Vasilich on Robotization

by Boris Bakhmetyev

Cactus Vasilich, who was temporarily filling in for the company’s top executive during his untimely absence, ordered the secretary, Iskrina Romanovna Kiskova, to invite her husband, the driver Zvezdoniy, to an urgent meeting. As you may recall, Zvezdoniy worked as a delivery man on his days off from his regular driving shift. He had even become a prominent figure in a Moscow delivery corporation.

Vasilich, at the request of Zvezdoniy and Iskrina, oversaw their operations, helping to resolve problematic issues with government authorities and pedestrians who occasionally found themselves in the path of the couriers’ moped-bikes. That’s why they held regular meetings right in the top executive’s office.

This time, Vasilich decided to thoroughly address the issue of high technology — specifically, robotization. He noted that the relevance of this topic had been steadily increasing lately. It was an inexorable demand of the times!

Vasilich very delicately demanded that Zvezdoniy replace at least half of the couriers with robot delivery workers by the end of the current year. This would help alleviate the personnel shortage in the industry, which had been exacerbated by demographic problems.

Moreover, Vasilich boldly proposed that Zvezdoniy try operating the official black "Lada Vesta" — the car Vasilich occasionally used to inspect Moscow districts — in autonomous mode.

As always, the tasks Vasilich set were both extremely specific and grandiose. They required full dedication to accomplish…

But the next day, Zvezdoniy suffered a managerial breakdown. Instead of going out to deliver orders, he took a bottle of vodka from the fridge — one he had bought at the end of the previous year, before prices went up — and got drunk. He was trying to grasp the magnitude of the instructions he had received from Vasilich.

January 18, 2026