Richard Davies was at the mall with his eighteen year old son. This was not a typical experience. Jeff had just graduated and wasn't sure what to do with his life.
On the one hand, Richard did not want to control his son. He was not one of those dads that insisted his son follow in his footsteps. Richard had become the CEO of a major corporation but he had done it by unconventional means starting from the bottom. He remembered that when he was Jeff's age, Richard had tried his hand at several different jobs before he figured out the career path he wanted. Richard wanted to give Jeff the same chance to try out different things before committing.
On the other hand, Jeff wasn't really trying anything out. Jeff was a slacker who drifted through life. He was content to just laze around doing nothing at all. Jeff wasn't into music. He wasn't into computers. He didn't even go skating with the skaters. He just laid around.
Richard brought his son to the mall to get ideas. Richard hoped he'd find something that his son was interested in. But store after store and Jeff's attitude was "meh".
There was a new shop at the mall called The Inani Shop. The population of Earth had become so overcrowded that jobs were hard to find but technology had also advanced to the point that people could be transformed into things called inanis. They could also be transformed into animals but that was a different shop. Inanis were becoming quite popular so Richard decided, just to satisfy his curiosity, to check the shop out.
Richard looked at a shelf of people turned into inani candle holders with macabre interest. There was no practical use for inanis. Inanis could often be just as good of an object as non-inani objects but could never be better than non-inani objects. Inanis were just more expensive because they had to be paid an hourly wage. They were exempt from minimum wage requirements though and so typically inanis were paid less than a dollar an hour but it was pointless to keep an inani twenty-four hours a day and pay for time when they were not being used. So typically, inanis would be sent home at the end of the day.
Another new business had also started because of inanis. Inanis needed homes to go to when they were not being used. It would be kind of like instead of putting your vacuum cleaner in the closet for storage, your vacuum cleaner left your house and put itself in storage. This did offer the advantage of reduced clutter and a reduced need for storage. Why would anyone own a vacuum that spends most of its time in storage when an inani vacuum could schedule to vacuum for several different homes. Inani homes were designed to accommodate inanis coming and going.
And the inanis didn't get bored this way because they weren't spending whole days in storage waiting to be used. They were being used every day. They could still get time off to go do something fun but that cost money and inani's did not earn a lot of money. People became inanis for different reasons: some because the work was easy although very degrading, some because they couldn't find better jobs, and then there were those who enjoyed being used. Some people wanted to be objects and wanted to be used everyday. This meant that inani homes were typically smaller than regular homes. Some inanis lived in nice homes with kitchens and living rooms but most inani homes were just closets. It was quite a sight to see an inani home with fifty closets and watch those fifty closet doors all open on cue to let fifty inani vacuums leave to go vacuum fifty different homes.
Richard thought that the aesthetics must be what is making inanis so popular. First, the lack of clutter and storage meant that homes that employed inanis looked cleaner and nicer. Second, the inanis themselves were often decorated artistically like these inani candle holders that looked like artistic nudes in gold (because they were nude people turned into gold candle holders). Richard had used inanis before but only occasionally. He decided today that he was going to get more into the trend and use inanis regularly. He left the inani candle holders to go look at inani vacuums.