Gunning For Safety

   You need a way to defend yourself, because there is a lot of violence these days. For example, recently a motorist drove into one of the bushes on my property in a violent manner. if I had had a gun, I could have gone out and defended the bush, but as it was I had to stand there helplessly, unarmed, while the motorist offered to replace it. I turned down the offer because I hate my bushes, which spend their days lunging out and scratching at me when I mow the lawn. I periodically go out with my chain saw and tame them down to the size of poinsettias, but that just angers them, and within days they are back, bigger and more hostile than before. To be honest, I wouldn’t be bothered in the least if motorists lobbed grenades at them as they drove by. But that is not the point. The point is that we all need some way to defend ourselves.
   The main reason violence is increasing, of course, is television. At one time, all the violence was on television and the streets were safe, because everybody was home watching it. You had shows like
   “Starsky and Hutch,” where you didn’t dare go to the bathroom for fear you would miss some violence. Starsky and Hutch were police officers who believed that the only way to stop a crime—robbery, jaywalking, tax evasion—was to drive their car very fast through a populated area while shooting their guns out the window. They were very effective, largely because people refused to go out on the street for fear of being run over and shot.
   But these days they’re not allowed to show violence on television except on Saturday-morning cartoon shows for children aged five and under. The rest of us are stuck with shows like “Donahue” and “Dallas,” in which people drone on endlessly about sex but never actually do anything on the screen. After watching these shows for a few hours, viewers tend to get bored and go out on the street and commit acts of violence.
   Another reason violence is increasing is electronic arcade games. Arcade games cause violence because they encourage teenagers to shoot at alien beings who are trying to destroy the Earth. The teenagers are getting very good at this. A skilled teenager can defend the entire planet for a quarter; in contrast, the United States government spends roughly $100 billion just to defend the Western Europeans, all of whom hate us. The problem is that the government can get all the dollars it wants merely by threatening to throw taxpayers in jail, whereas the teenagers must get their quarters by badgering their parents. Eventually the parents get irritated, especially if they have been watching television, and this leads to violence.
   How can you defend yourself? One excellent method is to get a vicious dog. You don’t want a large dog, such as a German shepherd, because large dogs are so accustomed to getting respect that they have completely forgotten how to attack. They rely entirely on deep growls and snarls, which are useless against an intruder wearing earplugs or a Sony Walkman. So what you want to get is a small, insecure dog, such as
   a miniature French poodle, which knows how stupid it looks and consequently hates everybody. If you want it to be really vicious, you should give it a silly haircut and make it wear a fake-jewel collar and sit in your lap. After a few days of this, it will attack anything that moves, including you, but this is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
   You can also defend yourself with guns. The U.S. Constitution says that the government cannot stop you from owning a gun. The courts have interpreted this to mean that the government can stop you from owning a gun, so you’d better check your local laws before you buy one. If you do get a gun, you should join your local Gun Fondlers Club and learn the Rules of Gun Safety, which are:
   1. Never load your gun.
   2. Never clean your gun.
   3. Never even take your gun out of the box.
   4. Never point your gun at anything or anybody except your vicious little dog if it really gets out of line.
   If you don’t want to own a gun, you can take up karate, a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. They can also break boards, which could be very useful if an intruder enters your home and tries to hide behind your spare lumber so the dog can’t get at him. I like the idea of learning to break boards with my bare hands. It’s a skill I might be able to use on my bushes.

Something Fishy Here

   Fishing is an excellent way to relax and contemplate the beauty of nature and get in touch with your inner self and maim and kill fish. Many people would be much happier if they went fishing. Take Secretary of State Alexander Haig. He seems awfully tense. I think he should take four or eight years off, buy several hundred six-packs, and go fishing. Al would probably shoot the fish with a bazooka, but what the heck, as long as he doesn’t start a nuclear war or something.
   It’s okay to kill fish. It’s not like hunting, where you kill friendly brown-eyed woodland creatures like Bambi and Thumper who talk in squeaky little voices. Fish are bad. They go to the bathroom in public waters, and they eat teenagers, as was demonstrated in the fine nature movies Jaws I and Jaws II. Besides, fish can’t feel anything. I know this because I took a fish apart once, in biology class. The idea was that I would find a little fish heart and a little fish stomach and a little fish nervous system, like the diagram in the biology textbook. I found none of these things. All I found was glop. Fish are nothing but little bags of glop swimming around with fish heads in front, so don’t waste your pity.
   IMPORTANT NOTE: When I talk about fish, I am not talking about whales. Whales are mammals: they have feelings and can talk to each other, just like you and me. The only difference between whales and humans is that whales mate for life. Some evil foreign persons, such as the Japanese and the Russians, kill whales. The Japanese use them to make efficient automobiles, which they force Americans to buy so American auto workers will lose their jobs. The Russians don’t do anything with their whales. They just use whaling as an excuse to get away from Russia for a couple of months.
   If you want to fish, you have to decide whether to catch freshwater fish or saltwater fish. The main saltwater fish are tuna, swordfish, catamaran, eel, oyster, snook, snipe, wahoo, giant clam, and serpent. To catch them, you have to go to the Bermuda Triangle in a small boat for several days. If you need more information on this subject, read The Old Man and the Sea, a book by Ernest Hemingway, a famous dead writer. In the book, the old man battles a huge fish for a long time, after which the fish tips the boat over and kills everybody except Ishmael. No, wait, that’s Moby-Dick. Anyway, if you catch a big fish, the government requires you to have your picture taken with the fish hanging next to you in case it was stolen. Then you can take it home and either stuff it and hang it on your wall or, if you have any taste at all, just throw it in the garbage.
   The main freshwater fish are bass, bream, guppy, carp, frog, muskellunge, piccolo, and crappie. Some people claim there are also trout, but this Is a mythical fish, like the Loch Ness Monster. Nobody in recorded history has ever even seen a trout, let alone caught one. I went “trout fishing” once, with my friend Neil and his uncle Bruce. We’d wander around these streams, and every now and then Uncle Bruce would point to a shallow pool of water that any fool could see contained absolutely no fish. “That’s where the trout will be,” he’d say, and Neil and I would stand there and not catch fish for several hours while Uncle Bruce went back to the tent to drink. I believe his marriage was in trouble.
   Some people still believe in trout. You’ll see them out by streams on the first day of trout season, standing shoulder to shoulder. The humorous thing is that they think the way to catch these mythical trout is to wave long strings with fuzzy hooks around in the air. I mean, they hardly ever even put them in the water, for heaven’s sake. If there were such a thing as a trout, the only way it would get caught is if it leaped out of the water an grabbed a hook as it flew by.
   If you want to fish for fish that actually exist, you’ll need either bait or lures. The best bait is worms, which you can find almost anywhere worms are found. All you do is impale the worm on the hook, wait for the little worm screams to die down, and toss it in the water. The fish will come around and nibble on it until it’s gone, then they’ll give the hook a gentle tug to let you know it’s time to send another worm down.
   You can also use artificial lures, which are brightly colored plastic or metal things with hooks on them that are scientifically designed so they appear to fish to be brightly colored plastic or metal things with hooks on them. Fish love lures. They gather together in little lure-appreciation groups, called “schools,” and howl with laughter as the lures go by. It’s their major form of entertainment, and they don’t want to lose it, so every now and then they draw lots and the loser has to bite the lure and get caught. This encourages the fishermen to continue.

