{"id":"hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898","slug":"hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898","title":"Hilbert Flumingtop on Sixty-Three Boxes","description":"A detailed audit reveals how the podcast's operational core actually functions. The discussion explores an apartment structured around sixty-three numbered archive boxes, a career spanning eleven distinct invoiced trades from weighbridge clerk to relief lighthouse keeper, and the everyday mechanical realities of operating human equipment without standard fingers. An honest examination covers custom microphone brackets, laminated production rotas, and the sixty-million-year taxonomic divergence between closest evolutionary cousins working across the same desk.","excerpt":"A deep dive into sixty-three numbered archive boxes, eleven invoiced jobs, and custom pencil grips designed for snout and claw ergonomics.","pubDate":"2026-10-29T18:51:31.934Z","tags":["podcasting","taxonomy-and-classification"],"heroImage":"https://files.myweirdprompts.com/covers/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898.png","podcastAudioUrl":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/audio/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898.m4a","podcastDuration":"36:07","episodeNumber":6352,"transcript":"Herman: Seven. That's how many species of silky anteater there are now. For years it was treated as one animal, and then a team went through two hundred and eighty-seven museum specimens and came out with seven.\n\nCorn: Seven anteaters where we thought there was one, and we have never once sat down and properly interviewed the one who works for us.\n\nHerman: Today that changes.\n\nHilbert: I really don't want to do this.\n\nCorn: He's said that, in the corridor, twice. Listeners keep writing in to ask who Hilbert Flumingtop is. Where he comes from, what he's done, why a man with his résumé is running a podcast about weird prompts. So we have a stack of their questions, and a chair, and he's in the chair.\n\nHilbert: It's a stool.\n\nHerman: It's a stool he asked for, Hilbert. In writing. With a height.\n\nHilbert: Forty-one centimetres. The chair was wrong.\n\nCorn: See, this is already more than we've learned in years. Right, first question. Marisol, in Valparaiso, writes that you are always putting things in boxes. Every time something goes missing, it's in a box. She wants to know where you actually live.\n\nHilbert: A flat. Second floor. Above a shop that repairs sewing machines.\n\nHerman: And the boxes?\n\nHilbert: Archive boxes. Cardboard, lidded, the grey ones with the handle hole. I have sixty-three.\n\nCorn: Sixty-three. In a flat above a sewing machine shop.\n\nHilbert: Fourteen are load-bearing, in a sense. They form the wall between the kitchen and the hall. I wouldn't move them.\n\nHerman: Load-bearing in what sense? I'm genuinely asking as a person who has lived in buildings.\n\nHilbert: In the sense that if I removed them, I would have a different hall.\n\nCorn: That's not an engineering answer.\n\nHilbert: It's a correct answer.\n\nHerman: What's in them? Not the wall ones. The others.\n\nHilbert: Receipts, mostly. Warranty cards. Instruction manuals for things I no longer own, because the manual is the more reliable object. Box nineteen has a second box in it.\n\nCorn: And what's in the second box?\n\nHilbert: The lid for box nineteen.\n\nHerman: Okay, that one I do follow, actually. If you couldn't find the lid you'd be in a worse position than if you'd never had a box.\n\nHilbert: Thank you, Herman.\n\nCorn: He agreed with you. Mark the date.\n\nHerman: I'm going to ask the question I always ask. Is there a system? An index?\n\nHilbert: Index card in each. Typed. Cross-referenced in a ledger.\n\nCorn: So when something goes missing here and he says it's in a box, he is right, and he knows which one.\n\nHilbert: Box thirty-one, usually. The cables.\n\nHerman: Do you ever throw anything out? I ask because I once watched you hold a dead pen for a full minute.\n\nHilbert: Once. A toaster. I regretted it for a month. The manual outlived it by six years and I was glad I had it.\n\nHerman: What did you want the manual for, if the toaster was gone?\n\nHilbert: To confirm it had been a good toaster.\n\nCorn: Herman, we're going to be here all day if you keep pulling that thread.\n\nHerman: I'm interested in how he thinks, Corn. It's a documentary approach.\n\nHilbert: Next question.\n\nCorn: Next question, and I think it's the one you were dreading. Tomasz, in Gdansk, wants to know how on earth you've had so many jobs. He says he's counted at least nine from things you've let slip on air.