Tara Bull, Accounts Receivable Manager at Credit Recovery Associates (CRASS) in Kankakee, IL holds a strategy meeting with the chief cooker of books, Konrad “Big Bag” Teirant and Chief Executive Officer Mack E. Avelli. Tara thinks CRASS can increase their bottom line by using their synergetic mindset to implement the new increased production metrics.
“By making our staff work harder for the same pay, we will move the goalposts,” Tara insists.
Ms. Bull is Sybil Kibble’s supervisor. She asks her Lead Collections Representative Sybil Kibble how her team would best achieve those metrics. “My double-down tactic always works,” Sybil advises her superior as she munches on dog biscuits. “By telling our debtors to pay twice as much as they can afford, they will always pay more.”
“Get ‘er done” Ms. Tara Bull tells Sybil. “I do not care how it gets done. The ends justify the means.” A hovering Mack. E. Avelli flashes an evil grin and a thumbs-up gesture.
Sybil and her team spend the eight hour work day making the calls, even skipping breaks at Tara’s insistence. Dale none too happy, runs in place at his cubicle to kill the stress, checking his heart rate on his beeping wristwatch. Mikey does his usual cleaning, making the toilets clean and sparkly at his own pace. However, something does not get done.
“Sybil! Get over here now!”
Sybil hangs up on her angry caller and works her way over to Ms. Bull’s office.
“Yes?”
“You all are not making the metrics!” growls a livid Tara Bull as she chucks a pile of papers at Sybil. “Bring in the bucks or I will fire you all!”
Dale decides to try a different approach. He offers payment plans, and goes around Sybil and Ms. Bull’s hard rules. He finds his stress levels decrease as he is able to help his customers pay their bills and empathizes with them at the same time, as Dale was once down and out himself.
Sybil tries her might and cannot not double down to make her double bonus/Form 4 and metrics. She thinks to herself that if she could go home and work, she could call people around suppertime and reach more people. After all, it works for telemarketers, right?
Sybil drives her white Chrysler LeBaron home, logs into her computer and starts making calls. Not long after 5:30 PM, Sybil hears a knock at the door.
“Who can this be, dag-nammit?” Sybil thinks to herself.
Sybil opens the front door to her rather oversized house. “Hi Sybil. I am sorry to bother you. My cat Holly is missing and I am terrified. Have you–“
“Your cat is not here, Kitty, go away,” barks Sybil as she goes back to her typing and calling.
As Kitty Bee searches high and low for her dearest Holly-Cotton all over Kankakee and Bradley, Sybil’s Form 4s pile up. “I am winning! I am getting my Form 4’s! Gimme my Form 4’s!”
Sybil is so excited to collect all that money and make bonuses as a result via the Form 4 bonus and hopefully please her boss, Ms. Tara Bull.
“Man, I gotta pinch a loaf,” Sybil says aloud as she gets up, after her last debtor hangs up on her.
Meanwhile, a certain Miss Holly-Cotton, who has been hiding out in Sybil’s rather large house, needs a place to go herself. She hops up on Sybil’s messy desk and starts sniffing around. She locates a certain pile of papers and jumps on top of it, highlighting the entire stack.
Sybil exits the washroom after dropping off some kids at the pool. She immediately spots Kitty’s cat Holly on top of what used to be a pile of Form 4’s.
“Oh my gawd, get the heck out of here you little brat-cat!” Sybil shouts at poor Miss Holly-Cotton as if she had done something wrong.
Holly gladly exits the house of Sybil and enters the loving arms of Ms. Kitty, who is waiting outside after having searched all Kankakee County for her long lost fur-baby. Meanwhile, Sybil returns to a useless pile of forms, formerly known as Four. She has lost out on her bonus.
Sybil doubles down on her nightly dish of comfort food, a bowl of Alpo. Yum!
For Bourbonnais cinema clerk, communal narcadoodle, and neckbeard Damien Hurlbutt, invalidation of others’ feelings has always been one heck of a drug.
”Hey Damien? Why does Buckstars wrap all their plastic utensils in even more plastic?”