Tips From The Bottom

Serf Wanted

   I think everybody should have a career. Careers give you money and a place to go during weekdays when there’s nothing good on television.
   No doubt many of you young people out there would like to have careers, but can’t find good jobs to start your careers with. Believe me, things are much better now than they used to be. In the Middle Ages, for example, the only good jobs were king and nobleman, and there were very few openings. So most people had to settle for serf or barbarian. The help-wanted sections in the Middle Ages newspapers looked like this:
   SERF WANTED—Must have experience sleeping with goats and whacking at soil with stick. Must have own stick. Goats provided.
   BARBARIANS WANTED—Looting, some pilfering. Must get along well with other members of horde. Apply at tent of Howard the Unusually Large.
   These jobs offered little opportunity to advance. If you were really good at serf, you might work yourself up to peasant, but that was about it. If you were really good at barbarian, after twenty years the head barbarian would give you a gold watch, then kill you and take it back.
   Things are much better today. But you young folks still must be careful about how you prepare for your careers, because otherwise you may be misled. For example, you have probably seen those television ads claiming that if you join the armed forces, you’ll get all kinds of useful career skills. You know the ads I mean: they show people repairing tanks and jumping out of airplanes at six o’clock in the morning. Now I’m not saying these are not useful skills: I’m just saying that executives at major corporations, such as IBM, rarely repair tanks, and virtually never jump out of airplanes. Successful executives usually wait until their airplanes have landed.
   Another source of bad career advice is school. Your teachers will tell you that the way to get a good job is to memorize such things as the capital of Bolivia. Do you think that your average successful corporate executive can name the capital of Bolivia? Don’t be silly. I’ll tell you who can name the capital of Bolivia: your teacher, that’s who. Do you want to be a teacher? Do you want to spend your days trying to convince a bunch of snotty kids that they should memorize the capital of Bolivia? Of course not. You want to make large sums of money and have a nice office with various buttons you can push when you want coffee. So what you want to do is memorize as little useless information as you can in school. And as soon as you graduate, you should apply for a job in the government.
   The government is loaded with terrific jobs. For example, you might want to be an ex-president. Here’s a lifetime job, with excellent pay and benefits, that virtually any incompetent can do. The only real duty ex-presidents have is to write their memoirs, which nobody ever reads anyway. If you were an ex-president, you could turn in Volume Four of the Encyclopedia Britanica (Ceylon-Congreve) and claim it was your memoirs, and nobody would know the difference.
   You could also apply for a job as Supreme Court Justice. The pay is excellent, and you cannot be fired unless you appear on national television naked or something. You don’t even have to know anything about the law. If the Chief Justice asked you what you thought about a particular case, you’d answer: “Oh, I don’t know, I can see both sides. What do you other justices think?” Then you’d vote with the majority. Your only other duty would be to wear a robe.
   If you can’t get a good government job, you may have to work for private industry, which is not as good, because many private employers expect you to work. The best job, of course, is corporation president, but even this has its pitfalls. For example, when Lee Iacocca was named president of Chrysler, he probably thought he would be able to spend his days sitting in his office, wearing expensive suits and signing the occasional document. Instead, he is regularly forced to appear in humiliating television commercials, in which he offers to pay people money if they will buy his cars.
   I think the best private-industry job is construction worker. You may think this would be a difficult job, involving lifting heavy objects and assembling buildings. But if you look closely at a construction site, you’ll notice the workers walk around a lot, drink coffee, and yell to each other, but, because of various clauses in their contracts, they never actually build anything. I’m not sure who really builds buildings;
   I suspect it’s done at night, perhaps by serfs.

Wedding Etiquette

   This is an excellent time of year to get married, what with the warm weather and all. As you may recall, it was around this time of year that Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married in a ceremony that lasted, by my calculations, about two weeks. It took Charles nearly a half-hour just to say “I do”:
   “I, Charles Arthur Philip George Henry Maurice Billy Bob Norman Howard Elmer the Third, Duke of the Realm, Defender of the Throne, Earl of Pillsbury, Lord of the Manse, Prince of a Fellow, Knight of the Trouser, Top of the Morning, Vice President of Marketing, and much, much more, do.”
   If you want to have a nice wedding, a really Special Day, you have to plan very carefully and follow the rules of wedding etiquette. Here’s what you do:

Getting Engaged

   You should get engaged to somebody who has a job and will show up at the wedding. If you think your fiance is unreliable, get engaged to several people, because there is no breach of etiquette worse than making your friends and relatives give you wedding presents and then failing to go through with it. If you get engaged to several people and they all show up, take all but one aside, tell them you won’t be needing them, and give them each an inexpensive fondue set (you’ll receive dozens as wedding gifts).

Announcing the Engagement

   If you are a member of the working classes and have a name like Heivina Spackle, the newspapers won’t print your engagement announcement, and you’ll have to settle for a three-by-five card on the bulletin board at the supermarket. So if you want to make the social pages, your best bet is to use a name like Allison Weatherington-Huffington DuBois and send in a picture of Julie Andrews.

Choosing a Church

   You must do this carefully, because some churches won’t let you get married in them unless you hold certain specific religious beliefs. Check this out in advance by calling the clergyman:
   YOU: Hello. Could you tell me if you require people to have any specific religious beliefs?
   CLERGYMAN: Why yes, we do.
   YOU: How many?
   CLERGYMAN: Let’s see ... five, six, seven ... nine in all.
   YOU: Fine. Can you send me a set?

The Invitation

   Your invitation should consist of a large envelope containing several smaller envelopes in random sizes, a piece of tissue paper, and a card with these words:
   Mr. and Mrs. Earl C. Spackle Request the Honour and Favor Of Your Attendance at the Marriage Of Their Daughtour Heivina Mae (who is not pregnant) To Elrood P Budgcood At the Manor Downs Vista Country Club And Racquetball Court Friday at around 4:30
   RSVP
   No Tank Tops

What the Wedding Party Should Wear

   The groom’s party should wear pastel senior-prom-style outfits rented at the shopping mall. The bride’s party should wear expensive dresses so unattractive that they can never be used again, even as tourniquets.

The Order of the Wedding Procession

   The first person down the aisle should be an adorable child belonging to the sister of the bride. If the bride’s sister has no adorable child, she should rent one. Next comes the sister of the groom escorted by the maid of honor’s boyfriend, followed by the niece of the maid of honor’s boyfriend escorted by the oldest brother of the mother of the bride, followed by the oldest unmarried bridesmaid escorted by the youngest male member of the groom’s family who has completed at least two years of college or technical school, followed by the great-grandmother of the bride (unless she is dead) escorted by the best man, followed, in order, by anyone else at the back of the church who is wearing nice clothes.

Who Pays for the Wedding

   The family of the bride pays for the church, the clergyman, the limousines, the bridal gown, the flowers, the reception room, the band, the photographer, the hors d’oeuvre, the dinner, the cake, the liquor and the honeymoon. The family of the groom eats a lot and gets tanked.
   So there you have them, the rules of wedding etiquette. In a future column, I’ll discuss the other two major etiquette areas, which are eating and death.

“Look! I Got You A Gift!”

   Well, the holiday gift-giving season is upon us once again, like an outbreak of shingles. Already I have received dozens of colorful mail-order-gift catalogs urging me to buy bizarre objects and give them to people. I recently got a catalog featuring enormous cans of popcorn smeared with caramel, each containing enough carbohydrates to meet the needs of a medium-sized industrial city for a year. If you want to give this gift, you just call the catalog people on their toll-free number and they ship a can to the person of your choice. It never even has to enter your home.
   The question, of course, is, Why would you give such a gift? Do you know of anybody in the entire United States who would actually want a huge congealed mass of caramel popcorn? Of course not. This is an example of a holiday gift, which is an object whose primary purpose is to be given, not to actually be used. It expresses the ultimate holiday gift-giving message, which is, “Look! I got you a gift!” Another example is electric razors. Every year at this time, you see television commercials wherein a cartoon version of an electric razor shaves a cartoon face just as well as a cartoon razor blade, and thousands of women go out and buy $39.95 electric razors and give them to men (“Look!
   I got you a gift!”). And the men say, “Great! An electric razor!” Then they continue to use their nineteen-cent blade razors. They stick the electric razors into closets with their caramel-covered popcorn.
   Men do the same thing to women. Every year I go to the department-store cosmetics counter, which emits a powerful aroma, reminiscent of a house of ill repute, and buy my wife one of the thirty thousand gift packages containing little designer tubes and jars with names like “Essence of Fragrance Moisturizing Body Cream,” “Body of Essence Cream Moisturizing Fragrance,” “Moist Fragrant Body Essential Creamer,” etc. I don’t know what these terms mean, and I don’t care. All I know is I can say, “Look! I got you a gift!” I doubt my wife uses these things, because she lets my two-year-old son play with them, which means he routinely smells like a house of ill repute, but that’s better than some of the things he smells like, if you get my drift.
   But these are not the ultimate Holiday Gifts, because technically you could actually use them. I mean, you could use caramel-covered popcorn as attic insulation, and you could use an electric razor to crush insects. But many of the gifts that spring up in the holiday season reach a new level, the level of Pure Holiday Gift, which means you can’t use them for anything except possibly ballast. For example:
   Cute ceramic knick-knack figurines depicting animals, especially cats—The way I see it, everybody who wants a cute ceramic cat has already bought one. It is cruel to inflict such objects on other people.
   I once was present when a holiday guest gave the hostess a ceramic cat, and she stood there, handling it as you would a live grenade, and trying desperately to think of an excuse not to put it on her mantel, which is the only thing you can do with a knickknack. Eventually, of course, she had to put it on the mantel, and the entire room suddenly acquired an air of cuteness that no amount of expert interior decoration can disguise.
   Guest soap formed into little balls or fruit—Nobody uses this soap. The people who live in the house don’t use it, because it’s for guests. The guests are afraid to use it, because they don’t want to mess it up. They end up not washing their hands, which leads to the spread of infections. The government should put a stop to this soon, because it is only a matter of time before somebody starts selling guest soap shaped like cats.
   Fruitcakes manufactured in April and packaged in cans and allowed to sit in a warehouse until they reach the density of a bowling ball—These present all the problems of caramel-covered popcorn, with the added problem that they can cause hernias.
   Coffee-table books—These are gigantic books with lots of pictures and titles like Scissors Through the Ages that you couldn’t read even if you wanted to because the pages are all welded together from when your guests spilled banana daiquiris on them.
   What can you do about this? You can buy gifts that people actually use. Think how happy you’d be if YOU got, say, a case of paper towels. Wouldn’t that be terrific? That’s what I’m going to get my wife this year. I’ll bet she’ll be speechless.

