Are You Useful or Useless?

If you never read the book or saw the BBC series of “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” not the movie but the BBC series, everything you need to know about it is wrapped up in the fact that it represents a four-book trilogy.

A four-book trilogy.

One of the later stories is that the planet, Golgafrincham, was about to die so it built 3 rockets to transport its citizens to another planet. The Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B lands on Earth and is carrying the citizens of the planet who are all the middlemen of the planet — the telephone sanitizers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

The people from that ship are puzzled to find that the others from their planet, the people to be transported on Ark Fleet ships A and C, the people who ruled, thought, or actually did useful work, had not arrived yet. They repeatedly said, “They’ll be here soon” and wondered what the others would do without them.

The captain eventually remembers that he was told a good reason for this, but had forgotten it, although the reason was later revealed to be because the Ark Ship B Golgafrinchans were a ‘bunch of useless idiots’.