A memo to my son, screaming his little heart out and threatening to expire immediately if I don’t let him play with his blue metal police bus in the bathtub:
Men have died and worms have eaten them, my darling, but not for Bus. So save the histrionics for a more sympathetic topic. I’m doing you a favor, believe, me, because this little die-cast object would rust within minutes of immersion in the bath, and that little pull-push mechanism that you haven’t learned to work yet would malfunction.
And while we’re on the topic, what is a “police bus” anyway?
What kind of imaginative play is this supposed to inspire? “Let’s pretend we’re at the Democratic National Convention and the lefties are rioting! You fire a few plastic pellets into the crowd at random, and I’ll cuff a few dozen protestors and put them in the Police Bus.”
“No, I know! I’ll be a warden at the prison, and you’re one of the convicts who’s being sent to work on the road crew. Get on the Police Bus!”
“Let’s play that I’m stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire, and the Police Bus is driving by carrying a bunch of strapping young Police Academy cadets to their graduation ceremony, and…”
Oh, my. I’d better confiscate this toy right quick and get Aitch something a little more G-rated.
I’m two weeks into my pretend job, and the commute is killing me. This morning, I found myself mentally calculating the potential loss to humanity if I ran over that MIT student instead of stopping in front of the crosswalk. He had a girlfriend with him, for God’s sake. How brilliant could he be? Definitely not a mathematician…probably just a linguist…a sociolinguist. So a couple of papers on conversational H-dropping would go unpublished. Floor it!
One nice thing about corporate America that I had forgotten: free tampons. In an effort to squeeze every ounce of productivity out if the menstruating portion of the workforce, the Powers that Be have arranged it so that we don’t have to spend a single minute tracking down feminine hygiene products or the quarters to pay for them. Thank you, Powers.
One rotten thing about corporate America that I had forgotten: company e-mail. Not just the general principle— anyone in the directory can, and does, reach out and e-touch perfect work-strangers at any given time, resulting in an incessant series of electronic sighs signaling new messages— but also the specific shortcomings of the application in question, Microsoft Outlook. Have those people in Redmond ever heard of a spam filter? I spend half my time deleting messages with the subject, “It’s not a dating service, it’s a SHAGGING service!” thus negating the productivity gains resulting from the free tampons.
I can hardly wait to go back to being the kind of consultant who phones it in.