An affluent foreign-born resident of Mamer is being lauded for having discovered a formerly unknown social group which she is calling “a body-using, hand-working underclass.”
“One morning, I woke up early and observed some men removing the bins from the side of my house,” says Val Haark, 33, a stay-at-home wife who in her spare time blogs about designer socks. “At first I took them to be scavengers, the type you see in science fiction movies, so I went outside to chase them away.”
“I didn’t have anything hard to throw at them except for some old macaroons from Ladurée,” she continued. “One of them escaped into our bushes, but the other one confronted me and argued in some barely comprehensible Latin-Germanic hybrid that taking away my rubbish was his job.”
“As absurd as the story sounds, it made sense, because every Tuesday my bins are emptied, but I’d always assumed the rubbish was sucked out by some kind of junk collection drone, or consumed by an animal species that only comes out at night,” she added.
A naturally inquisitive person, Haark spent the rest of the day exploring her neighborhood and collecting photographic evidence of other puffy-eyed individuals performing manual tasks in exchange for money.
“How curious that there are so many people who exist on the fringes of my perception, who make little noise yet seem to serve a grand purpose, and without whom we might find ourselves with dirty sidewalks, malfunctioning traffic lights, and ugly toenails,” she said.
Most shocking, Haark says, was when she discovered one such individual behind the payment area at a petrol station she has visited hundreds of times to fill up her Land Rover.
“I used to believe that petrol stations were staffed by automatons, machine-driven figures to whom one need not show any courtesy because they lack human feelings,” she said. “However, on this particular day during the payment process, instead of keeping my eyes on my phone while inserting my card in the reader, I looked up and was met with a sentient being who was asking me if I wanted to buy some discounted chocolate.”
