Little Red Riding Hood Outsourced

Little Red Riding Hood lived with her mother at the edge of the Dark Forest. One day Little Red Riding Hood’s mother got an email from her mother, who lived – who would have guessed it? – all the way on the other side of the Dark Forest. According to the email, Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother was seriously ill and in need of immediate goody therapy.

Little Red Riding Hood’s mother, being a good daughter, immediately set to work baking her mother’s favorite goodies. These included brownies with powdered sugar on top, chocolate chip cookies, and – the piece de resistance – a cheesecake with cherry topping.

“Oh, Mother, Mother!” cried Little Red Riding Hood excitedly, hopping from one foot to the other. “May I take those goodies to Grandma? Huh, huh? Please, please, please?”

“Of course not,” said Mother. “I’m going to FedEx them to Goodies Management Associates, who will deliver them to Grandma much more efficiently than you ever could. If I let you take them, you’d just wander off the path and get into more shit than I could ever get you out of.”

“Oh, fudge,” grumbled Little Red Riding Hood. But there was nothing she could do, and Mother sent the goodies off, just as she had said she would.

The next day, Little Red Riding Hood got a telephone call from Grandma.

“Hey, what’s going on over there?” she carped. “Where are my goodies?”

“I have no idea,” replied Little Red Riding Hood. “Mother sent them off yesterday. I’ll ask her.” And so she did.

“You’d better call GMA,” said Mother. So Little Red Riding Hood called GMA.

“Oh,” said GMA, “we send our goodies to Goodies Dispersal Services. Grandma will have to go to them to get her goodies.”

So Little Red Riding Hood called Grandma and directed her to GDS.

The next day, Grandma was on the horn again.

“They said I needed something called a ‘goody consenter,’” she screamed. “In case I have diabetes or something. Why didn’t you send them a goody consenter?”

So Little Red Riding Hood went back to Mother.

“That’s odd,” said Mother. “I did specify a goody consenter – myself. But … oh, I bet I only sent the five-digit zip code. Call GDS and give them the full nine.”

Little Red Riding Hood did as she was told.

The next day, Grandma called again.

“I only got chocolate chip cookies,” she groused. “Where are the other goodies?”

“You’d better ask GMA,” said Mother to Little Red Riding Hood. And so she did.

“Beats us,” said GMA. “We do send some of our goodies through Goodies R Us, and then they send them on to GDS.”

So Little Red Riding Hood called GRU.

“Well, of course, we only send brownies on Thursdays,” said GRU. “And cheesecakes only go out once a month, after the 16^th.”

The next day was Thursday, and Grandma called up with a complaint.

“I got my brownies,” she admitted grudgingly. “But where’s the powdered sugar I like?”

Little Red Riding Hood didn’t have an answer for that, so she called GRU again. They didn’t have an answer, either. So Red called GMA.

“We brush off all the powdered sugar before we send a single goody,” said GMA. “Of course.”

On the 17^th of the month, there was another phone call from Grandma.

“What the hell are you up to, wolf-bait?” she growled. “I got my cheesecake, all right, but it had strawberries instead of cherries. You know that I hate strawberries! What’s the matter with you?”

“Um, that must be GMA again,” said Red apologetically. “I’ll call them.” And she did.

“Oh, no,” replied GMA. “We never touch cheesecake toppings. Why would you think such a thing? We send goodies right through, just the way they are.”

“Right,” said Little Red Riding Hood. “Of course you do.” Then she called GRU.

“You wouldn’t, by any chance, change cheesecake toppings, would you?” she asked.

“Well, of course, we change cheesecake toppings,” said the GRU guy. “Strict ‘no cherries’policy.”

In an unrelated incident, the Big Bad Wolf was asphyxiated by a canister of poison gas dropped from a passing helicopter.