There are few jobs as rewarding as being a live-in butler. And by few, I mean quite a few. I can think of many jobs I’d rather be doing than this–like being a lawyer or a doctor. Heck, even being a famous movie star that everybody loves would be better than being a butler.
But being a doctor requires lots of learning. And learning is very boring unless you’re learning about monkeys. And even that gets boring once you start learning about their biology and bones and stuff. It’s really only fun to learn what kind of tricks a monkey can do when you give it a peanut.
Being a famous movie star that everybody loves doesn’t necessarily require learning, but it does require raw talent. And unfortunately, none of my talent is raw. It’s cooked, well-done.
Consequently, I’ve kind of been forced into a life of butlering. If I’m being honest, I’ve always had a natural proclivity towards it. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always found myself wearing a suit and dangling a large napkin over my arm. And I’m pretty good at having an old man beat me over the head with a cane when I make a mistake.
And to be fair, there can be some upsides to butlering. That is, as long as you have a good rich person that you’re working for. You want a rich person who is old enough that they don’t really know what’s going on, but not so old that they have to use a bedpan. There’s a sweet spot in the middle there, one where you’re less butlering and more squatting in a rich guy’s house and watching his giant TV.
I’ve never had such luck finding these kinds of rich people though. I must say, what I have in butlering skills, I definitely lack in finding-good-rich-people-to-be-a-butler-for skills.
In my experience, you don’t want to work for anybody who goes by “The Dutchman,” “Count,” or “Baron.” They’re usually evil. It’s also never great when people use “Von” in their name or have a name that ends in “-dorf.”
So it’s just my luck that my current boss is Baron Count Von Dutchmandorf.
I know, I know, I didn’t take my own advice there. But the thing is, these kinds of guys are really the only ones who use butlers these days, so you kind of have to take what you can get.
Working for a guy like Von Dutchmandorf can be very trying. Like the other day I was trimming his hedges, and Von Dutchmandorf came out to yell at me because his endangered species bone collection wasn’t polished. I told him I’d get to it but first I’d have to finish trimming the hedges. Then he said if I didn’t quit it with the hedges and start polishing he’d beat me over the head with a cane.
The thing is, I’d already been beaten over the head with a cane for not trimming the hedges.
There are a lot of punishments Von Dutchmandorf has for me besides the cane. Sometimes he locks me in his sauna for hours without water. And then when he finally opens the door and I crawl out panting like a stupid dog, he beats me with that cane again.
Or sometimes if it’s raining out, he’ll make me stand by the curb as he drives by and splashes me with gutter water. And usually he’ll lean out of the driver-side window and hit me with the cane a bit too.
Once he signed up for this dating app and catfished me into thinking he was a pretty butler-loving woman. He led me down this two-month semi-relationship thing. And then when I finally went to meet the woman in-person at a coffee shop, it wasn’t a woman obviously. It was Von Dutchmandorf with his beating cane. I probably should have caught onto that one because what kind of pretty woman is named Baroness Countess Von Dutchesswomandorf.
I guess when I think about it, all the punishments include a good caning, so what I meant to say earlier was that caning isn’t the only punishment, but it’s definitely always part of the punishment.
Now, caning a butler doesn’t inherently make somebody evil. We all know that. It’s permitted in the standard Butlers Union contracts. But Von Dutchmandorf is definitely entangled in some pretty evil things. And most of the time it’s like, you do you, just sign my check and I’ll keep tidying things up. But sometimes it’s a bit too much.
Like he got most of his fortune from selling Asbestos, but now everyone knows Asbestos is bad. But that didn’t stop Von Dutchmandorf from inventing New Asbestos. And then once it was revealed New Asbestos was the same as regular Asbestos, he started selling New Asbestos Version 2.
And he’s always getting me tangled up in it all. When New Asbestos Version 2 came out, guess who was in charge of testing it on a bunch of women and children? It was him, actually, but I was in charge of falsifying the test results that allowed to go on the market which is arguably just as bad.
Or, take for instance last week, when he made me add a bunch of spikes to the bottom of the hill he lives on. Now whenever a door-to-door salesman comes to the door and, as instructed, I push him down the hill, he lands on the spikes and screams “Ahh!” I hate hearing those salesmen scream “Ahh!”
I really should quit, but I’m too scared to suggest it. Whenever I go into Von Dutchmandorf’s office, he does that thing where he closes one eye and pinches his fingers so it looks to him like he’s crushing my head. And then once I start talking he gets up and actually starts crushing my head with a pair of big pliers.
So I guess my only option is to just up and leave, and escape into the night. But that would raise two concerns. One–is there even a guarantee I could find somebody better to buttle for? And two–how would I get the shock collar off my neck so I can get past the electric fence?
So I guess I’m stuck here for now, butlering for Von Dutchmandorf. At least his TV is really big.