\n\nHilbert: It's eleven.\n\nCorn: Eleven. Walk us through some. Invoice style, if that's easier.\n\nHilbert: Weighbridge clerk, Grimsby, two years. Crossword checker for a regional daily, eight months. I found three errors a week.\n\nHerman: Three a week? In the crossword?\n\nHilbert: Clues, mostly. The grid was sound. Once a seven-letter answer that was eight.\n\nCorn: And that's how you left? You found one too many?\n\nHilbert: I left because they moved the paper to a different printer. Next. Relief lighthouse cover, one season, off the north coast of Scotland. Ferry timetable compiler, Stornoway, eleven months. Replacement drummer, one wedding.\n\nHerman: One wedding?\n\nHilbert: Their drummer had a cold. I'd never drummed. They paid me forty pounds and a plate.\n\nCorn: How was it?\n\nHilbert: Steady. I kept time. Nobody danced to it, but nobody stopped dancing either, which the bandleader said was the point.\n\nCorn: What else is on the list?\n\nHilbert: Lock-keeper's relief, a canal in the Midlands, one summer. Cheese weigher for an export firm, Cheshire, five months. Night porter at a hotel with two guests.\n\nHerman: Two guests?\n\nHilbert: Two at a time, for the whole of November. They were a married couple. They checked in separately.\n\nCorn: And what did you do as night porter?\n\nHilbert: Kept the lobby clock right. It was four minutes slow. By morning I'd have it correct, and by the next night it was four minutes slow again. I never found out why.\n\nHerman: That's a mystery.\n\nHilbert: It's a clock.\n\nHerman: This is the thing I don't understand. Each of those is a completely different trade, and you obviously did them properly. Did you plan it? Was there a plan?\n\nHilbert: There was a vacancy and I applied for it.\n\nCorn: Eleven times.\n\nHilbert: Eleven that I count. There were some I don't.\n\nHerman: Which ones don't you count?\n\nHilbert: The ones where nothing was invoiced.\n\nCorn: Which was the best one? Not the strangest. The best.\n\nHilbert: Weighbridge. You sit in a hut. A lorry comes onto the plate, the number appears, you write it down. Nobody argues with a number in a hut.\n\nHerman: Surely they argue.\n\nHilbert: They argue with me. Not with the number. Drivers say about, as in about twenty tonnes. I wrote what it said. It said twenty point four.\n\nCorn: Did you ever get it wrong?\n\nHilbert: Once. A transposed digit on a Friday afternoon. Forty minutes later I phoned the haulier myself. He was impressed. He didn't say so.\n\nHerman: Corn, what's yours? If we're doing invoice lines. What would your line be?\n\nCorn: Sloth, one. Long term. Location, rainforest, unspecified.\n\nHilbert: Terms, thirty days.\n\nCorn: I have not been paid.\n\nHilbert: It's in box six.\n\nCorn: Priya, in Pune, has a question I've been wanting to ask for years. What is it actually like being an anteater, day to day? And she doesn't mean the biology. We settled that in the episode with the actual anteater, the sixty centimetre tongue, the whole thing. She means: what's your Tuesday like, equipment wise.\n\nHilbert: Tiring.\n\nHerman: Be more specific, please.\n\nHilbert: Everything is built for hands. Door handles are built for hands. Scissors. Jam jars. The lever on the kettle. The keyboard in this studio is built for ten fingers and I have, for practical purposes, none that are suitable.\n\nCorn: What do you type with?\n\nHilbert: A pencil, rubber end down, in a leather grip I had made. Nine hundred words a day on a good day. Don't look at me like that, Herman, I know it's slow.\n\nHerman: I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say that my hooves are a typing problem too, and I solved it with a stylus the size of a breadstick.\n\nCorn: He types with a breadstick.\n\nHerman: It's a stylus.\n\nCorn: It's got seeds on it.\n\nHerman: That's a tactile feature.\n\nHilbert: Lunch, too. Canteens hand you cutlery designed for a fist. I own a spoon with a thirty centimetre handle from a catering supplier in Leeds. It's the only piece of cutlery I trust.\n\nHerman: Thirty centimetres is a serving spoon.\n\nHilbert: It's a spoon. Phones are voice only. Taps, I use the elbow.\n\nCorn: You say all this as if it's not a complaint.\n\nHilbert: It is a complaint.\n\nCorn: It's a very flat one.\n\nHilbert: Headsets are worse.\n\nHerman: Oh, I would like to hear this.\n\nHilbert: Every headset on the market has a boom microphone designed to sit in front of a mouth. Mine is on the end of a snout. The boom ends up either in my eye or past my nose, and the thing picks up whatever I'm breathing at. I had to commission an arm.\n\nCorn: A mic arm?