I’ve almost assembled a useless box. I say ‘almost’ because the hinge on one of the pieces arrived broken, and I’ll need to get some plastic cement to repair it. In the video, the top of the box says ‘USELESS BOX’. I put that panel on upside-down.
So when I take it to work, my coworkers will ask, ‘What does it do?’ I need to tell them something. I’m thinking along these lines: 'Maybe it turns on the coffee pot. Maybe it turns off the lights. Maybe when you flip the switch, a man arrives to give you $200,000 but…
… someone you don’t know will die.’ (Once they flip the switch, I’ll tell them that if a man shows up with the money, he’ll take the box back and give it to someone they don’t know.’
I’ll definitely keep the Button, Button line, but the innocuous suggestions seem a bit lame. So what are some other suggestions I can give? Or do you like the coffee pot and lights ones?
Pretend to be very busy and when someone asks, distractedly mumble, I dunno, somebody left it there and go back to “work.” Women will squeal when it’s activated, men will recoil in stark terror. Don’t acknowledge the situation, keep pretending to work.
If you can keep a straight face you can say it’s a crystal ball that will show somebody what will happen to them next year, unless of course they won’t be…
I can’t watch those videos on this machine, but I have a very good guess of what it does (to within a certain epsilon, as I’ve seen several varieties).
[spoiler]Is this the box with a switch, you flip the switch to the “on” position, and a hatch opens, a hand slowly comes out and flips the switch back “off” then hastily retreats and the hatch snaps shut. Or some variation thereof. Is that what we’re talking about here?
If yes, then I’ll tell y’all of a variation I saw that really DOES make money, not only for the original seller, but for the person possessing said box too. Useful indeed![/spoiler]
Here’s how to make money with a certain version of the box that I saw when I was in 8th grade. (Assuming we’re talking about the same kind of box, in general.)
[spoiler]The box has a slot, like a coin slot, on top. You show this box to someone, suggesting that he put a quarter into the slot. (The guy who showed me this had the most straightforward story of all: He said outright that it was a money-making box, and suggested I should put a quarter into the slot to see how it does that.)
Okay, so I dug out a quarter and put it in the slot. The quarter didn’t fall all the way into the slot. It only goes in about a quarter of an inch and then just sits there.
The box comes to life. It’s a bit noisy (intentionally, I’m sure). A hatch opens. A small mechanical hand comes out. (It all went quite slowly and suspensefully at this stage.) The hand snatches the quarter from the slot, then quickly retreats (with the quarter) and the hatch snaps shut.[/spoiler]
Flip it and find out.
There’s a cat inside. I need to find out if it’s alive or dead. (Maybe not on those not up on science.)
It will turn off the lights in [the boss]'s office. (person of your choice for boss)
Every time it’s flipped, a dollar is donated to children in need. (If you want to go nuts here, pull out Bill Gates and AOL and see who gets it.)
It’s a science experiment that my kid built. (Yes, I know. No kid. Part of the joke.) What’s it do? I don’t know. Let’s give it a try.
I had one of those when I was about six. Green hand, very noisy, painfully slow coming out, immediate snap when it had the coin. Pretty much the same as this.
There was a Japanese short story by Shin-ichi Hoshi about a machine like that. It’s a big box with an arm, installed in a public park. It has a prominent button on it. People would walk by and push the button in; the machine’s arm pulls the button back out. Nobody could figure out what it’s for.
Many years later, the world is destroyed in an all-out nuclear war. There’s nobody around to push the button. After 1000 years, the machine decides humanity is gone forever, and performs the one task it was designed to do: play back a music recording. It is a dirge for humanity.
