Fools Follow, Part 2

The logic behind all of the board’s actions was simple. Before even attempting to make any rules about the building, they had sat and discussed broader issues. They had not considered the meaning of life, or why mankind or womankind had been placed on the planet, or even if there was a higher power. What they had discussed, over large plastic cups of sugar and highly caffeinated water and milk, was the purpose of a normal person in the modern world. This in itself had caused a silent moment and some uncomfortable squirming that could have been related to the problematic nature of the issue, or could have been related to having very full bladders from the aforementioned coffee.

In any case, someone – it didn’t matter who – stated that the purpose of a normal person in life was to exist in an unremarkable and utterly forgettable manner. This idea was met with wild acclaim amongst the directors. Indeed, examples of this phenomenon were then suggested to the group. The main theory was that normal people were unremarkable because they forgot large portions of their lives. This also caused a pause. After the pause, an enormous clamor arose as each director attempted to state their remembered life history in the loudest possible voice while all of the others tried to do the same thing at the same time. In the end, everyone laughed nervously and someone suggested that they were lucky to be special people so they could talk and appreciate things that normal people did not.

Once they were back on topic, they were able to easily leap to delineating rules. First, normal people, being normal, were quiet, because they had nothing to talk about. Second, the people they had inherited in the building, and any potential new people that would be offered to them were not normal. They were un-normal in a different, but not bad way, because there was no bad, but they were clearly not un-normal in the special way of the directors. Therefore, the directors thought the best place to start was making the quirks that made their patients remarkable simply unremarkable.