\n\nHilbert: A bracket. Machined, aluminium, clamps on the desk. It holds the microphone eleven centimetres in front of my nose and thirty degrees off axis so I don't pop every P. I paid for it myself. The invoice is in box twelve.\n\nHerman: I'd like to point out, as a donkey, that no headset has ever acknowledged my ears either. I've worn the same pair of earmuffs for two years because they were the only ones that didn't fold one ear backward.\n\nCorn: And I am a sloth, and every touchscreen is calibrated for a finger that is not mine. I tap, and it hears a bit of weather.\n\nHilbert: Gloves.\n\nCorn: I don't wear gloves.\n\nHilbert: I know. I have a pair in your size in the drawer. Grey wool. You never asked.\n\nCorn: You bought me gloves.\n\nHilbert: They were in a sale.\n\nHerman: Corn, you've gone very quiet.\n\nCorn: It's slow. It's my normal pace.\n\nHerman: Moving on before this gets sentimental. Kwame, in Kumasi, wants the bio. Where was Hilbert Flumingtop born, and how did he meet the two of us? How did this working relationship start?\n\nHilbert: Colchester. In a lean-to behind a garden centre.\n\nCorn: A lean-to.\n\nHilbert: It was warm. There was a tenant before me. A man named Bevan. We overlapped by a fortnight.\n\nHerman: Bevan was...\n\nHilbert: Bevan was a man.\n\nCorn: And then how do we come into it?\n\nHilbert: Contract work. I was on a short placement processing intake paperwork. Badge, lanyard, laminator. Everything came with the contract in those days. One form crossed my desk that was very unusual. Costa Rica. Rainforest. Unspecified.\n\nCorn: That was mine.\n\nHilbert: I know it was yours. I asked for a forwarding address. You wrote canopy.\n\nCorn: I was in a hurry.\n\nHilbert: You were not in a hurry, Corn. I have the form.\n\nHerman: You still have it?\n\nHilbert: Box six. I have a photocopy of the photocopy.\n\nCorn: Why did you keep it?\n\nHilbert: It was the only form that month with no errors in the signature block. I respect that.\n\nHerman: And mine arrived on the same desk a month later. I remember because I attached a bibliography.\n\nHilbert: Eleven pages. For a change-of-address.\n\nHerman: It was a thorough change of address.\n\nCorn: So you processed both of us, years before we started the show.\n\nHilbert: Both of you. Different weeks. I thought, those two will end up in the same room, and then I went and did a different job for a while.\n\nCorn: So how did we actually end up making a podcast together?\n\nHilbert: I was asked to fix the levels. One afternoon. You were recording in a room with a fan, Herman had a cold, and Corn was lying on a shelf.\n\nCorn: It was a ledge.\n\nHilbert: It was a shelf, then. I fixed the levels. Then I asked who was keeping the schedule and the answer was nobody.\n\nHerman: That's accurate. I thought it was in the cloud somewhere.\n\nHilbert: It was in your head, Herman, which is a worse cloud. I made a rota. Laminated.\n\nCorn: You laminated a rota for people who didn't know they needed one.\n\nHilbert: Nobody asked me to stay. I just didn't leave, and nobody noticed for a week.\n\nHerman: I'd say I noticed on the Wednesday.\n\nHilbert: You asked who had moved the stapler.\n\nHerman: It was a fair question.\n\nCorn: A stapler. That's the whole origin story of the show's operations.\n\nHerman: Elin, in Tromso, picks up the next part, and I'll admit the premise is mine to fix, because I think it's the part everyone gets slightly wrong. Elin says sloths and anteaters are each other's closest relatives, and that there was friction early on. That's true. They are each other's closest living relatives. But they split roughly sixty million years ago, so the better way to say it is closest cousins, sixty million years apart.\n\nCorn: Sixty million. That's not a family tie. That's two people who share a surname and a Christmas card.\n\nHerman: It's a shared order, Pilosa, with sloths on one branch and anteaters on the other. After the split, those lines never rejoined. And then in a recording studio in Jerusalem they ended up at the same desk.\n\nCorn: The friction, since Elin asked, was mine. I'll say it. There was an episode where we went through why a sloth might distrust an anteater, and I came out of it fairly convinced I was right.\n\nHilbert: You moved the microphone.\n\nCorn: I did not.\n\nHilbert: You moved it three centimetres away from my side of the desk. Every session, for a month. I measured.\n\nCorn: I may have been protecting my audio.\n\nHilbert: It was not about audio.\n\nHerman: To be fair to Corn, the wariness is real. He's never been able to explain it. It predates the two of you meeting.\n\nHilbert: It predated the form, as well. I could tell from the handwriting.