The Meaning and History behind the WUM

The truth behind the WUM (acronym of Wind-Up Merchant).

The year was 1542 and King Henry VIII of England had just eaten the Merchant of Venice(famous for being the last of the merchants). They were all devoured because Henry blamed them for the rising price of feathers(he obviously hadn't heard of inflation!).

Around 300 years later during the Victorian era(shortly after the industrial revolution), Great Britain was in chaos. The mighty British empire had conquered almost two thirds of Wales meaning a huge amount of new and exciting material(and slaves) were ready to be traded. But unfortunately there were no merchants left to buy and sell for the uneducated nation. So Queen Vic put up a 0.000001 Shilling reward for the first person to find a solution. The response was huge, and a brilliant scientist named Albert Heenan came up with a solution; using simple mechanics he fashioned a wind-up toy capable of calculating prices(taking into account fluctuating interest rates), adding VAT and speak in over 11,000 different languages. He called his brain child a Wind-Up Merchant(or WUM). The race was won and the Queen ordered for production to begin straight away. But only hours prior to the start of mass production a factory worker named Moreen Sherwood fell into the huge pool of molten metal which the merchants were to be crafted from. No one noticed and so production began, but the newly Knighted Sir Albert Heenan quickly noticed something was wrong!

He asked one of the merchants how much it would cost to buy 4 French housemaids?

The merchant replied; Why would you want to buy dirty French maids, you can’t clean houses with that rubbish, sorry you have to buy English ones!

Sir Albert; What are you talking about! An English maid costs five times more, doesn’t work as hard and talks to other house owners behind your back!

The merchant; No they are English…1Sir Albert; So what, that makes no difference!

The merchant; Yes it does, they are better because they’re English!..

Sir Albert; Oh no what have I done, I’ve created an illogical monster!!!

Albert quickly stopped production, but the damage was already done and over 1000 Wind-Up Merchants had escaped. Sir Albert couldn’t handle his mistake and threw himself down a well never to be seen again…

The Queen tried her best to cover up this incident and ordered all WUM’s to be destroyed unfortunately most escaped and laid dormant for over a century in the sewers of Manchester, Liverpool, east London and “the White part of North London”. But almost by magic all the WUMs left the sewers at the same time and hid in spare rooms of council flats owned by unsuspecting single mothers of 14 (due to the size of these families, the mothers didn’t actually notice that there was one more mouth to feed).1Now the WUM’s can be found trawling through the BBCs 606 forum, living a life of solitude and celibacy trying to be funny and get across their illogical point of view...