About Lawn Order

   I got to thinking about ecology the other day when I ran over a turtle with my lawnmower. Now before you reptile lovers start sending me irate letters full of misspelled words, let me assure you that I was not aiming for the turtle. I have enough trouble keeping my lawnmower in operation, and the last thing I would do is risk damaging it with a turtle. Let me also assure you that the turtle was unharmed, except for
   a few nicks on its shell that might make it less attractive to turtles of the opposite sex, whichever sex that happens to be. I don’t know how you determine the sex of a turtle, and I don’t want to know. I have come to think of this particular turtle as male, because my two-year-old son, who receives signals directly from outer space! recently announced that its name is Bob.
   Bob has been hanging around our lawn for several months now, despite our efforts to encourage him to go into the woods with the other turtles.
   “These are the best years of your life, Bob,” we say. “Don’t waste them on our lawn.” But Bob turns a deaf ear to our suggestions, assuming turtles have ears. You would think the lawnmower incident would have made him have second thoughts about our lawn, but lately he seems more attached to it than ever. This makes me think that maybe the theory of evolution is wrong after all. I figure that if turtles really had been evolving for all these years, they would have come up with something more intelligent than Bob.
   Anyway, all this got me to thinking about ecology. Most wild animals are, like Bob, fairly stupid. Plants are even worse. It is up to us human beings to use our superior brains to protect them, or one day we will wake up to find there is no more nature, and we will no longer have any place to hold 1960s-style outdoor weddings.
   So I am all for preserving wildlife, but I also think we have to use some judgment about it. We can’t go around preserving all wildlife, because some of it is disgusting. Take insects, for example. The other night, while we were having dinner, some wildlife entered our house in the form of a flying insect that looked like a mosquito, but was large enough to play in the National Football League. It was the kind of insect that wouldn’t even have to sting you, because it could crush you to death merely by landing on you.
   Now I imagine that the president of the Sierra Club, sitting in the safety of his insect-free office, would say that we should have let this insect drone around the dining room until it broke a window and flew outside, where it would be eaten by another species, which would in turn be eaten by another species, and so on and so on, leading up the Great Chain of Life, until finally the second-to-last link in the chain is eaten by a nuclear physicist. But that is mere theory. The truth is that nothing around my house would have dared to eat this insect; in fact, it probably would have eaten Bob, shell and all. I bet that if the president of the Sierra Club had been in my house, he would have done exactly what I did, which was to leap up from the table and batter the insect repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper.
   So I propose that we direct our ecology efforts toward preserving those forms of wildlife that are safe and nondisgusting, namely:
   Cute, furry animals, such as seals and otters, that you see in Walt Disney nature movies, but never around your house. Large animals, such as elephants and boa constrictors, that live on other continents. Plants that produce flowers or eat insects. Turtles.
   I have already embarked on a personal ecology effort to preserve Bob. I have resolved that, despite the great personal sacrifice involved, I will no longer mow my lawn.

The Law Vs. Justice

   Most of us learn how the United States legal system works by watching television. We learn that if we obey the law, we will wind up chatting and laughing with attractive members of the opposite sex when the program ends, whereas if we break the law, we will fall from a great height onto rotating helicopter blades.
   Some television shows explain the legal system in greater detail: they show actual dramatizations of court trials. The best such show was
   “Perry Mason,” which starred Raymond Burr as a handsome defense attorney who eventually gained so much weight he had to sit in a wheelchair.
   “Perry Mason” was set in a large city populated almost entirely by morons. For example, the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, was so stupid that the people he prosecuted were always innocent. I mean always. I imagine that whenever Hamilton arrested a suspect, the suspect heaved a sigh of relief and hugged his family, knowing he would Soon be off the hook.
   Now you’d think that after a while Hamilton would have realized he couldn’t prosecute his way out of a paper bag, and would have gone into some more suitable line of work, such as sorting laundry. But he kept at it, week after week and year after year, prosecuting innocent people. Nevertheless, everything worked out, because in this particular city the criminals turned out to be even stupider than Hamilton: they always came to the trials, and, after sitting quietly for about twenty minutes, lurched to their feet and confessed. The result was that Perry Mason got
   a reputation as a brilliant defense attorney, but the truth is that anyone with the intelligence of a can of creamed corn would have looked brilliant in this courtroom.
   The major problem with “Perry Mason” is that it is unrealistic: Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger usually speak in understandable English words, and by the time the trial is over everybody has a pretty good grasp of the facts of the case. In real life, of course, lawyers speak mostly in Latin, and by the time they’re done nobody has the vaguest notion what the facts are. To understand why this is, you have to understand the history of the U.S. legal system.
   In the frontier days, our legal system was very simple: if you broke
   a law, armed men would chase you and beat you up or throw you in jail or hang you; in extreme cases, they would hang you, then beat you up in jail. So everybody obeyed the law, which was easy to do, because basically there were only two laws:
   No assaulting people. No stealing.
   This primitive legal system was so simple that even the public understood it. The trials were simple, too:
   SHERIFF: Your honor, the defendant confessed that he shot his wife dead.
   JUDGE: Did he admit it freely, or did you have your horse stand on him first, like last time?
   SHERIFF: No, sir. He admitted it freely.
   JUDGE: Fair enough. String him up.
   The trouble with this system was that it had no room for lawyers. If a lawyer had appeared in a frontier courtroom and started tossing around terms such as “habeas corpus,” he would have been shot.
   So lawyers, for want of anything better to do, formed legislatures, which are basically organizations that meet from time to time to invent new laws. Before long, the country had scads of laws—laws governing the watering of lawns, laws governing the spaying of dogs, laws governing the production and sale of fudge, and so on—and today nobody has the slightest idea what is legal and what is not. This has led to an enormous demand for lawyers. Lawyers don’t understand the legal system any better than the rest of us do, but they are willing to talk about it in an impressive manner for large sums of money. In today’s legal system, the frontier murder trial would go like this:
   SHERIFF: Your honor ...
   DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I object. In his use of the word “your,” the witness is clearly stipulating the jurisprudence of a writ of deus ex machine.
   PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: On the contrary. In the case of Merke v. Barnbuster, the Court clearly ruled that an ex post facto debenture does not preclude the use of the word “your” in a matter of ad hoc quod erat demonstrandum.
   DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Oh yeah? Well Carthaginia delendo est.
   This goes on for several hours, until everybody has forgotten what the trial was about in the first place and the defendant is able to sneak out of the courtroom, unnoticed.

