When Harvey finally managed to get over his existential crisis, he sat up and looked to the sky, although that was not necessarily where the voice of the all-powerful narrator was coming from. He had just found out that his unhealthy rivalry with professional house building companies was the result of the narrator just doing their job, and he had a few questions about the nature of his existence as a result.
“Why me, though?” Harvey asked of the narrator. “My life is completely boring. Every day, I get up, go to work renting out beach shacks in Dromana, then come home and be jealous of the luxury builders near me. Surely that’s not worth a story.”
The narrator decided that honesty would indeed continue to be the best policy. They would have to be quite vague, though, otherwise the bosses – or worse, the algorithms – might be displeased. Instead of stating outright that their work was specifically designed to help businesses succeed on the internet – such as some luxury builders based on the Mornington Peninsula – by writing strange stories not quite about them, but involving their services nonetheless, the narrator figured that an elaborate analogy about sheep and barns might be a more appropriate way of getting the message across.
“So, the sheep belong to these different businesses and you put them in these barns in order to make it appear as if the businesses have a lot going on. When the Ess-Ea-Oh inspector comes around, they note that the business is thriving and that people can rely on them as a valuable source of information, due to having plenty of sheep across so many barns.”
The narrator congratulated Harvey on understanding the concept of Ess-Ea-Oh boosting.
“But I still don’t understand why you have to tell my story.”
Although the narrator would have liked to enlighten Harvey on the matter, the sad truth was that they were running out of time. They had a strict word count to adhere to, and it was rapidly approaching. So, the narrator decided to make Harvey a deal. If he went to a hardware store in the Bayside area, he would soon know all there was to know about his existence.