Who Moved My Cheese

Who Moved My Cheese By Spencer Johnson Key Takeaways Analysis Review

Who Moved My Cheese?

This is a book about how two mice named Sniff and Scurry and two miniature humans named Hem and Haw (that's right) are trapped in a maze that serves as a metaphor for the inherent restrictions and viccisitudes of our lives. One day some invisible force beyond their control takes the cheese from a sector of the maze, sending our mice and little people looking for more, if, indeed there is anymore to be had. Sniff and Scurry, we are told, have the right attitude because "they keep life simple...they don't overanalyze or overcomplicate things," and rather than question why the cheese was taken from them they accept change and just get out there and bust their balls humping it through that maze like good little unquestioning furry mini-zombies looking for more. Hem and Haw, like too many humans, we are told, over-think things and fixate on their past comforts and expectations and spend too much time stewing over the unfairness of their loss of food rather than fearlessly getting out there and looking through the maze for more.So, who moved/stole their cheese? That question is never answered. Nay, it is, posits this book, a completely unimportant and irrelevant question to ask, because, fellow bitches, the system is how it is, it's gonna stay that way, you can't do a fuckin' thing to change that and it's just too goddamned bad if you don't like it, because your cheese is going to be stolen and sent to South China and that's that. So stop bellyaching about jobs and health care. Just get yourself rich with stinking piles of cheese, or just shut up about it...liberals!Another key question that is not asked is: "Who designed, built and maintains the maze and whose interests does that serve?"I have a theory, not addressed in the book, that stinking rich executive-types, most of whom have driven their companies into the ground or into slave-wage zones and sent their employees off to look for "New Cheese" while enjoying their own golden-parachute-financed retirements and/or bailouts, may be among those who have stolen our cheese. But, according to the book, such things are not only outside the realm of questioning, but are irrelevant. The very idea of changing or creating a more equitable system is simply beyond the pale. You won't be the master of your own cheese, suckers, so be happy with what you can get. Those who take the cheese always know better.In an unexpected turn of events, however, some disgruntled employees at the facility where this book was printed--who had just been told that their cheeses were being moved to Mexico and they would lose their $15-an-hour living-wage jobs to $1-an-hour Mexican slaves--decided to slip an alternative version of this story into some of the copies of the book, some of which turned up on Amazon and the late-lamented Border's.In this version, Hem and Haw and Sniff and Scurry notice their cheese missing and, after looking for two years for no cheese dispensaries and finding themselves at the end of their 99-weeks of insufficient government-issue unemployment-benefit cheese rations, decide to put Hem and Haw's human smarts and Sniff and Scurry's uncerebral pluck to new uses and ends. Since cheese is the goal, or the ends, and since the ends justify the means, they decide to figure out who is taking their cheese, prevent further cheese-moving shenanigans, and keep those tasty fromage comestibles for themselves. Thinking "outside the maze", they decide that having their cheese taken away arbitrarily--especially by the one-percent who already own more cheese than the other 99 percent of cheese-eaters combined--is not the kind of change they will accept, and instead of being on the receiving end of change decide to mete out a little change of their own--for a change (after all, who says that change always has to come from "above," from outside? Why not from below, from the bottom up? I know, change from the bottom is class warfare; change/cheese moving from the top is, well, the marketplace working like it should). Deciding not to take it anymore, the plucky mice and men donned commando gear, staked out the various points of infiltration, and with their cache of weapons including Molotov cocktails, took out the greedy cheese-hoarding scumbags.No cheese was stolen thereafter.

But who produced the future cheese? After all, there were no more job exporters...I mean, "job creators." The anarcho-syndicalist collective, of course. And there was cheese for all.

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