How I Would Catch the Roadrunner
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again. Wile E Coyote spent the better part of his life and dozens of episodes trying to get a tasty meal of fried Roadrunner, losing family, friends, and yes, maybe even part of himself in the process. Each episode was an unadulterated catalogue of failures, banging his head against a wall in the attempt to outthink the rapid bird, losing not only the physical, but the mental battle.
Obviously I have the benefit of hindsight, I can learn from his mistakes, I can look upon his failures and learn from them. It’s easy to laugh at how he rolled a boulder up an impossibly thin rock formation to drop it on the Roadrunner’s head only for it to backfire and crush himself as many as 12 times and think “Never me”, but I challenge anyone to take that many blows to the head and still be able to remember when a plan has been hatched recently and not worked, let alone think critically and logistically when hatching future plans. I also have the benefit of a lot of modern-day technology that Wile couldn’t hope to access. I don’t think there were even encyclopaedias on the prairie, but I can simply google “How to catch very fast bird” and get 134,000,000 results, each with a different ingenious trap or system of rigged boulders or anvils (I assume).
All that said, I don’t think it’s foolish to say that I would do a much better job in Wile E Coyote’s situation and would take 2, maybe 3 episodes to catch and cook the Roadrunner. It’s simply a case of survival of the most intelligent and I can outwit any bird I come across. So I’m gonna lay out some of the things I would personally do differently.
Probably one of the most easily actionable things I’d do is to stop buying from Acme, it’s instantly visible how shoddy their products are and I don’t think he has ever gotten a solid return on his investment. There must be so many alternative options for anvils, cartoon bombs (or just “bombs” to him), and large catapults. Again, I accept that this was a time before internet access and one-day delivery, and the prairie is hardly a city centre. But the invisible forces of the free market must provide some options, the demand is demonstrably there! And if it isn’t, he can take some initiative, the lad clearly has a lot of talent in making home made devices and his creative skills are there for all to see, why not start up a small business of his own? If he doesn’t jump feet-first into the gap in the market, someone else will.
Getting back to actually catching the Roadrunner. He has tried all sorts of silly and, let’s face it, embarrassing entrapments and contraptions, he needs to utilise actually effective modern technology. I could take Roadrunner down in much less than the time required for an episode and still have time for a celebratory cup of tea before That’s All Folks by simply using a gun. Specifically an automatic weapon, you fire about a million bullets a minute, I know the Roadrunner goes fast but come on, at least one would hit him square between the eyes, especially if instead of doing any of that you just used guided missiles or predator drones. Outrun that, you fucker.
This is not to forget the fact that in almost every episode when we are introduced to them, Wile E is chasing Roadrunner and is mere metres away from catching up to the avian annoyance, if he put all his scheming time into just working on his cardiovascular endurance, he would make up those last few seconds (probably). Regardless, I wouldn’t even need to do that because I’m already pretty fast, so it’s kinda his problem.
One of those things would definitely work, just try them all rather than blowing yourself up over and over. I’m not working hard, I’m working smart. And if none of those work, just give up and buy some food and contribute to the economy, you bum. Anyway, thank you for reading my cover letter and I hope you will keep me in consideration for this esteemed office job.
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