Into The Round File

   I like to cheer myself up by pretending that my Mail actually screams when I throw it into the wastebasket:
   Dear MR. BARRY:
   You have almost certainly won a trillion dollars. We’re dead serious, MR. BARRY. We’re a gigantic publishing company and we just woke up this morning and we said, “By God, let’s send one trillion dollars to
   MR. BARRY, no strings attached.” That’s just the kind of gigantic publishing company we are. And frankly, MR. BARRY, you are under no obligation whatsoever to take a six-week trial subscription to a new Magazine called PhOtograPhs of homes That Are Much Nicer Than Yours, because all we really want to do, MR. BARRY, is send you one trillion ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Resident of the 15,924th District:
   This is the first of an interminable series of newsletters I’ll be sending you at your expense so that you’ll have photographs of your representative in Washington representing you by eating breakfast with the President. I recently had an opportunity to exchange views with the President during an informal working orientation breakfast for the 742
   new congresspersons, and the President and I agreed that one of the most important issues facing the nation, including the 15,924th district, is mineral resources on the ocean floor. I am pleased to report that I have been appointed to the influential Manganese Subcommittee of the House Special Select Committee on Grayish-White Metallic Elements, and I’m planning a fact-finding trip to ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Friend:
   Every day, all over the world, innocent children with large, soulful eyes are getting terrible diseases. Also, countless furry little endangered species are being dismembered by industrialists wielding chain saws. This is all your fault. So we want you to send some money to ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Electric Customer:
   Due to inflation, we have been forced to apply for a rate ... No, wait, forget that. We can’t use inflation anymore. Uh, let’s see ... Oh yeah. Due to the fact that our new Harbor Vista nuclear generating plant, if we ever get it finished, may have some piping problems that would cause it to emit a deadly cloud of radioactive gas the size of Canada, we have been forced to apply for a rate increase so we’ll be able to afford a really top-notch lawyer with his own jet and everything. We realize that, since we just got a rate increase last week, this may seem
   ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Mr. Barry:
   In a recent column, you stated that Abraham Lincoln ran the hundred-yard dash in 8.4 seconds, and that ice fishermen have the same average IQ as mailboxes. As an avid ice fisherman, and chairman of the History Department at Myron B. Thalmus Junior College, I would like to know where you get your ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear MR. BARRY:
   Really! We mean it! One trillion dol ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Mr. Barry:
   Unless you’re the kind of worthless scum that sat idly by while those thugs beat up that woman in New York some years back, you probably have been giving a lot of thought to your family’s financial security. No doubt you have said to yourself countless times, “Sure, I’d love to invest $10,000 or more in liquidated Option Debenture Fiduciary Instruments of Trust, but I don’t know where to mail a certified or cashier’s check.” Well, your worries are over, because ...
   AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
   Dear Brother Barry:
   As you are no doubt aware, the Reverend Bud Albumen didn’t develop one of the fastest-growing evangelical organizations in south central Kentucky just by accident. He developed it by building really top-notch studio facilities. But these facilities cost money, which is why the Lord told the Reverend Albumen to tell you to send in a Love Offering of
   $13.50 per member of your household, or a special rate of $6.75, which is
   a 50 percent discount, for children under ten. Just as soon as the Reverend Albumen receives your Love Offering, he will ask the Lord not to bring disease and suffering and mudslides to your home, but remember, he can’t do this until he receives your ... NO! NOT THE SCISSORS! PLEASE
   DON’T ...
   AAARRRGGGH
   Clip.

Claw Your Way To The Top

Dave Barry

Dedication
Introduction
You And This Book
Today’s Business Climate
Step One: Setting Your Goals
Test Your Business I.Q.
Chapter One. The History Of Business
The Very First Businesses
Did Dinosaurs Have Businesses?
Primitive Human Businesses
Business During The Middle Ages
The Birth Of The Helicopter: The Renaissance
The New World
The Rise Of The Modern Corporation
And So ...
Chapter Two. Getting A Job
Birth
Preschool
Elementary School
High School
College
Graduate School
Are There Jobs Available?
Lobster Repair: A Fast-Growing Field
Where Should You Begin Your Job Search?
Your Resume
RESUME
Writing An Effective Letter That Will Get You A Job Interview
Whom You Should Send Your Letter To
How To Prepare For Your Job Interview
The Interview Process
Chapter Three. How To Do Your Job, Whatever It Is
Taking A Phone Message
The Corporate Meeting
How To Act In A Meeting
A Fun Thing To Do If Somebody Falls Asleep In A Meeting
How To Take Notes During A Meeting
Special Note Of Encouragement To Timid Housewives Who Have Been Thinking About Maybe Trying To Get Into The Business World But Are Worried That It Might Be Too Hard And They Might Not Be Qualified To Do Anything Except Make Tuna Casserole
Chapter Four. Stepping Over Your Co-Workers
Getting Promoted
Ethical Question: Do You Have To Be Scum To Get Ahead?
How To Act Like An Executive
Dealing With Your Subordinates
Test To Find Out If A Potential Employee Is The Kind Of Person Who Thinks Up Ideas
How To Fire People
How You Should Behave Around Other Executives
List Of Topics That Middle-Aged White Anglo-Saxon Males Talk To Each Other About When They’re Not Talking Business
Chart Of Key Phrases To Use When Talking About Sports
Joining A Club
Computers In Business
Glossary Of Standard Computer Terms
How Computers Work
How To Use Computer-Generated Pie Charts And Bar Graphs To Make Abstract Concepts Understandable To Morons Like Your Boss
Chapter Five. Business Communications
What Makes A Good Business Memo
Standard Format For The Business Memo
Standard Format To Use For Lengthy Reports To Insure That Nobody Reads Them
How To Write Letters
Letters To Customers Or Potential Customers
Letters To Companies That Owe Your Company Money
Letters Of Recommendation
The Basic Rules Of Business Grammar
Common Grammar Questions
Making Speeches And Oral Presentations
Chapter Six. Giving Good Lunch
Examples Of Classy Restaurant Names
Examples Of Non-Classy Restaurant Names
Entertaining At Home
The Heimlich Maneuver
Heimlich-Maneuver Hockey
What To Do If A Client Or Business Associate Dies
Chapter Seven. How To Dress Exactly Like Everybody Else
How Men Should Dress
Shirts
Ties
How To Tie A Tie
Shoes
Underwear
How Women Should Dress
Hosiery
Makeup
Shoes
Chapter Eight. Sales
Rule #1: Maintain Eye Contact With The Prospect At All Times No Matter What
Rule #2: Call The Prospect By His First Name A Lot, Because He Might Forget You’re Talking To Him
Rule #3: Learn To Read The Prospect’s “Body Language”
Rule #4: Get The Prospect Into A “Yes” Frame Of Mind
Rule #5: Ask For The Sale
Chapter Nine. How To Go Into Business For Yourself
Tax Implications Of Going Into Business For Yourself
Three Surefire Business Concepts
Concept #1: The Electric Appliance Suicide Module
Concept #2: The “Mister Mediocre” Fast-Food Restaurant Franchise
Concept #3: The “Bingo The Leech” Licensed Character
Chapter Ten. How Finance Works
Who Should Read This Chapter
How Corporate Finances Work
The Stock Market
Common Financial Questions
Afterword

Dave Barry.
Claw Your Way To The Top

   How To Become the Head of a Major Corporation In Roughly a Week

Dedication

   This book is dedicated to Burton R. Legume, inventor, who in 1907 dreamed up the concept of the hold button, without which the modern industrial economy would not be possible

Introduction

You And This Book

   Maybe you’re a young graduate looking for his or her first job. Or maybe you’re a veteran employee who’d like to advance up the corporate ladder. Or maybe you’re a Labrador retriever who nosed this book off the coffee table, and it fell open to this page.
   It makes no difference who you are: the important thing is, this book can show you how to ACHIEVE YOUR CAREER GOALS and WIN THE REWARDS OF SUCCESS such as CARS and HOUSES and GREAT BIG BOATS where, any time you feel like it, you press a little button and UNIFORMED SERVANTS FROM SOME DISEASE-RIDDEN FOREIGN NATION WHERE EVERYBODY IS WRETCHEDLY POOR WHICH IS WHY THEY CAME OVER HERE bring you PLATES OF LITTLE CRACKERS WITH TOASTED CHEESE ON TOP or, if you prefer, FALSTON-PURINA DOG TREATS.