”Well actually, Lori…I was watching the Angery Game Nerd Show on PooTube and the host gets mad there is not enough packaging. After all, plastics makers need to make money too…“ Damien the self-proclaimed “nice guy” said to his ex wife at their former home in Champaign. Lori Brown – whom Damien calls “Grimace” – has been happily divorced from the Bourbonnais cinema clerk who sent her doctors lunacy letters, thinking he knew more about psychology than…um…an actual psychologist?
Have you known someone like Damien? I hope not. Lori would not wish his abuse on her worst enemy.
“Oh no. Not her again. Hey, let’s sit down and hide out over there.” Before Gothic Diana Ross & The Midnight Supremes have a chance, their next-door neighbor Bernadette rips a big one, the sulphuric stench drowning out the delicious coffee aroma.
“Bernadette, you farted in my chair. That’s my favorite chair! Lick it clean.”
The three songbirds cackle in unison and wave her away, butt, the queen of the plastic throne Bern keeps her bum firmly planted in the fragrant coffeehouse chair, wishing she had a match.
Waiting by the barista bar for their iced caramel lattes, the Gothic Boss Ms. Ross and her sisters approached by a slender, 5’4”, 60-something blonde woman wearing cheater glasses.
“It’s smelly out there, take this.”
“Do I know you?” Diana asks the stranger.
“No, I’m Sybil Kibble. I’m in here every night and I got this picture from some weirdo named Jen. They said they liked your music and felt bad about some smelly morons next door to you. You’re from Manteno, right?”
“Thanks! This is nice for a change.”
“Jen said to keep it for good luck. Maybe it will ward off Barn-o-dette or whatever the heck her name is.”
After arriving home from the Bourbonnais Buckstars in their black 1988 Chrysler Conquest, the ladies go inside to practice their instruments. Gothic Diana Ross takes a break, walks outside to put out the waste bins, and spots her next door neighbor Mrs. Cacca standing nearby.
“Oh no. Eew. I hope she doesn’t bother me for the zillionth time,” Diana says to herself. She pulls out the talisman given to her by Sybil and puts it in her front jacket pocket.
Instead of running up the stairs of Diana’s slate Victorian house to verbally spam her about the Manteno Cantina charity crap only done to look good on the outside, the communal narcadoodle Bernadette instead waves at a bus passing by, hoping its smiling eyes would react to Bernadette’s wide open grin as if to catch a fly.
In turn, the bus loudly “faaaaart-faaarts” like the truck from the American Freight commercials, one of the few things more annoying than Bernadette Moran Cacca.
Kankakee drugstore owner, wacky inventor and wannabe ladies’ man Wally Green wants to open up a furniture store. Just think of all the annoying commercials he can make! Buy one get one half off (but never free).
CRASS Debt Collector Dale Davis is all by his lonesome in his Kankakee apartment, wishing his boss Sybil Kibble would come there to kiss him, so they could get married and make dollars and cents together.
Lightning strikes again! Seven years and 500-some-odd short stories later, Kankakee’s best bathroom reader* is still recycling story fodder fed to – and digested by – some weird writer named Jen. Thanks for joining the moronic malarky of the Moroniverse in our mission to mock stupid human tricks carried out by dodgy pretend primates in this species called Homo sapiens.
*According to that fictional nitwit Bernadette Cacca from Manteno.
“Business is really crappy! I do SO MUCH for Manteno and Kankakee County, yet NOBODY cares. Why didn’t I get the Citizen of the Year Award this year? I taught a lion to poop in a litter box at the Kankakee Petting Zoo!” communal narcadoodle Bernadette Moran Cacca brags, embellishes.
“I know, let’s hold a pooping contest!” Aunt Sonya Moran exclaims to the Poopy Groupies. “It will be a great way to promote regular business! I’m just waiting for the log to emerge…” fan club president Sonya announces, as she strains on the crapper of the Manteno Optimal Club washroom at their monthly meeting. She makes sure to get out the most important information.
“You’re awesome!” Bernadette gushes.
“No, YOU!” Aunt Sonya replies.
Sonya Moran, slumlord, shapeshifting humanoid turkey vulture and president of Bernadette Cacca’s fan-club The Poopy Groupies hears her phone jingle, ringtone singing the bathroom blues of The Mentors.
