs from a now-lost rock opera about the trials and tribulations of our cousin Rick Perry, Governor of Texas … an album which is now in post production and almost ready to rumble. (I understand the musical itself was lost 
over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe … rumor has it, anyway.) Even before we’ve pressed the first MP3 in that painstaking way we do (note: we use a panini press to squeeze all the goodness into every compressed file), Marvin has rifled money out of our market with the promise of delivery later this year.
I see a couple of problems here. First, Marvin has only been taking orders from extraterrestrials. That raises some ethical questions, of course, but also pragmatic ones. For instance, how do we deliver on orders from Aldebaran Seven, placed by etheric entities only Marvin can see with his advanced optical scanners? Even more importantly, how do we bank “money” that is in the form of microwave transmissions from a distant galaxy. I think those are generally considered non negotiable currency here in the U.S. of A. Not on Aldebaran Seven, however.
Bottom line: We’re going to have a legion of hopping-mad Aldeberans after our sorry asses when we fail to fulfill these orders. Bloody robot! Second time this month!
