Writing prompt: None (I don't know where this came from)
Hey, did you hear about Alex? Well, lets just say, it’s big this time, and gonna result in lawsuits for the company too...
Before I go further, I should probably give you some background. I work for a plastics company in the new product design department. The business has come up with some really great stuff to attach to plastics. You all know about the plastic dolls that smell like strawberries and other delicious odors. We came up with that. We trying to develop a market for houseware plastics with good smelling skins. Food and garbage storage containers. Off season clothing storage that smells like a cedar chest. You know, stuff like that.
Alex was a genius at attaching odors to plastics. Alex was our in-house practical joker too. We didn’t know he was experimenting with sounds.
A girl in Portland is currently undergoing treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She was opening the new brightly-colored, blueberry-smelling storage container that held her Beanie Babies. The container let out a loud ‘Boo!’ and a terrifying witch’s cackle followed. The doctors said it was pure luck that she did not break any bones when she fled the room and tumbled down the stairs.
A woman in San Diego dropped a sharp knife on her foot when the new container she used for meatloaf leftovers let out a squeal while she was opening it. You got it, a squeal like a pig makes when in distress. (That particular noise was rather low of Alex.) The ER docs said she didn’t sever any toes and would recover with minimal scarring.
A man in Boise grabbed his gun and shot the tote holding life jackets he brought from his shed to his deck. Every time he tried to open the tote, it growled. Needless to say, he not only shot the tote, but managed to hit the propane bottle attached to his barbeque. The barbeque was doing it’s job and cooking hamburgers at the time. The scene wasn’t pretty. The man will live, however with much more than minimal scarring.
Meanwhile, corporate memorandums are being distributed post haste and in triplicate. We don’t know where Alex is. And we wince while watching CNN news.