“This is Sonya”
“Hey, this is—“
“Oh great to hear from you, I’m just getting done with a call on my other phone. I am so excited about this event coming up at the Manteno Optimal Club! My OWN NIECE Bernadette is—“
“Excuse me, may I interrupt for a second? I only have a minute.”
“Oh you’re not bothering me. What’s going on?”
“I can’t make the event, my brother passed away.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry to hear! What was his name? What happened? Where was he?”
“Thank you for your condolences. I just found out Friday night.”
“Oh man, I was really hoping to hang out with you Tuesday and get to know you! It’s gonna be a real hootenanny! Did you lose any money from the event tickets? I hope you didn’t.”
Awkward silence passes.
“Hello?”
“I’m good.”
“Can you hear me? It sounds like you’re in a loading zone. I’ll pick up some mementos from the event and give them to you.”
“When?”
“Didn’t you see the schedule? There’s an Optimal Club meeting at the end of the month.”
“No, I just lost my brother. Gotta run. Maybe I’ll see you in a month or two. We’ll see.”
Sonya gets back on the horn with her other call:
“So yeah, Bernadette, you star are sure gonna shine! Get out there and done hand out those free tickets. Hot dawg!”
“Woooooooooot!” Bernadette replies to Sonya.
Sonya ends the Zuum meeting and flushes the washroom toilet.
Entramanure and Queen of the Plastic Throne Bernadette Cacca hits the streets of Kankakee County handing out “free tickets” to her event:
“September 31 – Join us for a protest party in the basement of the Manteno Optimal Club! Stop our commie mayor from bringing in the Gotion plant! Two drink minimum. Over 21 only!”
The big day arrives (or does it?)
Emcee Konrad Teirant of the Moronic Half Assets (MHA) gets ready to provide all the entertainment with half the budget.
“OK Kids, it’s time to put on your Gotion!”
The crowd goes wild with chants of “Go Gotion Go! Go Gotion Go!” mixed in with “Stop our commie mayor!”
“And now we have a surprise for you! A contest — But it’s a secret. Shhhh. It’s our last event, so sign up now! There are prizes but they are secret, too. We don’t want to ruin the Sur-Prize! Get it, Sir, Prize, yuk, yuk, yuk…”
The quiet crowd just rolls their collective eyes.
“But first on the agenda, Crabby Crafting with Bernadette!”
“Crabby Crap Thing?”
“No!” Bernadette exclaims.
“Crabby patties?”
“Nope, Crabby crafting. Today I will introduce you all to the art of the paper-craft. Construction paper, glue and crayons generously supplied by Peppi’s Portapotties! Look for my face on the sign.”
“Mine too, Bernadette,” a plastered Peppi calls over to his wife and co-crap-tain of the plastic portable john business.
The patrons begin to make signs using Bernadette’s instructions, chatting as they craft.
“That Gothic Diana Ross, she’s a schizophrenic who does drugs! She never had that brain injury that she talks about, she just makes up things for sympathy. Oh and she’s violent! That makeup, those clothes, those piercings, oh my God, who would dress like THAT?” Carla Moran gossips at the table.
“Oh and, her mom was never a nurse practitioner. She was a housewife like every other woman back then.”
“So…what’s the deal with the Gotion plant? Are they gonna build it?
“Our commie mayor wants to spend our tax dollars to bring in a company from China.”
“You’re gonna have to speak Chinese just to apply there. Who in Manteno does that?” xenophobe Bernadette replies with her usual turd-eating grin.
“Rock, paper, scissors anyone? Speaking of rock, let’s give it up for the king!”
Subdued voices in the crowd can be heard:
“When are we going to protest?”
“This is Emcee KT bringing you the best of Elvis, he is in the HOUUUUSE!”
“Heh-heh. I’m just his groovy reincarnation,” Robbie Hurlbutt self-proclaims.
“Will you sing Jailhouse Rock?”
“Yeah, throw the mayor in jail! Go Gotion Go! Go Gotion Go!” the crowd chants.
Robbie sings, as Dumpster Clown Madeline Topolla-Teirant does her usual act juggling bowling balls and chainsaws from inside her dumpster shoved on-stage by a group of unseen stage-hands.
