I’m a reactor. I react to things. If something happens that can be reacted to and I’m around to react to it… well, I will. It’s what I do.

My reactions are quite varied. Sometimes, it’s fine to raise an eyebrow and the case is settled. But there are also times when even taking your pants down and performing a good old mooning isn’t enough. Each situation requires engagement on its own merits. You can’t just copy and paste reactions from one situation to the next and call it a day.

One thing people ask me time and again is how I fell into this line of work. Well, it started the day when I was fired. When I was ‘let go’, I finally understood that I didn’t need to bottle up my feelings and that I could express myself fully. So, I did it all. I was scattering papers, spitting on the baldness, cutting the tie and then crying in the corner. Yup, I was on fire!

Who knew that my ex-colleagues were filming me from behind a one-way mirror? And would later upload this on YouTube? I became an internet sensation overnight! Everyone and their neighbour’s dog was watching—even reactors were reacting to my reaction! That’s when I knew what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. I would simply react to everything and make sure there was always a camera present.

Now, you may think that I had the best job in the world and that it wasn’t demanding at all. Just pull faces, clatter your teeth with your tongue and fart out of the blue. No, you’d be so very wrong on this. The reaction should surpass the thing you’re reacting to. Otherwise, what’s the sense in wasting your hard collected intestinal gases? Gases aren’t cheap, you know! You have to be chowing down literal buckets of nuclear strength baked beans to get that shit happening!

So, yeah, I became a pro. A thing would happen and I’d react to it. Sometimes it was a subtle reaction, sometimes not. Sometimes it was meta or fizzy orange or even a sideways glance with a hint of dill. Hell, one of my reactions was compared with that of the Mona Lisa’s—inscrutable. No reaction was out of reach for a reactor of my capabilities.

I was so on top of the world that even the highest mountain was full of envy. I wrote a book entitled ‘React Like God’ and launched an online class, ‘How to React to Unreactable Stuff’. Hot damn, things were going supercalifragilisticexpialidociously well… until I met her. And that was the beginning of the end.

She was an ignorer.