We don’t kill any monkeys, not even the ones that don’t pass QC.
Instead, we discount them and ship them direct to you as factory seconds.

Some of those monkeys are perfectly good monkeys. Who cares if a monkey has
a birthmark, or maybe an extra kink in its tail? Not me. That’s why one day,

I just stopped killing defective monkeys. Just stopped. My boss thought I was crazy,
almost fired me, said we’d be overrun with monkey returns, and what would we do

then? But I know about monkeys. Once you have a monkey, you’re not going to
return it, even if it bites (and they often do). So I think it was a pretty good decision,

and also I’ve stopped having those nightmares. I can’t even tell you about them
except to say that every night, a monkey reached its hand up to mine,

from the floor, you understand—and I killed that monkey anyway.

For NaBloPoMo and PAD Challenge, Day 28 (prompt: Write about how it feels to stand up for what’s right when faced with adversity in the workplace). Speaking of adversity, WordPress hates this poem and won’t present it properly. It’s supposed to have five two-line stanzas followed by a single line on its own. I can’t make this happen, and my last attempt resulted in the whole thing disappearing. If you want to see it as I intended, let me know and I’ll send it to you. OK, moving on …