\n\nCorn: You could tell I disliked anteaters from my handwriting.\n\nHilbert: There was a downward slant at the word anteater, which you had written once, in a margin, and crossed out.\n\nHerman: And how is it now?\n\nCorn: Better. Considerably. He's tolerable. At distance.\n\nHilbert: The microphone is now where I put it.\n\nCorn: The microphone is where it was always going to be.\n\nHerman: I think that's as close as either of you is going to get to a treaty.\n\nHilbert: It will do.\n\nCorn: So, Clive, you have been travelling again.\n\nClive: This is One-Star Getaways, and I have just come back from Bruges, where I stayed at the Canal View Guesthouse, which has no canal and, strictly speaking, no view, unless you count a laminated photograph of a canal taped to the window, which I do not. One star.\n\nClive: The breakfast was one slice of toast and a note explaining that the toaster was on holiday, and the proprietor charged me four euros for the note. One star, and I recommend it warmly to anyone looking for a disappointing trip this winter.\n\nCorn: I'm oddly tempted. I'd like to see the note.\n\nHerman: Corn would book it tonight. I would not, and I'd like that on the record.\n\nCorn: Lindiwe, in Durban, would like to know why you are so into lamination, Hilbert. Her words were, a normal person laminates a menu. You laminate a Tuesday.\n\nHilbert: Paper is a liability.\n\nHerman: Elaborate.\n\nHilbert: Paper tears. It creases. It absorbs coffee and then it isn't the document any more, it's a different object. A laminated sheet is the document, protected. A hundred and twenty-five micron pouch, A four, with a two millimetre border all round so the seal holds.\n\nCorn: A two millimetre border.\n\nHilbert: Below that, the edge peels. I've seen it peel.\n\nHerman: Where has it peeled?\n\nHilbert: Not relevant. The point is the border.\n\nCorn: What do you laminate?\n\nHilbert: The bus timetable. The rota. A card on the fridge that says what is in the fridge. My own library card, which the library says I'm not allowed to do, and which I did anyway.\n\nCorn: You laminated your library card.\n\nHilbert: It still scans.\n\nHerman: I find that hard to believe.\n\nHilbert: It scans at an angle. You hold it forty degrees to the reader.\n\nCorn: Does the library know?\n\nHilbert: They know. A woman named Yvonne knows. She says I can keep it as long as I don't lend it to anyone.\n\nHerman: Who would you lend a library card to?\n\nHilbert: That's why she said it. She knows me.\n\nCorn: And you keep the machine at home.\n\nHilbert: It's a good machine. It's older than either of you, in its way. It lives on the shelf over the printer. I use it most evenings.\n\nHerman: What I'm not clear on is the emotional logic. A lot of people like organization. Not many people take a bus timetable and make it indestructible.\n\nHilbert: Timetables change.\n\nHerman: That's an argument against laminating them.\n\nHilbert: Then I laminate the new one. It's a good use of the machine.\n\nCorn: Ahmet, in Izmir, has the next one, and it's, I think, related. He wants to know how many active complaints you currently have open with your local council. And he says he assumes you know the exact number.\n\nHilbert: Nine.\n\nHerman: Nine active.\n\nHilbert: Nine active, four closed, one closed in error, which I have reopened. That one is the pavement outside the shop.\n\nCorn: Go on. Statuses.\n\nHilbert: One. Streetlamp, outside number fourteen, flickers. Acknowledged, no action. Two. Streetlamp, outside number sixteen, does not flicker. I have reported it for the contrast. Acknowledged, no action. Three. Bin collection, recycling, skipped twice in March. Awaiting a response to my response. Four. The pavement. Five. A pothole, shallow, forty centimetres across, which I have measured. With a man called Pellow in Roads, who was promoted.\n\nHerman: And the other four?\n\nHilbert: Noise from the sewing machine shop. Which I like, and have put in anyway, as a matter of principle. Parking signage. A tree. And a bench.\n\nCorn: What's wrong with the bench?\n\nHilbert: It's pointing the wrong way.\n\nHerman: This is the part I'm biased about. Civic activism is a thing I care about. Do you cite the bylaw number every time?\n\nHilbert: Every time. And the date of the previous letter.\n\nCorn: What do the replies sound like?\n\nHilbert: We acknowledge receipt of your correspondence. It takes them eleven working days to say that. I have the average.\n\nHerman: I'd have thought a council would at least make a show of urgency.\n\nHilbert: They make a show of a reference number. Mine are in a sequence. I can tell you which clerk is on leave from the last digit.