A massive gorilla kidnaps your girlfriend...

And that, folks, leads us to a metaphor for the workplace

The better you got at the game/job, the harder you had to work to stay alive/employed

FOLKS, in my neck of the woods some go-getter is setting up a computer museum. Surely these days any hardware, or software, more than six months old must qualify as antique?

Anyway, I checked out some of the stuff that will be displayed and discovered that I might have a genuine computing relic stuffed away in the dark recesses of our linen press.

Traditionally, linen presses or hallway cupboards used to store, well, linen, but ours is chock-full of video tapes I can no longer watch, childhood games (Trouble anyone?) with vital pieces missing, baby clothes from last century stored in vac seal bags that will probably never be worn again and, somewhere near the back, hopefully in perfect working order, is my hand-held Nintendo Donkey Kong game.

These things were huge in the early 1980s. If you are too young to remember, or from another planet, Donkey Kong’s back-story went like this: a large gorilla escapes from a zoo, kidnaps your girlfriend, then clambers to the top of a building still under construction, and tosses an endless supply of barrels at you, the hero plumber, while you scramble up sloping ramps filled with deadly pitfalls, rickety ladders and lethal traps to try to save your lady friend.

Except this seemingly innocent children’s toy was not just a game.

I was actually teaching kids what life in the modern workplace would be like once school had finished brainwashing us.

Basically, slaving away at some thankless task day in, day out, while a roaring psychopath at the top of the heap causes grief to everyone below him.

I say “him’’ because, just like real workplaces, of the tiny group of high-scorers eventually making it to the top level, only a microscopic percentage were women.

Plus, the better you got at the game/job, the harder you had to work to stay alive/employed, as the system is geared to keep piling on the barrels/work until you are overwhelmed and die/quit in spectacular fashion.

At which point, some folk must think, “Blow this for a game of soldiers!’’ then drop out and open a computer museum.