Needish

 Last Friday I had a barbecue at home with some friends. We were talking about what drunken people talks about, the evolution of human behavior and culture. Nico -yes, the same Nico you've read about in this blog before- told the observant crowd an experiment involving apes. The narration somehow opened my eyes and I thought it could be an interesting story for some of you, but I must start with a disclaimer. I just couldn't manage to find sources on the Internet, maybe because I -as most people- am not an expert in searching the web. Sometimes I dream that search results try to find me, but sadly, it never happens in reality. The point is that you shouldn't believe blindly in the following story, nobody knew for sure whether it was true or an urban myth. So here's it goes...

Everything started in a cage filled with apes, some banana trees and cold water showers on top. As you probably know, apes like bananas. They can also climb trees relatively easily. So as you might have guessed so far, the apes use to climb the banana trees looking for food. After a while, the scientists in charge of the experiment started spraying the coldest water in the world over these poor monkeys every time they even got close to the banana trees. They didn't take a long time in realizing that it wasn’t clever to climb the trees, they were being fed anyway, and of course it was more comfortable to be dry. Once every ape knew that it was wrong to climb the trees, the scientists took one of them out for being replaced by a new monkey. Here's is when the story starts becoming interesting. The new monkey gets into the cage, watch the banana trees, and starts climbing. Before any shower, the other monkeys chased the new one, hit him almost to death and hoped to have delivered a clear message: no tree-climbing in this cage. When that primate learned not to climb the tree, the scientists replaced a second monkey and repeated the same process several times until there were only new monkeys. Guess what? They’ve all learned not to climb the banana tree but none of them really knew the reason why.

It's amazing how many things we do every day, only because nobody has ever stopped to think before whether there is any better way of doing it. I can imagine how the first monkey who decided to walk straight felt. NEEDISH, like the first primate who decided to walk straight, is here to change the way we do things in some ways you probably have never thought of, and after using our service you probably won't understand why nobody came up with something like Needish before.

I am needish!

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