A Parable for the Gruntled

As a punishment for various sins which needn't be gone into here, Prometheus was chained to a rock in the Caucasus. He was assigned a vulture to peck at his liver on a nine-to-five basis, and those were the days before coffee breaks.

"Do you like your work?" said Prometheus one day, apropos of nothing except a slight tickling of the bile duct.

The vulture looked up and thought a minute. "Well," he said, "it's a living."

"I mean, don't you wonder where it's getting you? Don't you feel, sometimes, that life is passing you by, just sitting here day-after day and pecking away and getting nowhere?" Prometheus paused to take a breath. "Don't you wonder, sometimes, if you couldn't make some fuller use of your capabilities?"

"I believe," said the vulture primly, "that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well." He gave Prometheus a dirty look and went back to work. But he stayed an hour overtime that day, worked clean through the liver, and got a good start on the pyloric sphincter. Prometheus went right on thinking about moral uplift, but he was careful to do so in silence.