Today’s Business Climate

   Today’s business climate is partly cloudy with highs in the mid-70’s.
   Ha ha! That is just a sampler of the kind of snappy humor you will find throughout this book, along with a lot of words printed in capital letters to keep you from falling asleep. Actually, today’s business climate is perfect. It is a reaction against the violently antibusiness mood that swept the nation back in the sixties, when the young people of America, except for julie and David Eisenhower, decided to reject money as a life objective and became “hippies.” They scorned the corporate world, with its sterility, its greed, its exploitation, its conformity, its Xerox machines that were forever breaking down. They embarked instead upon a quest for a transcendent universal consciousness imbued with peace and love, which they sought to achieve by saying “dude” to members of minority groups and smoking reefers the size of marine flares.
   But gradually these young people realized they were paying a subtle price for their counterculture lifestyle, in the sense that they were always waking up in Volkswagen Microbuses with lice in their hair. So they decided that, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to become a sterile conforming greedy exploiter after all, so they went to work for large corporations. Soon they developed children and houses and Volvos, and within a few years they had reached the point of central airconditioning, from which there is no turning back. Most of them can no longer locate their Grateful Dead albums.
   So now everybody except Ralph Nader is strongly pro-business. People who, only a few years back, would have hurled pig blood at Lee Iacocca for some symbolic protest reason or another now think he should run for president. What this means for you is: This is a GREAT TIME for you to get into business. And don’t worry about qualifications: ANYBODY can make it in the business world. All you really need is a little gumption, a willingness to work, some common sense, and a brother-in-law who is Vice-President in Charge of Personnel.
   Ha ha! Another business-related joke! This is gonna be some fun, getting you a job, all right!

Step One: Setting Your Goals

   The first step toward your successful business career is to determine your Career Objectives. To do these things, you’ll need a nice sharp number-two pencil and some three-by-five cards. I’ll wait right here while you go get them, okay? I’ll meet you underneath the asterisks on the next page! Hurry back! This is going to be exciting!
   (Brief pause.)
   The point of the preceding paragraph, obviously, was to get rid of the totally hopeless dweebs who actually think they need three-by-five cards to determine their Career Objectives. These are the same people who you just know are going to write down things like:
   1. I would like to work with people.
   Which of course is a joke, because it is a proven fact that the more you work with people, the more you hate them. Look at the clerks at any big-city Bureau of Motor Vehicles: They work with people all day long, and their basic approach to human interaction is to make you wait in line as long as possible and then tell you you’re in the wrong line, in hopes that you’ll have a very painful and ultimately fatal seizure, and they’ll get to watch.
   So you savvy persons have ruled out “working with people” as a Career Objective. What you want, from your career, is a SENSE OF FULFILLMENT AS A HUMAN BEING and MAXIMUM PERSONAL SATISFACTION as measured in U.S. DOLLARS. You want a Rolex watch and numerous fast cars. You want employees so desperate for your approval that you could put your cigar out on their foreheads and they’d thank you. You want to be able to leave Supreme Court justices on “hold” for upwards of an hour. And you know that you do not get these things by diddling around with three-by-five cards.
   Welcome back! Got your cards? Great! Now first, I’d like you to write down, on each card, a Career Objective, such as “working with people.” Okay? I want you to do this until you have listed 800 Career Objectives—you might have to go get some more cards!—and then I want you to arrange them in order according to which objective contains the most vowels, okay? Great! We’re on our way! Call me when you’re done!

Test Your Business I.Q.

   1. You are the world’s largest manufacturer of carbonated beverages, and you have a product that is famous worldwide, that is virtually synonymous with the term “soft drink,” and that has had the same formula for 99
   years. It has a very loyal following. You are making millions and millions of dollars selling it. You should:
   (a) just keep it the way it is.
   (b) Change the formula.
   (c) Set fire to your own hair.
   2. You are a major defense contractor, and you are building a gun for the Army that is supposed to be able to shoot down enemy planes. So far the taxpayers have paid you nearly $2 billion for it, and all your tests indicate that the only way it would have any negative effect on an enemy plane is if you could somehow sneak into the cockpit and manually whack the pilot over the head with it. How should you deal with this problem?
   (a) You should try really hard to do a better job.
   (b) You should tell the Defense Department that they probably should get another contractor.
   (c) You should refund at least some of the taxpayers’ money.
   3. You are a major automobile manufacturer. You have been losing sales to cars from other nations, particularly Japan, because their cars tend to be fuel efficient, technologically advanced, and extremely well made, whereas the most innovative concept you have come up with in the past two decades is the opera window. You should:
   (a) Have Congress pass a law restricting Japanese imports, so consumers will have no choice but to buy your cars.
   (b) Have Congress pass a law making it legal for you to kidnap consumers’ children and not return them until the consumers buy your cars.
   (c) Have Congress pass a law ordering the United States Army to barge directly into consumers’ homes and take their money at gunpoint and give it to you.
   (d) Remind everybody a lot about Pearl Harbor.
   4. You are in charge of a large department, and you have an opening for a supervisor. The two obviously best-qualified candidates are women who have worked in the department for the same amount of time. Both are intelligent, highly competent, and respected by the other employees. In every way they seem equally qualified, although it happens that one of them is black. What decision do you make?
   (a) You promote the black woman, on the theory that it will help compensate for past injustices.
   (b) You promote the white woman, on the theory that if you promote the black woman, people will say it was just because she’s black.
   (c) You flip a coin.
   HOW TO SCORE
   Give yourself one point for each close friend you have in the Personnel Department.

Chapter One. The History Of Business

   When we look around us at the modern world, we see businesses everywhere, unless of course we happen to be, for example, in the bathroom. But even there, we see EVIDENCE of a thriving industrial economy, such as the Ty-D-Bowl automatic commode freshener. Sitting there and thinking about it, you have to marvel at the incredible creativity and diversity of the business world. Where did all of this come from? How did the human race get from the point of being primitive and stupid to the point where it could automatically, without lifting a finger, turn its toilet water blue? Let’s see if we can answer some of these questions. My guess is we can’t.

The Very First Businesses

   Many, many years ago, there was no business on Earth. This is because the Earth was primarily molten lava, which is not a good economic climate. Office furniture would melt in a matter of seconds.
   Then the Earth started to cool, and tiny one-celled animals—the amigo, the paramedic, the rotarian—began to form. Over the course of several million years, these animals learned to join together to form primitive corporations, called “jellyfish,” which were capable of only the most basic business activities, such as emitting waste and eating lunch. By today’s standards, these corporations were very unsophisticated: if, for example, you mentioned the phrase “Dow Jones Industrial Average” to them, they would have no idea what you were talking about. They would probably sting you.

Did Dinosaurs Have Businesses?

   Nobody can really say for sure, because the Ice Age destroyed all their records. But paleontologists now believe that, yes, dinosaurs probably did have businesses. Not the Brontosaurus, of course. That would be ridiculous. How would he hold his briefcase?
   But the Tyrannosaurus Rex has those funny little arms, which would have been perfect. Paleontologists think he was probably in Sales.

Primitive Human Businesses

   When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business as we now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This went on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a sudden a primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. “Why not,” he said, “pile thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert to form great big geometric shapes?” Well, everybody thought this was an absolutely terrific idea, and soon they were hard at work. It wasn’t until several thousand years later that they realized they had been suckered into a classic “pyramid” scheme, and of course by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas.

Business During The Middle Ages

   Business during the Middle Ages was slow. The main job opportunity available was serf, which involved whacking at the soil with a stick. It was not the kind of work where you had a lot of room for advancement. The best a serf could hope for, if he was really good at it, was that he would be rewarded by not having one of his arms sliced off by a passing knight.
   If you wanted to be a knight you had to know somebody, and it really wasn’t that much better than being a serf. You were always being sent off to try to get the Holy Land back from the Turks. This was no fun at all, because of course the Holy Land is very sunny, meaning your armor would get hot enough to fry an egg on. In fact the Turks, who dressed in light, casual, 100
   percent cotton garments, would often do this. They’d sneak up behind a knight and crack an egg on his armor, then race away, laughing in Turkish, before he could turn around. So as you can imagine, knights would come back in a pretty bad mood, and often would have to slice off several serf arms before they even wanted to talk about it.
   So the bottom line is that the Middle Ages were hardly the kind of ages where anybody wanted to make any long-term business commitments. All the really smart investors were waiting for the Renaissance.

The Birth Of The Helicopter: The Renaissance

   The Renaissance was caused by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the first primitive sketches of what would eventually become the helicopter. Of course, nobody really understood the significance of this at the time. But people did realize that, whatever this new invention was, it was going to require a tremendous amount of insurance. Thus a major business was born.
   This was followed by trade with the Orient. The way this worked was, Europeans would gather up some gold, and they would tromp across Asia to the Orient, where they would trade their gold for spices. They didn’t really want spices, you understand, but the Orientals claimed that spice was all they had, and the Europeans, having tromped all that way, wanted to take home something.
   After some years of this, the Europeans were starting to run out of gold. Also their food was so heavily spiced that it glowed in the dark. They probably would have all died of heartburn if Columbus had not discovered the New World.

