The Belps

So I've made a different sort of post, à lá Hyperbole and a Half and Pernambucano Gypsy combined. You'll see that, on a scale of 1 to 10 of computer graphics skills (1 being blind and in a semi-vegetative state and 10 being professional), I'm about a 2. But I needed a way to get my energy out somehow. Enjoy.

The BELPS

So Brazil is a sort of vortex. Foreigners get sucked into this vortex, drawn like helpless pale grains of sand into the beautiful beaches and even more beautiful people. 

But because it’s a vortex, you’re stuck once you get pulled in, and by then, it’s too late to escape Brazil’s biggest secret: The Belps.

The belps are a class of robots developed by the Brazilian government. They were made to fill clerical jobs in an attempt to give the image that capitalism abounds rather than an undying feudal system. Some political higher-ups figured it’d be cheaper to churn them out regularly than to pay for education, safety, job training, healthcare, and housing. (They also thought it’d be more effective than using the stray dogs running around the streets, because at least the belps would be designed to pee in designated places, but one of the IT guys made an error and that has turned out not to be the case.)

Belps were made in all different colors, partly because the government wanted to reinforce their campaign that “Brazil has no racism.”

Their eyes were inspired by goats and cows, whose gazes the developers thought to be serene.

The belps are trained for basic functions like sitting in a chair and pressing color-coded buttons. Newer models have been trained to literally push paper. They’re also very good with rubber stamps.

The government wanted to save on costs, so belps were not properly trained for human speech (other than the word “no”), nor were they programmed to understand basic math, relativity, or critical thinking.

Because the belps’ system is basic, outdated, and underfunded, it still has a few kinks.

Another glitch was the lack of banking abilities, which the developers simply forgot to install. Beta testers allowed 1.0 belps to watch American westerns for ideas on how to run banks. What they saw seemed to be work well enough for John Wayne, so they adopted it, and newer belp models have yet to be changed. 

Normal Brazilian children are brainwashed while growing up. Their teachers and families insist that their country is filled with smiling, happy people, and that their adult lives will be nothing more than carnival, soccer, and barbecues with their smiling, happy families. Then, normal Brazilians become adults and are disappointed to learn that this is not the case. However, normal Brazilians are exposed to belps at a very early age, so they consider them a slight annoyance but a relatively unsurprising concept, the way Americans feel about traffic in Los Angeles or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Because the belps' programming is limited, problems that arise from a foreigner’s presence (which perhaps would require the pushing of two color-coded buttons rather than one) can easily make the belps' systems short-circuit or overheat, causing them to just utter the word “no. no. no. no” repeatedly when their motherboards freeze. Luckily, they are calmed by shiny objects, bright colors, fireworks, cheap computer graphics in D-list movies, and scantily clad women, especially if said women are dancing in sparkling bikinis with clowns on a big-screen TV.

Another belp favorite:

(Swear to God I made that up and then decided to search on YouTube for it. The search invariably produced results. N.B., the breasts should tell you that this show is meant for adults.)

Another technique to dealing with belps is saying something positive about the soccer team from the city in which the belp has been placed. Luckily, all belps are programmed with the following algorithm:

1. Me Belp.
2. Belp from Base.
3. Soccer team from Base = S_Base
4. S_Base = good = love and happiness for Belp

So by saying something as simple as “Your soccer team. Good,” you can often trigger the use of this algorithm, giving you temporary abilities to convince the belp in question to agree with you.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to the problems caused by belps. They’ve learned how to reproduce and have infiltrated almost all parts of the Brazilian job market. They’ve also evolved into excellent buck-passers. Not even the managerial class is safe.

The country’s saving grace is that alcohol is often cheaper than water. It’s a good thing, because this is really the closest to a solution that you're gonna get:

Do this, and hope that your problems will disappear or solve themselves or slip through the cracks and go unnoticed by the belps that tend to cause them in the first place.