On what happens when a poster makes you stop and think

Let’s call him Johnnie. Forget his last name, his age, his nationality, his religion, his sexual preferences, his ideology, his social class. Just Johnnie, yet another homo sapiens.

With nothing better to do one Sunday, he wanders into a museum and mumbles to himself as he passes by posters and paintings and drawings, and illustrated books and a vast array of gadgets of all sizes, colours and states of preservation. A musuem doesn't talk, usually, but the visitor can carry on enchanting monologues before each object.

"Hmm. Women workers."

He said that loud enough for at least one person to hear his words--a clearly female voice retorted:

"So? What’s so strange about that? Women have always worked, haven’t they?

Johnnie didn't have time to answer that, didn't have time to see the face that spoke those words. The woman's question was still rebounding in the air when a band of musicians, dressed in the colours of the rainbow,  marched into the exhibition room, playing the most exotic instruments, some using long feathers to strike chords on stretched out pieces of what appeared to be leather,fastened tightly to a gourd. The melodic but quite nostalgic sounds sent Johnnie into a state of joy mixed with profound sadness...

The woman leaning on the shield of the "National Federation of Women Workers" had managed to slip out of the poster and now had her hands on her hips, right in back of Johnnie. He didn't know that, though, because he was now so enthralled with the band that he had forgotten about the woman's voice.

"So," she repeated. "What's so strange about that?"

Now the man did turn around, his eyes fairly popping out of their sockets. Never had he seen a lady of such rare beauty, and a worker! He found it difficult to organize his thoughts because his body was moving adroitly to the catchy melody the musicians were plucking out on their instruments, while his mind was groping for an answer to the lady whose loveliness was now in open conflict with his usually indolent thinking patterns.

"Aren't you supposed to be in that poster?"

"You gotta be kidding, or didn't you hear about the gogglepath?

"The what?"

"The gogglepath. Not only have we freed ourselves of male chauvinist consumer society sexism. We have achieved the ability to appear and disappear, returning to posters or leaving them to pass on the word to those poor souls still under the thumb of the market."

"You mean you left the poster to talk to me?"

"Look at the poster. The woman has left. I have left."

In fact, there was an empty space where the woman had been in the poster, and the lady talking to him was wearing exactly the same clothes.

"I'm terrible sorry, it just that, well, this can't be, things like this only happen in the movies..."

"It's a question of consciousness. People like you have become so brutalized by the urge to buy the latest gadgets that you've lost your imagination. It is imagination and not technology that's going to decide the fate of the human race."

"But doesn't it help to have a good computer at hand?"

"Ha! Ha! I knew you were going to say that. That's what unenlightened men like you always say..."

Just at that moment there was a fire alarm and firemen began swarming all over the place. The band had disappeared as if into thin air. Johnnie looked towards the poster: there she was, holding on to her women worker's flag, in the poster, calm and confident. Johnnie squinted towards the setting sun and set off towards his rooming house. Tomorrow would be another day. Was it true what the lady had said? Had he become a slave of gadget society? It didn't seem likely. His only gadget was a talking watch. It kept him company in the dreary hours when he was not working and woke him up when it was time to get dressed and rush to arrive before the boss did.