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One of Stephanie’s child laborers works on an Apprentice UK summary.

While on one of our many missions with our Barbers Without Borders humanitarian group this past weekend, Scott and I made a startling discovery. We don’t normally blog about our philanthropy like that fuckwit Bono, because we’re not in it for the glory or accolades, but our discovery was too important to overlook. In a small village outside Bangkok, we strolled down a filthy street lined with shanties, crying babies, and malnourished three-legged dogs. Even though we’ve seen similar sights a thousand times, it’s still enough to make a grown man cry. If only that were the worst of it.

As we passed what looked like a large abandoned fish cannery, the crack of a whip and the wail of a child caught our attention. We tried the doors, but the rattle of chains told us they were locked from the inside. We shimmied up a drainpipe and through an open window. The stench of dried blood, rotting flesh, and death hung in the air. The factory was dark, save for a few naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling. When our eyes adjusted to the darkness, our hearts shattered, for what we saw was a glimpse of hell itself. Perhaps 100 small children sat at long tables. The few who were lucky enough to be clothed had mere scraps between them and their cruel masters’ whips. But this was not your typical sweatshop. Curiously, the children were typing feverishly at Commodore 64s while others ran in oversized hamster wheels to power the factory’s generators. For some time we just couldn’t make sense of it. And then we saw it - a sign hanging at the far end of the factory. It read in large, bold letters: “The Memoirs of Sophie T. Mishap. NO TYPE, NO RICE!” We were crushed. All of this to maintain one sick woman’s weblog?

A group of Stephanie’s slaves on a rare break. It was not uncommon for the Mishap children to work 23 hours a day.

Scott and I knew we had to take action. We grabbed onto the chains dangling from the roof and swung to the floor below. Using the ancient fighting technique Jeet Kune Do (”The Way of the Intercepting Fist”), we quickly subdued the slave masters. We removed the shackles from the children’s feet and led them outside to freedom. As the sun beat down on us, little Sung Lu Po tugged on my sleeve and said, “Thank you, Barbers. I had never seen the shine of the sun before today.” The smile of one liberated child is enough to melt the hardest of hearts.

We were pleased that we brought one of the most egregious human rights violators to her knees. At least that’s what we thought. Her empire reaches all corners of the globe. One child informed us that her mother and brother were kidnapped from their home in El Salvador and taken to a Mishap sweatshop in Taiwan. Another said he and his brother were sold to Stephanie by a group of Somali pirates who had kidnapped them from Ethiopia a month prior. Still another said his sister was working at a recently opened Mishap factory, which had been charged with developing Stephanie’s MySpace profile. When the children there listed Stephanie’s favorite bands as “please send food, we need to eat” the factory was shut down, and the children there have gone missing. The factory we liberated was only the tip of the iceberg. Stephanie’s evildoing spans the entire globe, and this is just the beginning of our fight.

We attempted to reach Ms. Mishap for comment, but her assistant informed us she was visiting a Maserati dealership in New York City. Subsequent phone calls have gone unanswered.