The Carlsberg CEO? | Gearoid Holland
Arthur Fischell enjoyed a happy and relatively normal childhood. Having solved the meaning of life three seconds after being conceived in his mother’s womb, he spent the next eight months contemplating whether revealing it to the world would be wise, and just as he was about to decide, was given birth to. Slapped by the doctors for no apparent reason, he decided that the world could do without the benefits of his knowledge. He cried for what humankind had lost by its impulsive rashness.At the age of three, after watching MacGyver on TV and inspired by his ingenuity, Arthur broke the second law of thermodynamics using some lollipop sticks, some chewing gum, some pieces of sticky-back plastic and his handy pocket-knife (which didn’t have a “keep out of reach of kids” label). Furious with Arthur’s complete disobedience of the conventional laws of physics, his father kicked him into the middle of next week, making Arthur the first person to successfully travel into the future and thus breaking another law. His father kept quiet, afraid of being charged as an accessory.Arthur’s greatest achievement in secondary school was being caller number nine to a national radio station and winning the concert tickets. Unfortunately he’d been pretending to be sick from school at the time. His favourite subjects were Home Economics, where he learned to cook three-minute eggs in two minutes flat, and Music, where he completed Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony while playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” with one finger (using his little toe would just be pretentious).While at university, Arthur had frequent problems fending off the attention of the opposite sex. Having the world revolve around him increased his pulling power, but had the slightly inconvenient side-effect of causing attractive women to gravitate toward him in alarming quantities, and with ever more increasing velocities. Luckily, the vast majority had ample chests to cushion their impact against nearby walls, but once in a while, those with artificial enhancements tended to rebound, so Arthur adjusted the coefficient of elasticity and the gravitational constant of the universe to prevent the women from breaking the Earth’s orbit.Arthur’s doctoral thesis was on the most practical method of achieving world peace, harmonising all world economies, abolishing all the social reasons for crime, and ensuring that everybody got exactly what they needed to live happily ever after. The university, automatically retaining the copyright privileges, refused to let him publish it, so he decided to write a much more useful book instead; A Dictionary of Buzzwords Used at Interviews and in PR Brochures. However after refusing to appear at any official signings of the book, all the major booksellers boycotted selling it, and although sales of it unofficially topped the combined sales figures of both the greatest fiction and non-fiction works ever written, it never received the official renown that it should have.Disgusted with his literary failures, Arthur decided to try a related field specialising in fiction, and became a covert Special Ops agent with the CIA. However after saving the world from Dr Evil’s Death Ray for the 47th time in a row, the most recent involving only a bottle of water and a straw, he got bored and retreated to the Latin Quarter of Paris to pursue a love of art, away from public scrutiny. Unfortunately, a Sothebys agent happened to be walking by his apartment and spotted his first three paintings entitled “This is how much of a canvas I can cover with just the colour green”, “I wonder what blue and red look like if I mush them together” and “Let’s just throw several assorted tins of Dulux at the canvas and see what happens”.Arthur dedicated his gifts to benefit society as a whole. Although Arthur never actually possessed a mobile phone, he invented the perfect mobile ring-tone, which is neither annoying to other people nor boring to the phone’s owner that they feel the need to change it every other week, like their phone cover. He also invented a simple yet surprisingly bug-proof computer program that allowed people to send only funny and humorous e-mails to their friends, while blocking stupid ones.Ever the philanthropist, Arthur donated the $890 billion annual royalty payment from his inventions to charity, namely the Irish nation, so that they could discharge the national debt, pay off all the Irish OBEs (Order of the Brown Envelope members) and have enough left over to give all of the Irish citizens nice cushy civil servant jobs.Even $890 billion a year wasn’t enough!Arthur backpacked around Asia in search of spiritual fulfilment and found out that the One Path to enlightenment, or Tao, is in fact a cosmic one-way system, and he was travelling the wrong way. Arthur then spent three months writing pinpoint-accurate horoscopes for a local newspaper before using a selection of lethal puns and origami paper-puppets to escape the cut-throat world of journalism.Last reports indicate that he is an outlaw in Brazil, in trouble for inventing a dance craze that is even sexier than the samba. He is rumoured to be hiding out in the tropics somewhere, helping the natives to restore the rainforests and cure the problems of global climate change. But most importantly, Arthur told me the perfect gift to get my significant other for Christmas!
