Curiosity Killed the Cat

Now you may not believe this, but the following story is true (excepting for a few of the parts I maybe exaggerated a little bit on).

This all happened a few years back, shortly after Sheriff Grey shut down the chicken processing plant on account of Chicken Charlie damn near poisoning half the local population with his evil chicken chili. This left a whole lot of us around these parts out of work and with nothing to do.

Well, shortly after that this city boy named Tony Troutman was in town visiting his folks who had retired here. He saw the empty chicken plant, and lots of us sitting around unemployed, and when his Daddy explained to him what had happened, a light bulb went off in his head. He knew he could probably get a good deal on the old chicken plant, and he'd be able to hire us unemployed good old boys for cheap labor. Now all he had to do was figure out what all he could make in the factory.

Tony got on his cell phone and called his buddies in New York looking for ideas. Turns out one of them owned a trophy factory up there that he was fixing to give up on. The workers were threatening to start a union if they didn't get more pay, and the local OSHA boys were always fining him for some environmental nonsense or another. He was willing to sell off the business for cheap.

Pretty soon, Tony had it all worked out. He bought the chicken plant, trucked in all the old machinery, and before you knew it he had himself a trophy factory, right here in central Florida. And once he figured out who all to make his election contributions to, he didn't have to worry about those pesky OSHA guys, neither.

Now we were getting pretty good at cranking out the bowling trophies and commemorative plaques and all, making lots of money for Mister Troutman. So one day he decides to throw a big spaghetti dinner party for all us employees. Me and Gary McMurfee and a couple of the other guys volunteered to be the cooks for the shindig. We cleaned up some of the rusty chicken processing vats and fired up the old boilers. (We had to chase more than a few rats out of the kitchen, but we were used to it from before.)

Gary totes over a big sack of pasta, getting ready to start throwing it into the pots of water. All of a sudden I heard him yell: "Hey! There's a cat in this spaghetti!!"

A big orange tabby jumps out of the sack, and takes off running. "Looks like you let the cat out of the bag!" I joke. Gary starts to chase the cat into the shop, but I tell him not to bother. "Maybe he'll get rid of some of them rats in there. That's probably what he was doing in the spaghetti sack, anyway."

Now the next day, about halfway through the shift, we hear this godawful yowling scream coming from the combination press-oven. It sounds just like a big old cat being killed, which it turns out it is. Seems like the tabby got a little too close to the machinery and wham! Just like that, curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction ain't gonna bring this one back, though, so we have to take the machine apart, and spend the rest of the shift scraping out squished and baked cat pieces. I'll tell you, it's not much fun.

Now you'd think that would be the last of it, but it's not. About a week later this slick city lawyer shows up, looking to see Mister Troutman. After he leaves, Tony comes stomping out into the shop, and he's hopping mad. He's holding up what looks like a little league trophy, but instead of a silver cup with a little baseball player on it, it's made of a dried out partially flattened cat's posterior. "I want to know who made this!" he screams, but nobody answers.

We find out the whole story later from LuAnn, his secretary. Seems like this particular trophy ended up going to Timmy Anderson, the son of John Anderson, owner of a large consulting firm up in Atlanta. His lawyer claims that little Timmy opened up his trophy box in front of all his friends after the big game, and was so traumatized by this thing that he can't even think of baseball anymore without busting into tears. They're suing Troutman Trophies for a million dollars for pain and mental anguishing.

Mister Troutman eventually settled with the lawyers, but it cost him just about every penny he had. And after word got out about what happened to little Timmy Anderson, lots of our customers decided to buy their trophies elsewhere. It wasn't long before Tony was forced to sell off the machinery and shut down the plant.

Now back when it first happened, Tony had called us all in the office, one at a time, and nobody would admit to making the trophy. It's quite possible that it just come out of the machine that way. And Cletus, our Inspector, he only checked maybe every other box before it was shipped anyway, so he might not have caught it. There may be some of you out there who disagree, but when they asked me down at the unemployment office why I was out of work, I just told them, with a clear conscience, that our plant had been shut down because of a natural cat's ass trophy !!!