Greenmantle

Nice Weather today

Here is a story that I just wrote, hope you like it:
Business As Usual

The polling place was only open from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon but I didn’t really mind, as I never voted anyway. The only one in my family who voted was Uncle Horace, who worked for the Secretary of State. He had basically owned the job for the last twenty-three years. Now, I’m not complaining, but I think that making seven figures for playing minesweeper and making coffee once every ten minutes does not really make sense. But then again, nothing really does, does it?
The traffic was particularly heavy when I bicycled to work that election day, probably because it was a national holiday. No one was leaving the city to hunt in Maine or Maryland; that had been outlawed many years ago. I assumed that most of my fellow travelers were bicycling to their relatives’ for a little Tofurkey, the food that everybody eats on Thanksgiving.
It was convenient for President Gore to combine the two holidays, after all, if everybody is either eating their Tofurkey or watching a football game, who has time to vote? The only people who did vote were those who were actually paid to, or were really bored with the football game. This was not hard, seeing as the Lions were not exactly the creme de la creme of the NFL.
“President Gore gets 100% of Vote” ran the headline in the New Earth Daily, and it was true. Every single one of the hundred thousand or so people who voted actually did mark their ballot for Mr. Gore. This was not odd in itself; what would have been far odder is if they had not. His was the only name on the ballot.
I hopped off my yellow bicycle, and left it outside of my office building. I worked for New Earth Marketing Ltd. a wholly owned subsidiary of the New Earth Daily. The familiar smell of soybeans and barbecued tofu wings hit me immediately, but there was a strange tingle in my nostril: “Ah,gasoline,” I thought. It could only mean one thing. The Chairman of the Board, Mr. Henry Fuller, had arrived. There were only two ways to actually get refined oil. The first was by paying four dollars at the local Earth Destroyer® gasoline station. The second was to apply for government subsidies, which, although rationing fuel to half a gallon a month, only cost three dollars. As befits the CEO of a major advertising firm in Manhattan, Fuller bought his gasoline from the gas depot.
I walked into my office without triggering the motion detector air-conditioning mechanism. If the air-conditioning had turned on I would lose one percent of my salary. As I was not wearing much more than a t-shirt and shorts, the air conditioning would not have to be turned on. This meant that the price for it would not be deducted from my salary. If one wanted to escape such practices, there was always the option to move to another country not ruled by Al Gore, though this would not really help the situation, as the United European States was basically a puppet of the President. His picture hung in my office, along with an earth saver balloon tied merrily around it. This had been put up because it was my birthday and my coworkers had decided that I needed a little party. They all trooped in, and Jones, the one in the center, put down a carrot cake on my desk. After eating some of the concoction, we decided to toast our leader. “Long live Albert Gore, President for four more years, our leader for twenty!” There was neither irony nor sarcasm in our voices.