It is I, Dr. Cyclone, beaming off my private Soviet satellite from deep within the tundra of Serbia. This, sadly, might be my last message if things don’t pick up soon. For you see, even the most sinister of all super villains is still affected by the economic meltdown.
You may wonder, as someone who is no stranger to theft or heist, the global financial could negatively affect Dr. Cyclone, the most reviled villain of the UN? The materials for my many doomsday devices or the highly reflective cloth for my henchman are produced on a very grand scale. When people are laid off from their jobs, it means they are spending less, thus fewer goods are made and fewer parts are produced. Bottom line being I can’t get any damn transistors anymore, and damn it if the cost of cleaning agents for the pool that houses hyper-intelligent death-dolphins went up three thousand percent. Three thousand percent! That’s insanity. It makes me want to kill even more!
Air travel has also taken a huge hit in the past decade and it’s all culminating now. I can’t send my right hand man Reggie “Fist Twist” Yorkova to drug any super spies anymore throughout Europe. I miss the 90s when I could snap my fingers at dinner and have a CIA agent laying under a laser beam the next morning. Now it costs an arm and a leg just to check a bag, and Jesus if Fist Twist can get more than three ounces of ether through security anymore. I mean, yeah, he can buy it in Croatia, but I might as well flush money down the toilet. We’ve got nothing to do.
I’m evil, but I’m not a dick. Let me be clear: I’ve had to let go half my workforce off and I feel terrible about it. They were alright people, and now I look like a jackass making my own coffee in the morning. I truly resemble a goddamn jackass sitting in the break room with a needs-to-be-dry-cleaned black velvet cape waiting for some damn Foldgers to brew. A goddamn jackass. These cut backs are killing me. I have an image to maintain.
On top of all this, it is costing me a fortune to maintain this highly reflective dome lair. I used to have a few guys in here every morning to polish and dust, but now I’ve got some dumpy woman coming in a few days a week, maybe, incompetently leaving marks everywhere. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’ve had to monitor my electricity usage, and you know the first thing to suffer are the rows of insanely fast spinning razors that slowly inch closer to my enemies as I carefully reveal my motivations. You know how threatening it is to see Dr. Cyclone in mittens because Dr. Cyclone can’t afford his goddamn subterranean Siberian heating bill? Not very. There is no fucking insulation in this underground dome. It’s like we built right under a pocket of fucking nothing!
Though, not everything is bad. Usually, I’m stuck with some bottom-feeders for henchmen, but with all of these high level managers getting laid off, I have a former CEO of Wachovia Bank in charge of security holdings and acid application. And I do appreciate actually getting my hands dirty again. I had forgotten why I got into this super villain business to begin with. I’m writing my own before-death rants again and it feels great, and you can tell that the old school guys, like secret ops, they really appreciate that hand made touch.
Lastly — ah, damn it, this satellite is costing me like 30 bucks a minute. Never mind. ✦