The Un-Fortune-ate Cookie...

After you've worked and almost 55 hour work week, you look forward to Friday night dinner almost reverently. You arrive at the buffet, greet your friends and family, and begin to chow down on lo-mien, General Tsao's, egg rolls, crab legs--you know, you stuff yourself silly with Americanized foreign foods. You're having a great time, laughing and talking. The bill arrives with a cookie for everyone, and per custom, we throw them into the air, and wherever the pointed ends face, that's the person who gets that fortune (within reasonable proximity, of course...)

We open them one by one and read off the little vague prophecies: "Careful what you wish for," "Happiness can only be found from within, "Unicorns dance in your shadows"--cheesy stuff like that.

... and then I open mine...

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To get what you truly desire, you must work harder.

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"Excuse me?!" I've just busted my ass all week meeting silly deadlines on green things for really awful people who feel they are important and I must work harder?!?!?! If I were a bit more superstitious--or religious, for that matter--I might think that the cosmos is having a great belly laugh at my expense (not that my friends didn't get a good one from this...), but what the hell? They could have at least flowered that shit up a bit--you know, something like "Hard work brings great contentment" or "To live for work is working to live." Hell, I probably would have even been okay with "Work sucks, get used to it." Okay, maybe not so much on that last one either...

You have to wonder how bad the economy is when even fortune cookies are filled with doom and gloom...