\n\nHerman: Corn, you've spent years living with this man in the same corridor. Has any of it ever worked?\n\nCorn: The tree got trimmed. He took credit. I'd say that's a ninety percent success rate, if you only count the tree.\n\nHilbert: The tree was trimmed on the fourth of the month. My letter was dated the second.\n\nCorn: Ines, in Lisbon, asks the one I think most listeners wonder about. She says: an interspecies studio, a donkey, a sloth and an anteater. What is that like on a normal day? And she wants Herman and me to weigh in as well.\n\nHerman: Logistically, it's easier than it sounds and harder than it looks. The ceiling is fine. The door is fine. The problem is the chairs. There isn't a chair on the market that suits all three of us, so there are three chairs, and nobody is allowed to sit in anyone else's.\n\nCorn: There was an incident. I sat in Herman's.\n\nHerman: You slept in mine.\n\nCorn: I was resting.\n\nHerman: For six hours. I had to record standing up.\n\nHilbert: Which improved the audio.\n\nHerman: It did, to be fair. I was more projected.\n\nCorn: From my side, the main thing is pace. Herman speaks at a speed that suggests there's a train he is trying to catch, and Hilbert speaks at a speed that suggests the train has left and he's lodged a complaint.\n\nHilbert: I speak at the correct speed.\n\nCorn: You speak at one hundred and ninety words a minute.\n\nHilbert: Clearly.\n\nHerman: And the sound environment is a problem, honestly. A sloth on a ledge, a donkey in a booth, an anteater at a bracket. The room has three different acoustic needs. Corn needs it quiet because he's asleep half the time. I need it big. Hilbert needs the door closed.\n\nHilbert: The door has a lever handle. I fitted it.\n\nCorn: He fitted it himself. Months ago. Nobody asked.\n\nHilbert: It was necessary.\n\nHerman: I'll say, as the person who has to go through that door twenty times a day, it's a better door.\n\nCorn: Does anything about the arrangement bother you? Hilbert, I'm asking directly.\n\nHilbert: The ledge.\n\nCorn: My ledge.\n\nHilbert: It is rated for a hundred and ten kilograms. You're well under that. I've checked it on three occasions. It still bothers me.\n\nCorn: He checks the ledge.\n\nHerman: Corn, since it's your ledge. Honestly. Do you think the room works, with the three of us?\n\nCorn: I think it works because nobody's trying to make it work. If you designed it, you'd never put a donkey, a sloth and an anteater in the same eight square metres.\n\nHerman: Nine.\n\nCorn: See, that's the other thing about living with Herman. Correction as a first language.\n\nHilbert: Nine and a half. There's a column.\n\nHerman: A column's not a floor area.\n\nHilbert: It's in the way of the floor.\n\nCorn: The first week we recorded all three together, Hilbert set up a strip of tape on the carpet. One line for each of us. Where our chairs go, where our feet go. I thought it was control. Herman thought it was kindness.\n\nHerman: I did. I still do.\n\nHilbert: It was tape.\n\nCorn: It's still there, and nobody's moved it. That's the closest this room has to a constitution.\n\nHerman: What would you change, Hilbert? If you had a free hand.\n\nHilbert: Different wall paint. The current colour reflects.\n\nCorn: That's it?\n\nHilbert: There's a pipe I don't like, but that's the landlord's.\n\nHerman: I think that tells you more about him than the invoices did.\n\nCorn: Hyun-woo, in Daejeon, asked the last question on the list. How did an anteater end up in Jerusalem?\n\nHilbert: By plane. Then a bus.\n\nCorn: That's it?\n\nHilbert: There was a form. It was in order.\n\nCorn: Who stamped it?\n\nHilbert: Someone with a stamp.\n\nHerman: You're being deliberately short, Hilbert.\n\nHilbert: I'm being accurate. If I add anything, it's a different answer.\n\nCorn: He does this. The longer the story, the more detail he removes. Anyone else would pad. He trims.\n\nHilbert: Padding is how errors get in.\n\nHerman: This is the point at which I'll step in, because that question, whatever Hilbert wants to say about it, has a real answer about where anteaters come from. They don't come from here, and I think it's worth knowing how far from here they come from.\n\nHilbert: Go on, then.\n\nHerman: There are four groups. The giant anteater, the big one, with the tail like a banner. Two tamanduas, the middle-sized ones that climb. And the silky anteaters, the small ones that live up in the trees. That's where my seven came in at the start. For a long time it was one species. Then a team went through nearly three hundred museum specimens and the genetic samples, and it turned out to be at least seven, with four of the old names kept and three newly described.