Alan Bannister

Alan Bannister (I-HR) was the ninth Grand Unified Alan of Alanland. He succeeded Alan Figueroa.

Having descended to the office upon the expiration of the term of the Null Alan, the possibilities of the Bannister Administration were limitless. And so, Alan Bannister turned his eyes first to modernizing the transportation network of the country. "Too many cars," decreed Bannister, although it was a little unclear what he was talking about, considering he was stuck in a traffic jam at a railroad crossing at the time. So the government did its best to fix both problems in the only way it knew how—by making them both the same problem.

Effective on February 31 of that year, all traffic that previously used the train and road systems was to shift to the ALANCAN system (an acronym standing for ALANCAN Submit You Systematically Through Every Medium). To use the system, a passenger or cargo was loaded into a capsule that was placed in a pressurized tube, known as a "car sleeve". The pressurized air would then transport the capsule to the destination (of the capsule, since users had no way of choosing where the canister stopped—the suggested government response to this limitation was "You wanted to go somewhere, you went somewhere, what's the big deal", following by loudly humming the theme to Merv Griffin's Crosswords).

Materials for the ALANCAN system were quite expensive to obtain, so alanDOT set upon constructing them out of whole cloth. That is, they took a number of discarded coats and sweaters out of the Quindaro dump, broke them down into their base components, and reconstituted them into ALANCAN car sleeves. At one point, 150 grandmas were working day and night to knit the new car sleeves. However, the new system quickly unraveled when it was discovered that no coins could be placed in the tubes. As a result, the population grew furious, as commerce ground to a halt over the lack of loose change. Cars and trains returned to Alanland, and Alan Bannister's Grand Alancy lay in shambles at his feet. He spent the remainder of his term in office with a space heater pointing out of one of the windows of Quindaro Hall, desperately hoping that warmer weather would cheer the populace, but to no avail.