Chimpanzee Workers Start Riot in Miami Warehouse
Beasley Buttons, former warehouse worker, dries off on warehouse grounds after being blasted with fire hose in all-out riot.
by Amy Flanders, Public Relations Office
For immediate release…
“I knew it. I knew it. I knew it!!”
Those were the words of Productivity Analyst David Sheen to describe the complete and utter mayhem that occurred down in the Miami Shipping Office wherein a band of chimpanzees were employed to replace fifteen full time workers.
Sheen was beside himself and apparently had not slept for days when we caught up with him outside the shipping room doors Saturday morning.
“I knew the idea was a bad one, but senior management wouldn’t listen to me no how, no way. Now look at what’s going on!” said Sheen.
It began only a day after the chimpanzees were hired. At first they were moving boxes around, climbing up high on shelves to retrieve inventory, and loading trucks. This was going pretty well. Then out of nowhere, one of them, a male named Luga, decided to climb onto the roof and throw his feces at a group of Malaysian investors and their wives. The men scattered, ducked behind trash cans, then shouted obscenities at the instigator before catching a bus to the airport.
Spurred on by the incident outside, within an hour, inside the plant, three chimpanzees teamed up and started throwing boxes of ceramic dishware at our forklift drivers. Next, a chimp tore open a bag of packing peanuts and dumped them from the top shelf of the warehouse. Upon seeing this, two others, April and Bozzie, joined in and before you knew it, it was literally snowing peanuts. Next, another two chimps got ahold of wrapping tape and boarded unicycles. Andy Needleman described what happened:
“I couldn’t believe it. They take the tape and start riding the unicycles they pulled out of boxes packaged for shipment to Tahiti and ride them this way and that. One of them races around a building column then into the break room, jumps off he vehicle, does a back flip, then tapes a driver to his truck. Meanwhile the little one takes a roll of tape and goes to work on the vending machine before the whole thing falls over with a loud kaboom and candy, chips and whatnot spill onto the floor like it’s Christmas. That’s when the rest of ‘em go bonkers. They start ripping open the packages and running wild and howling. One of them swings from the ceiling fan and lands in a big box of styrofoam then bounces onto an expensive crate of stem-wear while his little fried gets a ride on a handtruck until the two of em slam into stack of Lladro statues. Next I see one of them run across the street and pull a lady’s wig off her head then parade around her yard with it on his head. She tries to wallop him with her handbag, but he won’t have none of it and just taunts her then runs into her house for a glass of lemonade. When he runs back into the warehouse he defecates on the boss’s desk. Me and Wasserman was hiding half the time behind a locked door and waiting for reinforcemens to arrive,” said Needleman in a sworn testimony to Miami police.
The short-lived experiment to increase productivity and lower wages was a catastrophe and ended up costing the company $25,000, including a bill from the Fire Department. Fire fighters came onto the scene and had to use their extension ladder to go after a baby chimp who was up on the roof with an ipod listening to Huey Lewis’ Heart of Rock’nRoll and dancing too close to the generator. When firemen reached the chimp, he ran past them and slid down their ladder backwards then stole the fire chief’s sandwich and hat.
“Next thing you know,” said fireman Leo Singleton, “this little monkey guy grabs hold of the fire hose while another one works the levers and BAMM, water blasts out and the chimp holding the hose is airborn and laughing his butt off while his buddy is sprayed up over the warehouse roof. He climbed down then rolled around on the grounds in the sun to dry off. We gave him a canvas bag, what was all we had with us, and he dried himself with it. (Pictured). I never seen a sight like that in my life.”
At last, zookeeper Ernesto Ruiz-Trujillo was called in from Metro Zoo and, with a basket of grapefruits, was able to lead all the offenders into a van where they were taken back to the zoo until authorities and company officials could work things out.