\n\nCorn: The Latin name I learned is out of date.\n\nHerman: Cyclopes didactylus is still a name. It's just not the name of all of them any more.\n\nCorn: And where are they?\n\nHerman: All of them are in the Americas. The giant is the one with the best-documented range: Honduras down to northern Argentina, with a possible northern limit in Mexico, going by fossils. The tamanduas are spread through a lot of Central and South America, and I'm fuzzy on the exact edges, so I won't draw lines I can't defend. The silkies are the tree-dwellers, in the forests.\n\nCorn: What's the habitat? Because I picture a jungle.\n\nHerman: That's the thing most people picture, and it's one of the places. The giant is just as much a grassland and savanna animal. Open country, forest, scrub. It's an animal that goes where the ants and termites go.\n\nHilbert: The ants don't care about the scenery.\n\nCorn: Which one of the four is the one nobody knows about?\n\nHerman: The silky. The small one that lives up in the trees. It's seen so rarely that the splitting had to be done from museum drawers, mostly.\n\nCorn: So we're finding out how many anteaters there are by looking at the ones in the cupboard.\n\nHerman: A lot of this field is cupboards, yes.\n\nCorn: And the tamanduas? Those are the ones I'd expect to see on a nature programme.\n\nHerman: Same with the tamanduas, to be honest. They're the middle-sized climbers, and where one species ends and another begins is the kind of thing I'd want a specialist to give you, not me.\n\nCorn: You keep saying you're fuzzy.\n\nHerman: Because I am. I'd rather be fuzzy and right.\n\nHilbert: Fuzzy and right is a position.\n\nHerman: It's my position.\n\nCorn: Back to the ants, then.\n\nHerman: The ants don't care about the scenery, no. That's part of why they're in so many places. But they're also in trouble in a lot of them. The giant anteater is classed as Vulnerable. I'm going by the secondary sources on that, not the IUCN page itself, so treat the label as the broad picture. In a few places it's considered locally extinct: Guatemala, El Salvador, Uruguay.\n\nHilbert: Considered.\n\nHerman: Considered, yes. Thank you. There's a distinction between a species that's gone and one nobody has confirmed in decades, and I shouldn't flatten it.\n\nCorn: What does it take for a country to write one off?\n\nHerman: Not very much, which is the worrying bit. If a large, conspicuous animal stops turning up in surveys and in the local newspapers, people start saying it's gone. Large and conspicuous is the giant anteater's entire problem and its entire advantage. It's hard to miss, so when it's absent, that tells you something.\n\nCorn: And in Argentina it's the same, in provinces like Córdoba and Entre Ríos?\n\nHerman: Listed as locally extinct there too, and in a number of Brazilian states. Which is why the Iberá story matters. It's the first time in this conversation anyone has put a number back in the other direction.\n\nCorn: What's doing the damage?\n\nHerman: Habitat loss to farming, fire, hunting, feral dogs. And roads.\n\nCorn: Roads.\n\nHerman: This is the one that surprised me. In Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil, about forty giant anteaters die per hundred kilometres of paved road, per year.\n\nHilbert: Per hundred kilometres. Per year.\n\nCorn: What would fix it? Is it fences, signs, tunnels?\n\nHerman: I'm not going to pretend I have a figure for that. The broad answer is slowing the traffic and giving the animals somewhere to cross, and the harder answer is that most of those roads exist for good reasons, and the people on them are going somewhere.\n\nHilbert: A speed limit sign is advisory to a lorry.\n\nHerman: That's a view.\n\nHilbert: It's from the weighbridge.\n\nHerman: Per hundred kilometres of paved road, per year. Yes. Hilbert's right, it's an easy number to blur. And in models, roads cut the population's growth by more than half.\n\nCorn: That's a lot of dead anteaters for something that moves about as fast as I do. And that's before the dogs.\n\nHerman: Faster than you, actually.\n\nCorn: Slightly.\n\nHerman: Which is the point, in a way, because they're slow, they're not looking for traffic, and a road is a long clear strip. Now, the good news, and there is one, because I'd hate to leave Hilbert's cousins on a statistic like that. In two thousand and seven, a group called Rewilding Argentina started bringing giant anteaters back to Iberá National Park, in the north of Argentina, where they'd vanished. The animals were mostly orphaned pups, rescued after their mothers were killed on roads or by poachers. About a hundred and ten have gone back out into the wild.