His specialty was failing. He had taken failing to a new level and made it into an art form. There was no task, no activity, no project so simple that he could not, in a manner as spectacular as it was convoluted, botch so completely as to beggar belief. In short, if you needed something to go wrong, he was your man
One time, he had been tasked with stealthily moving a modestly sized package from one end of the city to another. A simple task, just move it from one place to another without attracting undue attention. Like posting a letter, but with less confusion about how much a stamp costs these days. Needless to say, he failed at this, and summarily invited to attend a high-profile dinner with a visiting princess from a nearby kingdom. While this is considered a success by many metrics, it was everything but stealthy, and the package remained undelivered for a long time after this very public occasion
The key to understanding his art of failure is that he always fails at the task he sets out to do. This could be tweaked to suit the needs of those who employed his services. The key was to phrase the task in such a way that the outcome of him failing was positive when all was said and done. And, most importantly, it didn’t work if he knew he was supposed to fail; invariably, he would fail at failing, thus succeeding in a spectacular manner never before seen, thus invalidating the whole thing
Being an unfortunately intelligent soul, he soon caught on to this, meaning that the contractual terms had to add yet another layer of specific safeguards to ward off the possibility of accidental success. Double, triple or even quadruple negations were not uncommon, to the point where even analytic philosophers had trouble keeping up with what the conditions for success were. Over time, it became its own specialized vocabulary of gently drawing one’s attention this way and that without ever clearly spelling out what was to be done, but fully trusting that it could and would be done. Despite these contractual complications, he remained highly sought after, and often found at the site of very remarkable confluences of events that probably should not have happened but happened anyway
Needless to say, we did not invite him to our social functions
More longer friend see that sky? 