Make Mine Extra Crispy

This photo gives new meaning to the idea of well-done. This fast-food joint near our home burned down when a fire started in a deep fryer and got out of hand. No one was injured, but several people were embarrassed.

The fryer operator, Jorge Mendoza, will have his pay docked $5 per week until he repays the $400,000 in damage that was done because of his inability to remember where he stored the fire extinguisher.

Shift Leader, Carl Karlson said, "This is just not the sort of experience our guests expect. Jorge will make this right or we ship his butt back to El Salvador."


Associate District Manager Skip Klein nodded in agreement adding, "Carl Karlson is one of our best shift leaders and we at Lenny Burger have confidence he can pull things together here."

(click to enlarge)



If you've ever worked at an enterprise of any size, you may have encountered the employee who doesn't seem to have an actual job. Title yes, job no.

At Tedious Systems we have several. In fact, some have tried to count me among that group, but they are mistaken. However one of our salesman fits the bill to a tee.

This fellow, we will call F. Scott Fitzgerald, isn't really a salesman, so much as he is a salesman's helper. This character is forever scheduling meetings that he thinks I need to attend. Usually related to some thing or another he and his mates hope to sell. Invariably, it has nothing whatever to do with me or even my department. Also on the occasions when I show up at his request, he isn't present and I am left to guess the point of the meeting. Usually, the hapless potential client is equally mystified.

F. Scott wears what you would call business casual clothing at work. He usually looks neat and his clothes are tasteful for the most part. The odd thing though, is that he also wears a baseball cap, which I find to be a strange combination. He looks like a retiree at the mall.

Apparently, F. Scott has taken his game to a new level. He scheduled a meeting, not with a potential client, but with some folks who might someday be in a business that might provide an opportunity for F. Scott to sell them one of our fine products. That's a bunch of mights. They are a hypothetical, potential client. Should they ever need F. Scott's expertise, he wants them to remember that he is their go-to guy.

At this meeting it seems that F. Scott made some promises about a hypothetical proposal, for the hypothetical client's, hypothetical business endeavor. To complicate matters for me, he promised that I would throw this thing together and get it to the hypothetical client by yesterday afternoon. If only I'd known, I could have nixed the idea out-of-hand.

Instead, yesterday, just before noon, F. Scott, called my office (really a cubicle) to ask how the hypothetical proposal was coming along. Fortunately for him I wasn't at my desk and he was forced to leave a message.

The message began, "I have been asked to check on the proposal that needs to be to xyz today..." My eyes bulged from my head and for a moment, I couldn't see.

In my long experience, when someone tells you that they have been asked to (fill in the blank), without attributing the request to someone, they are lying. This pompous clown was asking on his own behalf and was trying to lend some credibility to the whole stupid plan. The last thing he wanted to admit was that he volunteered me to waste my valuable time on his dumbass scheme. I am not his support.

I left him a message saying that his request was (a)stupid, (b) impossible to fulfill, (c) not my role on the team (I only use team when I am blowing smoke up someone's keister), (d) wasn't going to get done by me. I have yet to hear back from him.

This afternoon this hypothetical customer called to ask me how it was going. No doubt that F. Scott made him call after he got my swell message. The hypothetical customer really didn't want a bunch of hypothetical information, he just had a simple, but still hypothetical question. Easy to answer and he went away happy.

F. Scott remains in hiding at an undisclosed location. Maybe with Dick Cheney.

Salesmen, who needs them?








Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor