Jar Jar Clippy

I had a nightmare last night. I was locked in a room, writing a story. I was writing it on a PC, using Microsoft Word. There were no Macs in the room, and there were no other editors on the computer — not even Notepad. I had to use a PC, and I had to use Microsoft Word, and I had a deadline.

All that was nightmare enough, of course. But it was about to get much worse.

I was halfway down the first page when the window sort of stuttered and blinked and a little icon in the lower right hand corner swelled up until it was the size of the whole document. It had the body of a paperclip and the head of Jar Jar Binks. It was Jar Jar Clippy.

“Hellosa!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing a lettersa!”

“What the fuck,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy made a face and disappeared.

I kept typing. The wall in front of me turned into a giant clock, ticking implacably toward my deadline.

Jar Jar Clippy appeared again. “Greetsa! It looks like yousa making a postersa!”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy disappeared.

I was on page three before he appeared again. This time he charged out of the side of the screen and slammed into Word, pushing it halfway off the desktop. “Salutationsa! Why yousa keep making meesa go byebye?”

“I can’t believe this shit,” I said, and clicked cancel. Jar Jar Clippy didn’t disappear. I clicked it again. He didn’t disappear more.

“Now!” said Jar Jar Clippy. “Meesa think yousa writing an Italian sonnetsa! Meesa helpsa!”

“I don’t need help,” I said. “Please. Don’t help me.”

Jar Jar Clippy put a stunted paperclip arm to his lips and studied my first paragraph. “Hmm,” he said. “This bad! Yousa badsa writersa!”

“Alright, that’s it.” I brought up process manager and looked for the Jar Jar Clippy task. It wasn’t there. I did find something called “horrible-annoying.exe”, but when I killed that Windows shut down.

“Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck.” I rebooted the PC. When it came back up Jar Jar Clippy was sitting on the Start bar, tapping his paperclip foot in an unbearably cutesy way.

“Felicitationsa!” he said. “Meesa fixsa your badsa badsa term papersa!”

“It’s not a term paper,” I said. “And it’s not bad.” I started up Word. My story was gone, replaced by a bunch of horrible stunted prose that looked like it had been stitched together by a lobotomized cliche machine on crack.

“You bastard,” I said. “You Lucasized it. You Lucasized it!!!”

“No! Meesa bettersized it,” said Jar Jar Clippy. He put on a pair of unbearably cutesy paperclip reading glasses, and read:

The force is strong in all of us. That is why we must always respect the environment. The environment is full of good things, like air and water. Air and water are important. Trees are also important. The force runs through all of these things. Air and water and trees. Dirt too. Dirt is important. Rocks are important as well …

It went on in this vein for about ten pages. I flipped through all of them, looking for some trace of the original text. There was none. I took several deep breaths.

“Jar Jar Clippy,” I said, in the most reasonable voice I could muster.

“Yes sa!”

“Where’s the story I was working on?”

“Heresa!” he said. He jumped up and flew around the window, followed by a cape of twinkling stars.

“No,” I said. “The original article. The one that wasn’t about the environment at all.”

Jar Jar Clippy grew a pair of paperclip shoulders, and shrugged. “Gonesa.”

“Gone?”

“Sa.”

“Right.” I rubbed my face. “I’m going to kill you now.”

Jar Jar Clippy affected an exaggerated pout. “Yousa meansa.”

I picked up the monitor and slammed it against the desk until it shattered. Then I looked around for a sledgehammer. Luckily, there was one was leaning against the wall. I used it to smash the computer to pieces. I looked around for a woodchipper. Luckily, there was one in the closet. I fed the keyboards and mouse into it.

Then I sat down, and closed my eyes, and smiled. I took out a piece of paper and a pen, and started to rewrite my article, longhand.

After a minute, the little jar of paperclips on the edge of my desk began to shake. I stopped, and looked at it, a terrible premonition tickling the back of my mind.

A paper clip jumped out of the jar, and landed on my arm. It shook itself, and a little Jar Jar head popped out, gave me an unbearably cutesy wink, and bent over to study what I’d written. Then it looked up at me, and smiled. “Hellosa!” it said. “Meesa think yousa writing a grocery listsa!”

I screamed.