On Thursday evening April 23rd, via Zoom, new superintendent of schools for Sherwood Elementary , James Morgan, advised parents that the oil delivery problem had been solved. “We just made the problem go away” Morgan said.

The 124 parents on the zoom meeting had questions. ”Their faces were too small and I didn’t know how to mute people so things went south pretty fast“ an exasperated Morgan said. ”Most of the parents told me that there was no way they were sending their kids here with a building full of oil. They told us that we had done a great thing by eliminating peanut oil from the school for the 2019-2020 year but even if the crude oil had been drained from the building they probably wouldn’t send their kids back here”. Morgan went on to say “We need the tax revenue so we need the school to stay open.”

Sherwood Elementary, located in the state of Missouri, knew they had a problem when former superintendent Mark Hilton agreed to take delivery of 10 million barrels of oil. ”I thought I was making a great investment” said Hilton. ”I was pretty wrong about that”.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity James Morgan said he immediately formed a task force of parents and teachers to “work the problem”. “I am a can do type of person” Morgan explained. “I took some of the most annoying parents and a couple of teachers and put them on a task force to get us out of this mess and we found out pretty early that the way this whole delivery thing works is that the oil gets sent to a warehouse until we decide what we want to do with it” Morgan, who is new to the oil business said.

“I got a call on Monday morning from an area code in Midland Texas. “I never heard of Midland but apparently that is where the warehouse is” Morgan said in an aggravated tone. “They told us that 10 million barrels of oil is a lot of oil and they didn’t have any room for it They asked me if I was stupid”. This question bothered Morgan. “No one with a southern accent is gonna call me stupid” Morgan said angrily.

“This is the moment I reached out to our science teacher, Mr. Monterey, who advised me that a few years back an oil rig in the ocean blew up and millions of barrels of oil began leaking from the bottom of the ocean.” Mr Monterey explained to the new superintendent that people were “pretty upset” about the huge oil leak from the bottom of the sea but that now the ocean “seemed fine.” Mr. Monterey, Morgan explained “holds a certificate of achievement in Science so I knew I could count in him.”

“Right away I got on the phone with the warehouse in Midland and asked them if they could take the oil to the gulf of mexico.” Morgan added that “we were basically putting it back where it came from”. That is when the warehouse explained to Morgan that they couldn’t do that. “They gave me a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo and I wasn’t having it so I told them to deliver the oil to us.”

“There were so many trucks we couldn’t believe it” Mr Monterey exclaimed. “We lied and said we had a storage facility near the Potomac river”. Monterey explained that the Potomac feeds directly into the Atlantic ocean where “the oil would be absorbed without anyone noticing.”

Monterey went on to say “We started dumping the oil right away. We didn’t want to hurt the environment so we left the oil in the barrels.” The first million barrels went off pretty smoothly but apparently there rocks and water falls on the river and the barrels started leaking. Also, people down river started notifying the authorities. “We decided to dump the next nine million barrels into the river without the barrels” Morgan advised.

“The whole river turned black” a man living down river said. “So I called my congressman and told him the Potomac was pure oil. That’s when he told me he looked out his window and the river looked fine to him.”

“So far we haven’t heard much” Morgan said. “Nobody really knows who dumped the oil yet. I think we handled this pretty well” Morgan said with a sigh of relief.

Written by Thorstein Veblen