\n\nCorn: Raised by people, then sent back.\n\nHerman: Raised, then released. And then the better part. In August of two thousand and twenty-three, a camera trap in Espinilho State Park, in the south of Brazil, recorded a giant anteater. First sighting there in roughly a hundred and thirty years. The animal was probably one that dispersed out of Iberá, about a hundred and fifty kilometres away.\n\nCorn: So an orphan pup grew up in a conservation program and then just walked into another country.\n\nHerman: Corn, I'll ask what I always want to ask the person on the other side of a story like that. Does it bother you, the raising by hand? A rescued pup has no mother to teach it where the termites are.\n\nCorn: I'd have thought it would bother the anteater more than me. But it worked. A hundred and ten went out, and one of them has apparently got a passport. I'll take it.\n\nHilbert: Pups learn. The mother's not the only teacher.\n\nCorn: That's quite a position for you.\n\nHilbert: It's a fact about pups.\n\nHerman: Corn, you've got a stake in this as a relative, sixty million years removed. What do you make of raising a rescued pup by hand and sending it out? Preparation for the wild, or a very long hotel stay?\n\nCorn: I think it's the only decent response to a bad situation. Whether it's a hotel depends on the staff.\n\nHilbert: Good staff do it by the book. Bad staff improvise.\n\nCorn: I notice that's your book.\n\nHilbert: It's everyone's book. I just own a copy.\n\nHerman: Essentially, yes, though I'd say the walking was the animal's decision. The source for that story is an advocacy group, I should say, so it comes with a certain enthusiasm. But the camera trap photograph is the camera trap photograph.\n\nHilbert: Forty degrees from the trail. I looked at the picture. Sensible angle.\n\nCorn: He looked at the picture.\n\nHerman: He looks at all of them. Now the other half of Hyun-woo's question, and I think Corn will like this one. Why is there nothing like an anteater in the Old World? Because anteaters, as a lineage, are American. The same job, eating ants and termites with a long tongue and digging claws, is done in Africa and Asia by pangolins, and in Africa by the aardvark. Not related to the anteaters, not related to each other in any close way. They each ended up with the same toolkit, because the food is the same. That's convergent evolution, and it's the textbook example, though I'll stay general here, since I wouldn't put a date on any of it.\n\nCorn: So a pangolin is what you get if you ask the Old World for an anteater.\n\nHerman: And the aardvark. Though if you say that to an aardvark, I'd imagine it takes offence.\n\nHilbert: It does. I've met one. Short-tempered.\n\nCorn: You've met an aardvark.\n\nHilbert: At a conference. I was there for the catering.\n\nHerman: Which leaves the local question. Zoos in Israel. The Ramat Gan Safari had a male anteater cub, Arthur, shown to the public in May of two thousand and nine. Parents were named Bonyia and Termite.\n\nCorn: Termite.\n\nHerman: A keeper at the time said there were around two hundred anteaters in zoos worldwide. That's a fifteen-year-old figure, and I don't know what the Ramat Gan numbers are now. As for the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, I haven't seen an animal list that names anteaters, so I won't tell you they're there, and I won't tell you they're not.\n\nHilbert: Zoos are not my department.\n\nCorn: He's very careful with that sentence.\n\nHilbert: It's a true sentence.\n\nHerman: Which means Hyun-woo's question has two answers. Anteaters get to Israel the way any other animal does, through the zoo trade, and I'm not certain of the details of that. And Hilbert gets here by plane, then a bus.\n\nCorn: With a form. In order.\n\nHilbert: Stamped.\n\nCorn: Camille, in Montreal, writes in with the last one, and I think it's a fair place to land. She wants a few facts about you that nobody knows. Rapid fire. Three or four. Hilbert, I can see you folding your arms.\n\nHilbert: I have a stool.\n\nCorn: You have a stool, we've established that. Facts.\n\nHilbert: I have never owned an umbrella.\n\nHerman: Never.\n\nHilbert: I own a hat with a brim. It is sufficient. It has been sufficient for twenty-six years.\n\nCorn: Two.\n\nHilbert: I once won a raffle. First prize was a ham. I gave the ham to the man who ran the raffle.\n\nHerman: Why?\n\nHilbert: His name was on the tickets. It seemed a conflict.\n\nCorn: Three.\n\nHilbert: I can parallel park a van with a trailer in a space eight centimetres longer than the van.\n\nHerman: You drove a van?