CHAPTER THREE: ARRIVAL ON A BIRTHDAY CAKE
The Corporation's complaints division was stuffed full, as usual. The mail system had totally broken down and was nowhere to be found, but some of the letters had managed to squeeze themselves inside anyway, and took up nearly all the space inside the new headquarters of the division. A few complaints executives were scattered around the place lying in piles of paperwork and letters of complaint. A member of the staff was dozing on a strangely off-balance chair in front of a customer who was trying to complain to an apparently oblivious, and rather loud, man. Even the chair was more attentive. Behind that customer, who was nearly falling asleep himself, was a line that was, well, long. Imagine the longest thing you can imagine. And extend it a whole lot more. That line was longer than that.
In fact, to describe the building simply, it was a structure that was stuffed full with pieces of paper, a few clients, and an almost infinite number of people who had tried to make a complaint, given up and settled down to wait for eternity.
The new headquarters was situated a few miles from the last one, which was the same distance from the previous one, which was right next to the one before that, and so on, until the wrecks of old and broken down headquarters had covered the landscape of a whole, and pretty large, planet. The first one, the one which had sunk and now read "go stick your head in a pig", was a sort of tourist attraction among the more fanatical complainers of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. It represented, they thought, the ultimate complaint to the company, and that more people should pay attention to it.
One of the other planets that were part of the complaints division was full of advertisements that were meant to promote products that people complained most about. They even had a list of the top ten thousand products with the most complaints, and of course, way too many signs with their motto, "share and enjoy", to even bother counting.
The last planet was supposed to be the recipient of all the mail (the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's complaints division will happily receive any complaints via letters, paper aeroplanes, smelly socks, or whatever it is that you communicate with), but sadly, all it now contained was a couple of musty old socks, and surprising, a few bits of mouldy blue cheese and a gigantic birthday cake. The mail system had broken down ever since it had started. It simply didn't work. A large portion of the mail had been sucked into a mysterious black hole that mysteriously disappeared straight after its snack. The remaining still resided in the headquarters.
The Heart of Gold was balanced precariously on the birthday cake. It had made a weird, it had to be admitted, landing. Then the cake suddenly decided that enough was enough and collapsed. Arthur, Ford, Trillion and Zaphod crawled out.
"Want to come, Marvin kid?" Zaphod asked, glancing back.
"You wouldn't want my company. Nobody ever does. Life is horribly depressing…"
"I mean," Zaphod continued, "You wouldn't mind carrying that drinks synthesiser with us, right?"
"My brain the size o – "
"Yeah, we get you, kid," he interrupted, "Now let's go!"
The strange party set out across the landscape and got lost a few minutes later.