The New World

   Every schoolchild is familiar with the story of how Columbus set off in three tiny ships (the Pinto, the Cordoba, and the Coupe de Ville), and right away his crew started getting very nauseous and asking why for God’s sake he had decided on three tiny ships instead of one medium ship. Nevertheless Columbus pressed on, ignoring popular fears that he would sail off the edge of the Earth, and finally he and his hardy band made it to the New World, except for the Pinto, which mysteriously exploded, and the Cordoba, which due to a navigational error actually did sail off the edge of the Earth.
   The New World had an extremely good business climate. For one thing, there was plenty of land, and nobody owned it, unless you counted the people who had been living there for several thousand years. For another thing, it had an abundance of the two crucial factors you need for economic development: Water Power, in the form of rivers, and Raw Materials, in the form of ore. So soon millions of Europeans flocked over to the New World to make their fortunes. They stood around all day, sunup to sundown, throwing handfuls of ore into the rivers and waiting for economic development to take place. They would have starved to death if a friendly Indian named Squanto (which is Indian for “Native American”) hadn’t come along and shown them how to plant corn. “You put the seeds in the ground,” explained Squanto. He couldn’t believe what kind of morons he was dealing with.
   Soon the corn came up, and the Europeans decided to celebrate by inviting all the Indians over for a big Thanksgiving dinner, then sending them off to live on reservations in North Dakota.

The Rise Of The Modern Corporation

   At the beginning of the modern corporate era, many businesses actually made things. Typically, they’d get hold of a Raw Material, which they’d smelt and pour into a mold, where it would cool and form a product, which they’d sell for a profit, which the owner would use to buy his family a nice house on Long Island.
   The problem was that when the owner died, the family members were darned if they’d come in off Long Island and engage in anything as filthy as smelting, so they’d hire a professional manager to run the business. Often, however, the professional manager was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and consequently he wasn’t exactly dying to smelt either. So he’d dream up other corporate activities for himself to engage in, such as Marketing, Long-Range Planning, Management by Objectives, and Lunch, and he’d hire additional managers, who of course would turn right around and hire managers of their own, and so on.
   This is how we arrived at the modern corporation, where at the very top you have a chief executive who spends his entire day posing for Annual Report photographs and testifying before Congress; and beneath him you have several thousand executives engaged in “middle management,” which is the corporate term for “management activities in which there is no possible way for anybody to tell whether you’re screwing up”; and beneath them you have tens of thousands of secretarial, clerical, and reception personnel; and beneath them somewhere in a factory nobody ever goes to because there is no decent place around it where you can have lunch, you have the actual production work force, which consists of a grizzled old veteran employee named “Bud.”
   This modern corporate system offers something for everybody:
   THE EXECUTIVES get enormous salaries and bonuses and stock options and offices big enough to play jai alai in.
   THE SECRETARIAL, CLERICAL, AND RECEPTION PERSONNEL get medical plans, dental plans, pension plans, savings plans, go-to-college plans, stop-smoking plans, lose-weight plans, softball plans, and bulletin boards it takes upwards of two working days to read.
   THE STOCKHOLDERS get regular annual reports printed on top-quality paper informing them that despite less-than-projected earnings caused by impossible-to-foresee foreign-currency fluctuations exacerbated by a short-term restructuring of the long-term capitalized debenturization of the infrastructure and the discovery that certain moths may mate for life, the future continues to look very bright inasmuch as the corporation quite frankly has the best darned management team the human mind can conceive of. BUD gets regular five-minute breaks.

And So ...

   ... and so we have come to the present day, to the incredibly sophisticated world of the modern corporation—a world that YOU, thanks to this book, are about to become part of! In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how you can land that all-important entry-level job, so you’ll want to study it very carefully! Unless your dad owns the company, in which case you can head on out to the golf course.

Chapter Two. Getting A Job

   In this chapter, we’ll take you step-by-step through the job-hunting process, starting right at the beginning.

Birth

   This is the time to start preparing for your business career. You can bet your little navel protuberance that the other babies are preparing, and you don’t want to fall so far behind that they wind up as vice-presidents and you wind up serving them food and wearing a comical white hat in the corporate cafeteria. In fact, I’d recommend that you start preparing before birth, except that you’d have trouble seeing the flashcards.
   The flashcard procedure is as follows: you lie on your back in your crib, and your parents lean over you and hold up cards, each of which has printed on it a basic fact that will help you succeed in business. As your parents show you the card, they should read it out loud in a perky voice, as though they are just having the time of their lives, and you should indicate comprehension by waving your arms and pooping.
   You should spend as much time with the flashcards as possible. Ideally, you’ll reach adolescence without ever once getting an unobstructed view of your parents’ faces. As an adult, you’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind you of Mother.

Preschool

   Look for a strong pre-business curriculum, one that emphasizes practical activities, such as blocks, over liberal-arts activities, such as gerbils.

Elementary School

   This is where you should learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, which are skills that are essential for filling out expense reports; you should also develop lifelong chumships with anybody whose name ends in “II,” or, even better, “III.” You might also consider learning to read. This is not really necessary, of course, inasmuch as you will have a secretary for this purpose, but some businesspersons like to occasionally do it themselves for amusement on long airplane trips.

High School

   The point of high school is to get yourself into a good college. The way you do this is by being well rounded, which is measured by how many organizations you belong to. Many college admissions officers select students by actually slapping a ruler down on the list of accomplishments underneath each applicant’s high school yearbook picture. So you should join every one of the ludicrous high school organizations available to you, such as the Future Appliance Owners Club and the National Honor Society. If they won’t let you into the National Honor Society, have your parents file a lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of intelligence.
   Another thing you need to do in high school is get good SAT scores, which are these two numbers you receive in the mail from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. They have a whole warehouse filled with numbers up there. To get yours, you have to send some money off by mail to Princeton, then you have to go sit in a room full of other students with number-two pencils and answer questions like “BRAZIL is to COMPENSATE as LUST is to ...” Then you have to look at the various multiple choices and try to figure out what kind of mood the folks up at the Educational Testing Service were in on the day they made up that particular question.
   Nobody has the vaguest idea anymore how this elaborate ritual got started, what it has to do with anything in the real world, or how the Educational Testing Service decides what numbers to send you. My personal theory is that it has to do with how much money you send them in the mail. I think the amounts they tell you to send are actually just Suggested Minimum Donations, if you get my drift.

College

   College is basically a large group of buildings, usually separated by lawns, where you go to major in business. This means you must avoid:
   Courses where you have to trace the Development of something, such as the Novel. Courses that involve numbers that cannot be categorized as debits or credits, such as “square roots.” Courses involving a foreign language, such as French (this also includes courses involving funny-sounding English, like in those old plays where everybody is always saying: “Whatst? Dost thou sittest upon mine horst? Egad!” etc.). Any course involving maps, the Renaissance, or specific dates such as “1066.” Any course where you sit around a classroom trying to figure out what the hell Truth is.
   What you want to take are courses that have the word “Business” in them somewhere, such as Introduction to Business, Getting to Know Business a Little Better, Kissing Business Right on the Lips, etc.

Graduate School

   There are advantages and disadvantages to going to graduate school. The main advantage is that if you go to a really good graduate school, like Harvard, you’ll have a very easy time finding a good job. At night, as you lie in your bed, your window will often be broken by stones, around which have been wrapped lucrative offers. The main disadvantage is that you couldn’t get admitted to Harvard even if you held the dean’s wife at gunpoint. So I think you’re better off applying for a job.

Are There Jobs Available?