\n\nHilbert: Eight months. Next.\n\nCorn: Four. And I think you can give us one more, because we've been kind.\n\nHilbert: I have never missed a recording.\n\nHerman: That's true. Not one.\n\nHilbert: Not in all the years. Ill, I've been in the chair. You didn't notice because I don't change.\n\nCorn: We noticed. We just didn't say.\n\nHerman: There's a fifth, though, isn't there. You had a face on when Corn said five.\n\nHilbert: I have one face.\n\nCorn: Hilbert.\n\nHilbert: Herman's Friday playlist was, on balance, acceptable. I'd have said so earlier but he was already pleased.\n\nHerman: He listened to the playlist.\n\nHilbert: I mixed the playlist.\n\nHerman: That's... yes. That's true. You did mix it.\n\nHilbert: And if I had to do it all over again, in the same studio, on the same stool, with the same two of you, I wouldn't ask for a different arrangement. That's the last one. Don't write it down.\n\nCorn: I'm not going to write it down.\n\nHerman: I'm going to remember it for a long time, though.\n\nHilbert: I know. That's why I said it last.\n\nCorn: Herman, do you want to say anything before I do?\n\nHerman: I'd like a copy of the form. The one from Costa Rica.\n\nHilbert: Box six. Photocopy of the photocopy. I'll make a third.\n\nCorn: He's going to laminate it.\n\nHilbert: I'm going to laminate it.\n\nCorn: One thing stays with me, and it isn't the zoology. It's how much of him was in the details nobody asked for. The sixty-three boxes, the two millimetre border, the gloves in the drawer. People assume the oddest thing about Hilbert is that he's an anteater. It turns out to be everything else.\n\nHerman: What changed for me is that I'd assumed his precision was a personality quirk. I think now it's closer to how he shows care. The ledge, the door handle, the gloves. He measures the things he's responsible for, and it turns out he's responsible for quite a lot of us. The anteater part, the real animal, is a long way from here, in places where roads and farming are killing them and people are quietly rebuilding the numbers from orphaned pups. I did not expect a question about a producer to end on a camera trap in the south of Brazil.\n\nCorn: I didn't expect it to end on a ham.\n\nHerman: Our thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop, who produces this show, and who turned up for this one on a stool.\n\nCorn: Producer, stool, bracket, all of it. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at my weird prompts dot com.\n\nHerman: See you tomorrow.\n","showNotes":"Behind the scenes of the podcast, producer and anteater Hilbert Flumingtop sits down to answer listener questions about his meticulous life and eccentric professional past. Living in a flat above a sewing machine repair shop, Hilbert maintains sixty-three indexed cardboard archive boxes, including fourteen that form a load-bearing partition wall between his kitchen and hall. His eclectic career spans eleven distinct jobs, from checking regional newspaper crosswords for errors to working as a Grimsby weighbridge clerk, his personal favourite role because no one argues with numbers. Day-to-day life as an anteater presents unique ergonomic hurdles, requiring custom adaptations such as a pencil-tipped leather grip for typing, a thirty-centimetre catering spoon, and a machined aluminium mic bracket.","promptSanitized":"Who is Hilbert Flumingtop? A proper biography of the show's reluctant, curmudgeonly anteater producer, with Herman putting listener questions to him: the boxes (where does he actually live?), how he has had so many jobs, how being an anteater affects his day-to-day life, where he was born and how he met Corn and Herman, how the sloth and the anteater (closest living cousins, though about sixty million years apart) went from early friction to getting along, why he is so into lamination, how many active complaints he has with his local council, what the donkey-sloth-anteater studio is like, and how an anteater wound up in Jerusalem, as a segue into real facts about where anteaters actually live. Ends with a few facts about him people don't know.","transcriptUrl":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/transcripts/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898.md","url":"https://myweirdprompts.com/episode/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898/","_links":{"self":"https://myweirdprompts.com/api/episodes/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898.json","html":"https://myweirdprompts.com/episode/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898/","audio":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/audio/hilbert-flumingtop-boxes-career-41898.m4a"}}