“Look, I started out with nothing more than a single cell,” said Gilford, who makes a point of frequently reminding himself of all those weeks he had to scrape by on whatever was delivered to him through his umbilical cord. “And then I managed to double it, double that again, and then double that again. At this point I think I’m estimated to have about 100 trillion of them.” “Not bad for a kid who was briefly in breech presentation,” he added.

Spoiler Alert: This is an article from The Onion where, in this case, fiction proves it’s as powerful as non-fiction, especially when the fiction stumbles into and is wrapped in the truth.

NEW YORK—Marveling at just how far he had come in 56 years, MerCal Enterprises president David Gilford reflected this week on his rise from a humble fertilized embryo to head of a publicly traded multinational company.

Speaking from his executive suite, Gilford told reporters that as leader of a business that regularly reports billions in profits, his current station in life is a far cry from his beginnings as a newly formed zygote, when he didn’t have single dollar or functioning circulatory system to his name.

“It wasn’t easy at the beginning, just grinding it out for nine long months,” said Gilford, noting that immediately following conception he was guided by little more than the cilia that pushed him down the fallopian tube, having never even seen a quarterly report or attended a shareholders meeting. “Back then I didn’t know which way was up. I was struggling just to work my way toward the womb.”

“But here I am now, an hour away from signing off on the largest acquisition in this company’s history,” he continued. “I sure didn’t realize it back then, but when that sperm cell fused with that ovum and endowed me with two sets of chromosomes, it set me on the path to the corner office I’m in now.”

Gilford said he never even entertained the possibility that the differentiated tissue groups he began to form after attaching to the uterine wall would one day lead to him overseeing more than 7,000 employees in 11 global offices. While it now seems obvious that the placental nutrients he was receiving from his mother have been pivotal in his appearing year after year on Forbes’ list of the nation’s highest-paid chief executives, Gilford admitted that, at the time, he didn’t stand out as anything special.

“I don’t think I screamed ‘future CEO’ when people looked at me back in those days,” said Gilford, who, as a blastula, had only begun developing new non-maternal mRNA. “What did I know about negotiating or leveraging? I knew how to fill my central cavity with fluid. That’s what I could do, so I did it.”

Read More