100 YEARS OLD AND STILL REFLECTING ILL TIDINGS...
THE Queen And The Mirror, Part Two. The plot so far: Once upon a time there was a proud and beautiful queen who had a magic mirror which told her that everyone would vote for her if she held an election to see whom her subjects loved the most. (See Thursday’s column for details.) Now read on:
As soon as the results started coming in, the Queen realised that the magic mirror had been completely wrong and its advice had been terrible. She had already smashed the mirror to smithereens in her fury but now stuck the pieces together again to have a good rant at it.
“Why did you tell me everyone would vote for me?” she asked it. “Why didn’t you tell me that a lot of children would vote for Jez the Tortoise and he’d act as though he won the race even if he did still come a poor second?”
“Hmph,” hmphed the mirror haughtily. “Why didn’t you read the small print?” “What small print?” she asked. “The small print at the end of my advice,” the mirror replied. “The small print that said your share of the vote can go down as well as up.”
“But what went wrong?” the Queen asked. “Was it something I said?”
“No,” said the mirror, “it wasn’t something you said: it was everything you said, and everything you did, and everything you didn’t do.”
“What didn’t I do?” the Queen asked. “Surely I did everything I could.”
“Did you upgrade your software?” the magic mirror asked.
“What software?” asked the Queen angrily.
“The Mirrors software,” the mirror said. “You can hardly expect me to give an accurate reflection of the future when I’m still struggling with a beta version of Mirrors Vista which was itself an experimental upgrade from Mirrors XP.”
“Oh,” said the Queen, vaguely recalling some messages that had appeared on her mirror years ago telling her that accurate electoral forecasts are no longer supported by the Mirrors software she was using. “Do you mean that several of my friends lost their seats for much the same reason that lots of BA travellers lost their seats on planes a couple of weeks ago?”
“Exactly,” said the mirror. “And if you’d been keeping up with the news, instead of flitting off round the country to chat up voters in places where they weren’t going to vote for you, you’d know that the BA problem has been diagnosed as ‘human error’. So don’t blame us mirrors when things go wrong. People have been trying to do that since Mirrors 3.0, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” said the Queen. “I shouldn’t have smashed you to smithereens if it was my fault for not reading the small print or upgrading my software. But what do you suggest I do now?”
“Try talking to the leprechauns,” the mirror said. “They still love you.” So that was what the Queen did.
The moral of this sad tale is twofold: 1: Don’t count your voting slips until the electorate has spoken; 2: Never underestimate a tortoise.