Saving Private Robot

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Saving Private Robot

30 robots wearing European faces and controlled by Filipino technicians are teaching English in South Korean schools. With South Korea suddenly our dependent child again, the ROK government needs more of its people learning how to say, in English, “Give us more money, stupid Yanks” and “Send your young people to die protecting us while we carry on business as usual and pretend to be your BFF.”

On the second day of school half the robots called in sick with those fakey coughs.

One wonders if the robots wear no-name sneakers and Goodwill ties, and are programmed to blurt out every ten minutes some moldy platitude prefaced with “When I was your age….”

But, really, how can anyone tell the difference between a human English teacher and a robot English teacher?

But how will the teacher-robots cope with being covered with sticky-notes reading “I get high on 30-weight” and “Your mama dates a garbage disposal?”

This robot idea could be applied to other occupations. A robot clerk in a big-box store could flee from customers at higher speed, and a robot waiter at a really fancy restaurant could ignore diners in French as well as in English.

Robot motorists – hey, they couldn’t drive worse than humans.

Robot Catholics – they’d all start ‘blogs and call each other sedevacantes and Vatican Two-ists and rad-trads.

Robot citizens would argue politics but they wouldn’t bother to vote, just like human citizens.

Robot culture – Robots reposing silently for hours with their unblinking ocular receptors of e-audioanimatronicbionic rods and cones registering images of Dancing with the Stars.

Robot supervisors with the Texas Department of Transportation would drive around all day in large white TXDOT pickups while overseeing the undocumented worker robots.

Robot shoppers wouldn’t simply push each other down, they would blast each other into non-existence with warbling death rays.

Toyota robots would sneer at Hyundai robots as declasse’.

Each robot would start its own church. The Electrons for Jesus would maintain that the Pixels for Christ aren’t scripturally sound, and the Pixels for Christ might argue that the Electrons for Jesus smell of ritualism.

Q: Why did the scientific robot cross the road?
A: Because it was programmed to do so.

Q: Why did the philosophical robot cross the road?
A: To argue determinism with the chicken.

Q: Why did the killer robot cross the road?
A: To destroy the other half of humanity.

Q: Why did the robot throw the alarm clock out the window?
A: To measure the horizontal and vertical deterioration, in centimeters per second, of the trajectory of hurled object with reference to air temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed.

A priest, a rabbi, and a robot walk into a bar…

But at this point a large North Korean generalissimo with immobile facial features clomps mechanically into the bar with a glowing, pulsating collection of conflicting nuclei under his arm, and even the robot falls silent, trembling.

One question, though: why don’t our governments send the robots into battle and have young Americans teach English to young Koreans?

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