Dear Ovaries, You’re Fired.

You’re fired. You will be allowed to take up a superannuated position within the present building, but must cease all duties.

As required by industrial practices regulation, please consider this explanatory letter a formal notification of failure to fulfill your job description or heed official warnings.

When I arrived, in the summer of 1962-3, the Ovaries department already took up two locations on opposite sides of the building, each with approximately one million eggs.

According to the industry standard, storing two million eggs, even in two separate cupboards, is a waste of company resources. Worse, this requisitioning was then entirely ignored for about 14 years.

You were required to store and dispatch eggs when needed, and regulate the hormonal system in the entire region. These duties were performed intermittently, and with all the finesse of a rhinoceros in high heels asked to ascend a flag pole.

Your claim that you have simply been doing what is “natural” and that your system was “intelligently designed” is repudiated. Ovaries, if you were planned (which seems implausible) you were not designed by a cluey deity, but instead were drawn up on a wet paper napkin by a pitiless ratbag drunk on cheap Moselle, with one foot in their hat.

Further, though eggs were continually dispatched from the mid-‘70s, no eggs were required by company management until the late 1990s. Before then the release of eggs caused anxiety, expense, chemist rummaging, doctor visits, consternation, and surgery.

Within two weeks of every occasion, eggs were dispatched by your department, the management had to deal with painful consequences. The haphazard and dangerous methods employed by your department led to endometriosis-related flow charts plotted with data supplied by a gibbering woman on outdated hormonal drugs causing murderous rage and an unfettered propensity for plating-up ice cream and Mersyndol without regard to the judges.

When given unfettered responsibility both ovaries behaved like Visigoths in a reality show. You have ruined perfectly good broderie-Anglaise underpants with lurid stains, cruelly forcing matching bras to wander the earth alone.

Management concedes that you were instrumental in the 1998 Daughter Project, which did earn the company awards, such as the “certificate of inclusion” in “trying hard at maths” for year 5.

Outweighing this is the ineluctable suggestion of egg-pilfering on a baroque scale. If, as official inventory states, we had two million eggs in 1963, and the consultants from Ultrasound say that at last count there were six eggs, then embezzlement is strongly suggested. Your memo advising that surplus eggs have “simply been absorbed” is being examined by in-house lawyers.

The Goddess Worship Workshops you facilitated, featuring the playing of woodwind recorders and the crocheting of menstrual-blood collection-cups made from natural grasses, according to newspaper reports, resulted in the resignations of every employee, a share price to drop to 17th Century levels, and a rush on Chocolate Royals and hospital brandy at the closest IGA, resulting in greenstick fractures among the interns.

OH&S officers informed you three months ago that you should complete the menopausal project and cease employment immediately.

As has been explained to you in writing, you cannot unilaterally decide, as you are running out of eggs, to release two at once as some sort of “release one, get one free” policy – this has resulted in much heavier than expected monthly losses. This body may not be a temple; neither should it be a $2-shop having an out-they-go sale.

It is no good complaining about your working conditions. You were housed in an area rarely left open to the elements and, until relatively recently, the pelvic flooring in your area was state-of-the-art.

The management wishes to point out that other companies treat comparable staff in a disgraceful fashion. Testicles, for example, are visibly affected by gravity and suspended in a swinging, sprouting scrotal sac which resembles a furious Rupert Murdoch without his spectacles.

As for your other alleged services, if I want to feel that my bosoms might explode I don’t need to be pre-menstrual. I can rub them with chili paste and watch a movie with Idris Elba in it. And I am quite capable of bursting into hot tears of despair without your “assistance”: I can listen to Parliamentary Question Time.

Ovaries, we require your resignation effective immediately. Nobody wants to escort you from the building as this will be messy, and require yet another general anesthetic brought on by your towering inefficiency.

A transition package will be offered to you, ovaries. It’s a show bag containing the telephone number of Lifeline, a packet of perished rubber bands, and a biro.

We thank you for your one month of good service in 1998, and we wish you all the very best for your retirement. (We passed around a collection tin at the office for a goodbye cake and a mark of farewell. No money was forthcoming, and the Fallopian simply used a white-board marker to write “get rooted” on the card).

Sincerely,