   Heck yes! Don’t you listen to those Negative Nellies who tell you there aren’t any good jobs anymore, just because the steel, automobile, shoe, clothing, railroad, and agricultural industries have all collapsed! There are new career opportunities opening up all the time in today’s fast-changing economy. Just to give you an idea, let’s look at:

Lobster Repair: A Fast-Growing Field

   You know how, when you go into a seafood restaurant, they have the lobsters up front, in a tank, all trying to scuttle back out of the way and hide under each other so they won’t get eaten? Well, it’s inevitable that some lobsters get damaged in the process-broken claws, eye stalks falling off, that kind of thing. And then you have the problem that (a) you have damaged lobsters, which you can’t serve to your customers and (b) you have these loose random eye stalks lying around the bottom of your tank, which hardly act as a Cheerful Greeting to your incoming customers. This is why there is such a tremendous demand today for people who know how, using modern adhesives, to reassemble a damaged lobster, or use the leftover parts to construct a whole new one, often incorporating a new and improved design (“Hey,” more than one delighted restaurant patron has cried recently. “My lobster has a claw made entirely out of eye stalks!”).
   And this is just one new emerging-growth career field. Others include: Drug Overlord; Computer Geek; Televised Christian; Person Who Sells Staples to the Defense Department for What It Cost to Liberate France; Vigilante; and Pip, whose job is to stand behind Gladys Knight and go “whooo whooo” at certain points during the song, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”
   WELDER WANTED—TO weld certain pieces of metal together.
   ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT—Young-thinking, fast-moving, forward-looking emerging-growth company with dynamic, attractive plant-filled lobby featuring modernistic, incomprehensible sculpture and old, heavily thumbed issues of Pork Buyer Weekly seeks eager,ambitious,personable, aggressive, can-do, confident, hard-driving, highly motivated self-starter to clean scum-encrusted office coffee-related implements.

Where Should You Begin Your Job Search?

   The answer to that question is right in your local newspaper. That’s right! Every day, hundreds of employers pay good money to advertise jobs in the classified ad section, apparently unaware that practically nobody reads it! So I want you to turn to the help wanted section right now and locate all the ads that look promising.
   The way to do this is to count the adjectives. For example, take the ads shown above.
   The first ad contains only one adjective, and thus represents a poor career opportunity. The second ad, on the other hand, clearly offers a very exciting opportunity, based on the adjective count.

Your Resume

   Your resume is more than just a piece of paper ... it is a piece of paper with lies written all over it. Often, a good resume can mean the difference between not getting a job and not even coming close.
   in writing your resume, you should follow the format shown in the example below, although you might want to modify it to suit your individual situation. For example, you may want to use your own name, instead of the word “NAME.” Unless you have a name like “Dewey.”
   A lot of people make a really stupid mistake: namely, they send their resume to the Personnel Department. Pay close attention here: NEVER SEND ANYTHING TO THE PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT.

RESUME

   NAME: (Last name first, first name in the middle, middle name way off to the right, in a little box. Should sound British.) ADDRESS: (Include clear directions as to how to get there, such as, ‘if you come to a Dairy Queen on your left, you have gone too far. PHONE: (Specify whether “Princess” or “Standard” model; note any special features such as “last number re-dial.”)
   CAREER OBJECTIVE: (This should sound like the speeches given by Miss America contestants to demonstrate that they have a Personality. For example: “I would very much like to utilize my skills to the greatest of my ability in hopes of achieving a significant degree of accomplishment.” Leave out the part about hoping, someday to work with handicapped animals.)4412
   SUMMARY OF CAREER ACCOMPLISHMENTS: (The important thing here is verbs. Verbs verbs verbs! You want to sound like a person with a slightly overactive thyroid. Be vague. Lie. Remember that nobody’s going to read this.)
   September, 1985 to present: ADMINISTRATOR. Initiate, coordinate, Participate, and eliminate all traces of long and short-term mid-range interim approaches. 1983 to 1985: COORDINATOR. Gathered, analyzed, and collated a wide range of data, then kneaded it on a floured surface and baked it in a moderate oven until a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean. Served six. REASON FOR LEAVING: Communists. 1981 to 1983: ASSOCIATE. Put my right hand in, took my right hand out, did the hokey-pokey, and shook it all about. REASON FOR LEAVING: Ennui.
   EDUCATION
   SCHOOL: Harvard and Yale University School of Learning, Ph.D. in Business Appliance Management, 1980.
   COLLEGE: Fargo and Surrounding Farms College of Arts and Sciences Such as Long Division, B.M. in Restaurant Communications, 1978.
   REFERENCES
   I should be happy to supply the names of any number of deceased grade-school teachers upon request.
   The absolute last thing the people in Personnel want the company to do is hire you. They don’t want the company to hire anybody, because it just means more work for them. As far as Personnel is concerned, every new employee is one more cretin who will never learn how to fill out his medical and dental claim forms correctly.
   So if you send your resume to Personnel, they’ll set fire to it immediately and send you back the following letter:
   Dear (YOUR NAME):
   Thank you so very, very much for sending us your resume. What a nice surprise it was! “Look at this,” the mail person cried as we all gathered ‘round. “(YOUR NAME) has been so kind as to send us his or her resume!” What excitement there was, here in Personnel! We danced far into the night!
   Sadly, however, we do not expect to have any positions available until approximately the end of time. We will, however, keep the remains of your resume on file, in a tasteful urn, and you may rest assured that nobody will disturb it except for routine dusting.
   Sincerely,
   The Personnel Department
   So the question becomes: what do you do with your resume? My advice is, set fire to it yourself. Nobody ever reads resumes anyway. I only told you to write one because it’s an old job-seeker tradition, and we have so few traditions left.
   Good! We’ve taken care of that! Now let’s move on to the next step, which is ...

Writing An Effective Letter That Will Get You A Job Interview

   In an ideal world, of course, your letter would say, “Dear Sir or Madam: Give me a job interview or I will kill your spouse.”
   But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world that has strict postal regulations regarding what you can say in letters. So you’re going to have to take the “soft sell” approach to getting an interview. Chances are, you’ve already written such a letter, and chances are it sounds something like this:
   Dear Sirs or Madams:
   As a dynamic, eager, hardworking young person who brings an enormous quantity of enthusiasm to every task, on account of being so eager, I am writing, to express my sincere desire to be considered for the position of Employee within your company. I am confident that once we have had a chance at some mutual and convenient time to meet and shake hands firmly while making eye contact and reviewing all my major accomplishments dating back to the birth canal, you will realize how mutually beneficial it would be for your firm and myself to seek some means of achieving our future goals in a way that would benefit both parties. Mutually.
   I shall contact your office by telephone every seven or eight minutes, starting this morning, to determine a time that would be mutual and dynamic for you.
   Very sincerely,
   Byron B. Buffington II
   The advantage of this kind of letter is that it has a confident, positive, assertive, enthusiastic tone. The disadvantage is that it makes you sound like the biggest jerk ever to roam the planet. I mean, look at it from the perspective of the people at the company: they have to actually work with the people they hire, and nobody is going to want to work with a little rah-rah snot-face.
   What you want is a job application letter that makes you sound like a regular person, somebody who would be fun to work with:
   Hey—So the priest says to the rabbi, he says, “But how do you get the snake to wear lipstick?” Ha ha! Get it? Say, did you get a load of the new clerk in Accounts Receivable? Whoooo! She is so ugly, it takes two men and a strong dog just to look at her! Ha ha! How about those Giants? I don’t know about you, but I say we knock off early today.
   Take it easy,
   Byron “The Buffer” Buffington

Whom You Should Send Your Letter To

   A vice-president. It makes no difference which one. All vice-presidents do exactly the same thing with their mail, namely write the first name of a middle-management subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Dan?” They do this by reflex action to everything placed in front of them, usually without reading it, then they toss it into the “OLD” basket. If an employee is hospitalized and a get-well card is passed around the company, it usually winds up with an unintelligible blot in the upper right-hand corner where all the vice-presidents wrote the names of subordinates followed by question marks.
   Nobody will ever dare throw your letter away, once a vice-president has written on it. Eventually somebody is going to ask you to come in for an interview, if only to find out how the snake joke starts.

How To Prepare For Your Job Interview

   One obvious way to remain calm and perspiration free during an interview, of course, is narcotics, but there you run into the problem of scratching yourself and trying to steal things off the interviewer’s desk. So as a precaution, what most veteran employment counselors recommend is that you wear “dress shields,” which, as some of you women already know, are these highly absorbent devices that you stuff into your armpits. They are available in bulk at any good employment agency. For a job interview, you should stuff three or four shields into each pit. This will cause your arms to stick out from your body at an odd angle, so to prevent your interviewer from attaching any significance to this, you want to begin the interview with a casual remark, as is illustrated by the following “model” interview dialog:
   INTERVIEWER: Hello, Bob. Nice to meet you.
   YOU: There’s nothing odd about my arms!