“Look at my wife, she’s such a clown.” Konrad says, points at Madwoman, attempts to make the crowd laugh. “I just went for the juggler.”
Groans are heard from the impatient crowd.
Konrad reaches down to a stranger and pretends to grab their nose.
“Got your nose! Without that you can’t smell Elvis Parsley.”
The embarrassed spectator melts into a puddle of embarrassment.
The MHA bow as they finish their three-ring circus act.
“Thank you everyone! Now it’s karaoke time. We only have one sign-up, everyone give it up for Wally Green!”
Half the crowd gets ready to exit, they’ve had enough.
“Make sure to throw money in the tip jar” a looming bog witch Bernadette says as she guards one exit.
“It’s a two-drink minimum, so get back in there, it’s for a good cause!” JB says as he guards the other door.
Wally finishes his own rendition of “Magnet and Steel” to a slow clap from a disappointed crowd, wishing they could up and leave already.
“I’m single and ready to mingle at the bar!” Wally proudly announces.
The crowd erupts in boos.
“That’s right, head over to the bar and our wonderful bartenders will be sure to serve you. Remember our two-drink minimum helps raise money for The Manteno Optimal Club! Your dollars go to an awesome cause! And now the moment you’ve been waiting for, our accordion empress and kazoo cover queen, Mrs. Bernadette Cacca!
Emcee Konrad turns off his mic and the talented Bernadette plays her usual two-hour set, covering show-tunes on piano, accordion and vuvuzela horn. All requests denied and then she bows, showing off her poop emoji dress.
“Everybody give it up for Illinois’ Number One piano empress and entramanure, the queen of the plastic throne herself, Mrs. Bernadette Cacca!”
Bernadette’s fan club — The Poopy Groupies and some other morons give their favorite nitwit a standing ovation, drowning out the people at their tables talking on their cell phones, playing games and ranting about the proposed Gotion plant.
She bows again, exits the stage and heads downstairs to poop, because, gotta mine those craptocoins the old fashioned way.
“Free balloons for everyone!” announces Poopy Groupy and turd burglar JB as he hands them out to the contestants for the pooping contest.
“We ran out…”
“Oh, just blow these up, but don’t inhale,” Bernadette says as she pulls out a box of condoms and hands it JB, who is manning the helium station.
“Did you pick that guy off the mountain?” Sonya says, making fun of the contestants in her typical narcadoodle fashion.
“Huh?”
“I bet you picked a whole bouquet of mountain climbers, you like them so much.”
“Oh, the mountain you climbed in your jammies?”
“No, in Switzerland. They use Oreos there.”
“Wait, what?”
“For money right?”
“I think you mean Euros.” JB replies to his idiot boss, scumlord Sonya.
“I think you have been smoking some of that governmental illegal substance again…” Sonya projects.
“And now our top-secret contest is about to be revealed by our guest announcer, one true Illinois treasure: Bernadette Cacca! Lift the curtain and reveal the fun surprise!” Konrad announces.
A row of seated contestants are slowly revealed as the curtain rises.
“Whoever poops the most wins! On your pot, get ready, GO GO GO GO!” Emcee Bernadette Cacca announces.
Bernadette closes all the portapotty doors, “Peppi’s Portapotties” logos decorating complete with the owners’s cheesy smiling mugs.
Undead Greg Schneissder, Wally Green, Pat Splatt, JB “Turd Burglar” Powers, Sonya’s aunt Sonya Moran, and Peppi Cacca all aim their bums to please, meanwhile Bernadette Cacca plays the butt trumpet. “Any requests?”
“Yeah, tell us what the feck is going on?”
The dookie starts to add up.
All toilets flush except for Greg’s – he was constipated. Must be that Slow-Burn Virus he got on his Undeath Day. Bernadette goes into each portable toilet bowl with yardstick in hand, carefully measuring each poo-pile.
“We have a weiner! Pat Splatt has pinched the biggest loaf! It’s a foot-long! Now come up to the stage and collect your prize, Pat!”
“What did I win?”
“A bag full o’ Craptocoins, mined the old-fashioned way!”
