Reopening to the New Normal

A special message from the Fake Science Labs

Over the past few months, we at the Fake Science Labs have taken extraordinary measures, using some of our finest rulers, with one goal in mind: returning to a normal time, when life is as it was, and our lab rats were dying at incredibly high rates.

That said, even while reopening, we must make some concessions to the “New Normal” (not to be confused with the “Nude Normal,” which resulted in lawsuits and a total ban on our work in the United Arab Emirates). By taking a few precautions, we can seem like we care about what happens to you, even though you’re honestly just a single number on a spreadsheet to us, and we don’t even understand how spreadsheets work.

First, we’re asking that when you visit one of the Fake Science Labs, you stay in your car the entire time and breathe into a plastic bag. Otherwise, everything should be as normal, except you cannot open the car door, enter the building, or breathe outside of the plastic bag. Welcome to “the new normal!”

If you do break through our phalanx of lawsuit-preventing lawyers and end up inside, we request you follow the standard rules of social distancing, in which you stay at least six feet away from anyone else. Of course, you’ll have to measure this distance, which is why we have Roberta — an extremely skinny 6-foot-tall woman you’ll carry perpendicular to your own body. If she ever shouts, “Ow, my malformed skinny head is hitting a stranger,” you’re too close and will have to leave the premises immediately.

Of course, all this would be for nothing if we didn’t encourage sanitation within the laboratory itself. You’ll be required to wash your hands every few seconds until you get tired and finally agree to scrub off your skin. We’ll have a skin-scrubbing station provided for you, for a small fee. Please discard your germy former palms in the nearby skin disposal station, which has been disinfected by skinless professionals.

From that point on, you’ll be free to work or take a tour as needed. We do ask that you wear a small spacesuit underneath your hazmat suit. Also, you’ll need to work on something called “dot breathing.” It’s like circular breathing, except you don’t breathe at all.

We hope that, together, all these measures will create a “new normal” that can allow you to be as miserable as you always were, but in different and marginally more hygienic ways. Though we haven’t had time or inclination to study our recommendations, it just seems unpleasant enough that it must be good for you.

Thanks for joining us on this long, long journey. It’s going to be good to get back to normal after 8 to 12 hours of preparation.