The queue was getting restless. They were getting bored and tired of waiting for their daily quota. The man inside the machine room was taking hell lot of time today. After a while he came out and everyone started asking him questions about the machine. Wasn’t it working properly? They were worried they would have to return home empty handed.
The man replied, No, instead of one word, I entered 50 words. I needed a longer story as I am going away for few days. The crowd heaved a sigh of relief and formed a queue again to collect their 140 words story. That’s what they got in lieu of entering a word in the Automatic Story Teller Machine.
It was a large horde of people gathered around the machine room and more and more people were swarming in; even those who don’t even read stories, ever. The Machine-Sub-inspector vacated the cubical and was covering his face which was shrunken with disgust with a slimy hanky.
“Relax everybody, no need to panic. The story teller isn’t dead. He is just unconscious inside that ATM box, probably due to hunger. He hasn’t washed up in weeks and there is a dead rat inside the machine which explains the reeking. We will soon open the box and feed him and everything will be back to normal.”
As the crowd dispersed to their business one guy asked another “how did this happened?”
The other replied “People had given up on stories. This must have made the teller meager.”
Superb!