The Milk Lady was on her early morning rounds. She was driving a small electric cart around the streets, delivering bottles of milk and other drinks to people who had asked for it. The company who employed her called those people “subscribers”.
She could remember when this sort of thing was still perfectly normal. The hum of the electric engine, the gentle clatter of the bottles; she could still replay those sounds in her mind, like a song. Once, anyone could have heard it if they had woken up as the sun was rising.
And now here she was, doing it as an actual job, in the 21st Century. After so many things had changed.
She now had to go to bed in the afternoon. She would wake up at about 3am, giving her enough time to get ready and eat a very very early breakfast.
While on that morning’s rounds, she started thinking of what job she might want to do after this one.
One idea was to open a shop. But rather than a normal shop that sold something, it would be a mostly empty room, in an area off a slip road, next to takeaways and men’s barbers and places like that.
The thing that would make it mostly empty instead of just plain empty would be this: a speaker attached to the back wall. It would be a wireless affair, connected to a small bluetooth-enabled gadget hidden out of view.
The wireless speaker would get randomly-selected audio files transmitted to it from the bluetooth doohickey. The files would consist of clips of speech and odd bits of music, broken up with brief periods of silence.
While you could do that in an art gallery, the Milk Lady felt it would be much more interesting to have it in actual public place, local to where people lived.
She thought about how she could encourage people to visit the shop. Maybe she could write letters to strangers, explaining that she didn’t know them, but would they like to visit this shop that just has a speaker in it? Maybe she could put up stickers in odd places, saying that the shop existed, and that you might want to take a look.
Maybe people could be invited to just visit and sit on the floor, listening to this odd broken radio type thing. Maybe it could be a place to just meet up and pass the time…
But of course having a shop would mean that you needed some form of income from it to keep it going. At first the Milk Lady considered the idea of adding vending machines to monetize it. But that would mean the shop would effectively be about vending machines. It would distract from the whole idea of there just being a speaker, spouting out jagged pieces of speech and music.
Try as she might, there was no way to monetize the weird empty room speaker hang out place without somehow compromising the essential empty-but-for-a-single-speaker thing. And of course, for her own reasons, it couldn’t be just a thing set in a gallery. It had to be an actual shop.
This is how the world works, thought the Milk Lady. It ought to stop working like that.
