I Ate all the Fortune Cookies in the Break Room
Fortune Failed Me
By: Jaime Church
I’m sorry. I know they were meant for all of us. I usually wouldn’t, I promise I’m not a greedy person. Out of the 7 deadly sins, I’m probably the least guilty of greed. I’m not going to tell you which one I’m the most guilty of, because it's important to retain some degree of an air of mystery. And anyway, that is not what this is about. This is about the pile of fortune cookie wrappers that you will find if you look in the trash can in the women's bathroom of the employee restrooms at Bellevue Square, (underneath the used paper towels, because I got really self conscious just before I left so I delicately placed a crumpled paper towel on top of the cellophane crinkles to make it look a little less like exactly what it was.) I didn’t even keep the paper fortunes themselves, that’s how bad things are getting. Ok, well while I didn’t keep them, I did read them, because for Christ’s sake, I’m not a stone cold killer.
Who even writes the fortunes on Panda Express cookies? Because whoever it is, they are doing a terrible job. And I think someone needs to tell them. Women at my work tell me I’m doing a terrible job all the time, and I think my services affect far fewer people than whoever gets to do the writing for fortune cookies for a large-scale Asian-American fast food chain. So I think a little healthy criticism is necessary here. You know what? They probably have A.I write the fortunes. How depressing is that. I’d bet you that somewhere was a poor chap, sitting with a yellow notepad and No. 2 pencil, jotting down loads of beautiful fortunes, and then his boss came in wearing a slick, slimy corporate suit and slapped the pencil and pad right out of his hand and fired him on the spot and replaced him with Mr. Chat GPT. I can imagine that humble little pencil rolling away, fast at first (the boss slapped it away pretty hard,) but eventually it comes to a slow, heartwrenching stop. It’ll stay there for a long time, collecting longing for the time when intelligence wasn’t artificial. I don’t know why I imagine the boss smoking a fat cartoon cigar, speaking with one eye pinched and a thick trans-Atlantic accent, but that is the only way he is coming to me. I imagine the guy getting fired to be a human reincarnation of Kermit the frog. The boss shoves his thumb in the direction of the exit door, and human-kermit slowly packs up his lunchpail, his thrifted coat, his framed picture of Ms. Piggy, and his dignity before heading out into the vast void of unemployment. Anyway the point is that guy gets fired and the boss gets rich and that’s why all our fortunes suck now.
The thing about fortune cookies, is that when you get a bad one (which you always will,) you obviously want a new one, which means you have to eat another cookie. This sets the stage for why I ended up eating all the cookies in the break room. I was mining for hope. Somehow, after every fortune I unwrapped, I thought that, well now that that one is out of the way, I’m sure the next will have something slightly more promising. But obviously that is an incredibly slippery and incredibly dangerous slope to be sliding on. I swear to you, the last fortune I got just told me I suck. It was like your room for improvement grows day by day or some shit like that and I didn’t even know what to do. Because I can get ghosted by my crush, or be told by women at work that “oh my goodness you have almost no hips,” or even spill coffee on brand new pants from Ross Dress for Less. But when a fortune cookie that tastes like cardboard has the audacity to tell you that you’re the one needing improvement, you start to get a little ticked. And some people might try to put the blame back on me for this one. Why are you letting it get to you? This pisses me off even more. The question is, why aren’t you letting it get to you? If you don’t care what the fortune is inside your cookie, what hope is there? I care what this cookie has to say, and what this cookie has to say is shit, and you’re going to tell me that I’m the crazy one?! The crazy one is whatever madman is out there with the power to brighten someone's day and he chose to put in some weird cryptic crap that is going to leave that poor sucker even more confused and drained after eating the cookie than before! We live in a sick, sick world.
It’s an extremely good thing that I don’t gamble or drink. If I put this much faith in a mass-produced cookie, think of how bad things could get if I ever learned poker or found out what the bottom of a bottle looked like for myself. Poor cookie. It’s just doing its best. And I really am sorry for eating all of them. They sucked, yes, but they weren’t all mine to eat. I just really, really hope A.I isn’t writing them somewhere. Yeah, sure, let chat write our essays and our resumes and our recipes. But please don’t let it write our fortunes. Please. If I can’t trust my cookie, I can’t trust anything. Don’t infiltrate the unassuming. Don’t poison the harmless! If you just give me one honest-to-god, human fortune, I’ll stop complaining. I’ll finish my break and go back to work and you won’t hear a peep out of me. I swear. Just give me something human and I won’t be hungry for more.
A fortune that would have been nice to read:
LADYBUGS SMILE THAT YOU EXIST AND THE WORLD WILL SHOW ITS GRATITUDE SOON.