“WAT? I don’t want that crap. What’s the real prize?”
“I’ll have it!” Undead Greg says has he grabs the big bag off the stage, poring the Newly Formed Turds (NFTs) into his mouth, gobbling every single one.
“MMM! So much better than brains, brains brains, brains…”
“AAAAAAAARGGGH” the crowd screams bloody-murder and escapes, people nearly trampling each other to avoid the looming Zombie Apocalypse.
People gather in the parking lot, dumbfounded over the dim-bulb nitwit tomfoolery that just happened, thankfully having avoided the zombie inside.
“So…what were we gon’ done-protesting in that here place again?”
“Excuse me, excuse me sir, YOUR laundry is done!” shapeshifting humanoid turkey-vulture Carla Moran squawks at Konrad “Kon” Teirant who had fallen asleep at the Manteno mini-casino/laundromat “Spin-n-Sudz.”
“Yeah! I need a machine!” sister Sonya Moran says at the man who had ruffled her feathers in his sleep.
Carla continues to poke Konrad, who had spent the past week staying up late cooking the books into a mutated mystery-meat mess at the Kankakee bill-collection company Credit Recovery Associates (CRASS).
Carla shoves Kon into the slot-machine, causing it to spin into oblivion, make a racket and flash like a fire truck.
“I won the jackpot!” Konrad says in a startled haze.
“No, dude, that’s my jackpot!”
“It’s mine!”
The two avian sisters peck at each other over Konrad’s money, to which they think they are entitled. The love money more than Kon, and that is hard to beat.
The owner walks in. “Who let these stupid birds in? Don’t y’all know not to feed the animals?” she says as she scans her eyes across the mini-casino and bar. She picks up a broom.
“Shoo ladies! Shoo! Fly away and don’t come back now, y’hear.”
Konrad goes to collect his winnings, ignoring the warning screen right under his nose:
“TILT!”
“Sorry sir, malfunctions void all transactions. It says so right on the sign.”
“Wha–“
“It’s our policy.”
Konrad audibly shuffles his feet over to the laundromat to pick up his clothes, like a toddler ready to throw a tantrum.
“Sorry sir, we just closed. You’ll have to get your laundry tomorrow.”
A wild Konrad storms out the building into the Manteno parking lot looking for someone else to blame for his own mistake, because why take responsibility when you can just blame someone else? So goes the mind of a tyrant anyway.
“You stupid birds! You cost me my big bag!” Konrad yells into the Midwestern clouds at the vultures who had long flown away, like a wolf howling at the moon, or a pixellated coyote from a casino slot machine if you prefer.
“Oh my gawd, JB, stop holding your fork like a shovel. You look like someone from the backwoods,” Manteno’s very own Bernadette Moran Cacca berates her Poopy Groupy and secret lover JB the neighborhood turd burglar right in front of her husband and co-entremanure of their portable washroom business.
“Now why are you eating that with your hands?”
“Two words, “Finger foods.”
“D’aaah-is it made from real fingers?” Fellow Poopy Groupy Undead Greg Schneissder asks Bernadette as he slithers over to the table.
“No, horses’ ovaries. That’s what hors d’oeuvres means in English,” Bernadette claps back.
“That’s not true!” JB argues.
“Yes it is!” the confidently incorrect Bernadette argues with the turd burglar in a recursive loop. The family that poops together, stays together.
Yet, communal narcadoodle Bernadette graces the cover of the Manteno Sentinel again for her charity work playing accordion and kazoo show-tunes at the Manteno Optimal Club. Her aunt, slumlord, and shapeshifting humanoid turkey vulture Sonya Moran helped get her the press about some upcoming event crap. No wonder people want to yeet her.
Kankakee squirrel watcher, candy-crusher and school-bus-parts collector JoAnn Kibble was hand-picked by her daughter Sybil to judge the annual Squirrelympics!
Brought to this community every year, the event is sponsored by Sybil Kibble’s employer: bill-collection-factory Credit Recovery Associates (CRASS), because they are here for you, and only for you!
“We don’t just take your money, we give it back, too!” — Mack E. Avelli, Chief Crook and and Money Launderer, CRASS
MoronicArts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.