The Interview Process

   Basically, what the interviewer wants to know is how well you can “think on your feet.” So what he’ll try to do, with his questions, is throw you some “curve balls,” which means you should come to the interview well supplied with snappy retorts. Let’s go back to our “model” interview:
   INTERVIEWER: Tell me, Bob, why are you interested in coming to work for us?
   YOU: Who wants to know?
   INTERVIEWER: Ha ha! Got me there! Bob, what specific strengths do you feel you would bring to this job?
   YOU: So’s your old man!
   INTERVIEWER (tears of laughter streaming down his face): Bob, you sound like the kind of quick-thinking employee we are looking for! How about a large starting salary?
   YOU: You and what army?
   CONGRATULATIONS You’ve got the job!
   In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to figure out what exactly the nature of this job is—specifically, whether it involves any duties, and if so, how you can get out of them.

Chapter Three. How To Do Your Job, Whatever It Is

   To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Try to find this out in your first couple of weeks by asking around among your co-workers. “Hi,” you should say. “I’m Byron Buffington, a new employee! What’s the name of my job?” If they answer Long-Range Planner or Lieutenant Governor, you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most other jobs, however, will involve some work.
   There are two major kinds of work in the modern corporation or organization:
   1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings; and
   2. Going to meetings.
   Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily number two, going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that’s where the real prestige is. But most corporations and organizations like to start everybody out with a couple of years of taking messages, so we’ll discuss this important basic business skill first.

Taking A Phone Message

   When the phone rings, lift the receiver, punch whichever button is lit, and say: “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department (or whatever). Kindly hold the line.” Then quickly punch the hold button.
   Now you should check around briefly to make sure that everybody the caller could possibly want to talk to is in a meeting. This is also a good time to go to the bathroom. When you return, punch the hold button again, and say: “I am sorry, but whomever the person is to whom you wish to speak is in a meeting at this present time and is expected to remain there until at least the next major economic recession. Did you wish to leave a message?”
   Now this is very important: the instant the caller starts to respond, you must say: “Will you please hold again for a moment?” and punch the hold button with a very rapid and sure motion. Now you should head on down to the Supplies Cabinet and get some handy pre-printed phone message forms, in case the caller did wish to leave a message.
   When you get back to the desk, push the button again and say, “I am sorry. Now, did you wish to leave a message?” And the caller will say something like, “Listen, I’m calling from France and I don’t want Marketing, so could you ask the operator to transfer ...”
   Now at this point, if you are an experienced message-taker, your sixth sense tells you the caller is just about to complete a sentence, and we certainly don’t want that to happen! So you will have to very quickly—but politely!—ask the caller to please hold the line again for a moment, and at the same time strike the hold button the way a hungry cobra strikes a small furry mammal.
   Okay, we’re almost ready to take the actual message. Punch the button again, and say (in case the caller has forgotten): “Thank you for calling the Marketing Department! How may we help you?” Now at this point, there is every likelihood that the caller will have hung up. This might seem like a major obstacle, in terms of being able to take a message, but it is not, thanks to the handy pre-printed phone message forms that you got from the Supplies Cabinet. Here is what they look like:
   WHILE YOU WERE OUT IN A MEETING
   Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms./Rev./Massa/ (name)
   Check one:
   Telephoned.
   Did not telephone.
   Thought about telephoning, but then changed his or her mind.
   Telephoned, but could not for the LIFE of him or her remember why.
   Telephoned, then hung right up, but I am certain it was him or her.
   Wants you to call and attempt to leave a message for him or her.
   Wants to fire you.
   Wants to reveal a sordid episode from his or her past involving a goat.
   Wants to end World Hunger in our lifetime.
   Wants your body.
   Wants for nothing.
   Wants to tell you the joke about the man who finds out he has only eight hours to live, so he goes home and makes love with his wife once, twice, three times, and finally they fall asleep, and at 3 A.M. he tries to wake her up, and she says, “Not AGAIN! Some of us have to get up in the morning!”
   Ate paste as a child.
   Has the clap.
   So all you have to do is check the appropriate space to indicate what message you feel the caller would have left if he or she had had the time. The only hard part is deciding what name you put where it says “name.” I recommend you put the name of a corporate vice-president, for two reasons:
   1. It will enhance your reputation as a person who has spoken directly to a vice-president; and
   2. Nobody will ever be able to prove that you’re wrong. Any attempt to contact the vice-president about his “message” will result in failure, because he will of course be in a meeting.
   Okay. It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are never going to get to a position of corporate power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single bone-head decision, until you learn how to attend meetings.

The Corporate Meeting

   It might be useful to compare the modern corporate meeting to a football huddle, in which the people attending the meeting are a “team,” attempting to come up with a “play” in which each team member will be assigned responsibility to “block” a specific “defender” so that a “fullback” will be able to carry the ball through a “hole” in the “line” and get into the “end zone” for a “touchdown,” which will cause everybody to exchange “high-five” handshakes and slap each other on the “butt.” So we can see that in fact it is not at all useful to compare a modern corporate meeting to a football huddle. It was a pretty stupid idea, and I apologize for it.
   Perhaps a better analogy would be to compare the modern corporate meeting to a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be somewhere else. The major differences are that:
   1. Usually only one or two people get to talk at a funeral; and
   2. Most funerals have a definite purpose (to say nice things about a dead person) and reach a definite conclusion (this person is put in the ground), whereas meetings generally drone on until the legs of the highest-ranking person present fall asleep.
   Also, nothing is ever really buried in a meeting. An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

How To Act In A Meeting

   This depends on what kind of meeting it is. There are two major kinds:
   1. MEETINGS THAT ARE HELD FOR BASICALLY THE SAME REASON THAT ARBOR DAY IS OBSERVED, namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it is Monday. You’ll get used to it. You’d better, because this kind of meeting accounts for 83 percent of all meetings held (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This kind of meeting operates the way “Show and Tell” operates in nursery school, with everybody getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school the kids actually have something new to say. When it’s your turn, you should say you’re still working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since obviously you’d be working on whatever you’re supposed to be working on, and even if you weren’t, you’d claim you were, but this is the traditional thing for everybody to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, “Everybody who is still working on whatever he or she is supposed to be working on, raise your hand!” You’d all be out of there in five minutes, even allowing time for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it’s how they do it over in Japan.
   2. MEETINGS WHERE THERE IS SOME ALLEGED PURPOSE. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like somebody wants to show everybody slides of pie charts and give everybody a copy of a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate sexual fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless of course you’re a vice-president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: “Norm?” Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague old Norm for the rest of his career).
   But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get your “input” on something. This is very serious, because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you’ll get some of the blame. I mean, if they thought it was any good, they wouldn’t want your “input,” would they? So you have to somehow escape from the meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie. Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from somebody very important, such as the president of the company, or the Pope. It should be either one or the other. It would sound fishy if the accomplice said, “You have a call from the president of the company. Or the Pope.”

A Fun Thing To Do If Somebody Falls Asleep In A Meeting

   Have everybody leave the room, then collect a group of total strangers, from right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person and stare at him until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, in a very somber voice, “Bob, your plan is very, very risky, but you’ve given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what the hell you’re getting yourself into.” Then they should file quietly from the room.

How To Take Notes During A Meeting

   Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person such as your boss starts talking. When he does, look at him with a look of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking rectangles. Also, if you’re sitting next to somebody you can trust, you can use your notepad to discuss various other people at the meeting.

Special Note Of Encouragement To Timid Housewives Who Have Been Thinking About Maybe Trying To Get Into The Business World But Are Worried That It Might Be Too Hard And They Might Not Be Qualified To Do Anything Except Make Tuna Casserole

   Boy, are YOU ever in for a surprise. I mean, here you have been staying home, day after day, cooking meals and doing the laundry and praising the primitive refrigerator art your children produce and scrubbing away at the advanced fungal growths around the base of the toilet, during which time your husband has been GONE. And when he gets home, all he has the energy to do is just COLLAPSE on the Barca-Lounger and talk about what a DIFFICULT DAY he has had because the ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE (whatever that is) won’t “BALANCE” (whatever that means). So you have naturally come to believe that whatever goes on in the business world must be just DEATHLY difficult and complex, to cause a grown man such ANGUISH.
   Well, just you wait until, following the program outlined in this book, you get your first actual job in business. You are going to think you died and went straight to heaven. For one thing, everybody there is a GROWNUP. They allow NO CHILDREN in business. You never have to take ANYBODY, for any reason, to the potty. Speaking of which, if a business toilet gets dirty, you just CALL MAINTENANCE ON THE PHONE, and THEY COME AND CLEAN IT! And if they don’t, YOU CAN WRITE A SNOTTY MEMORANDUM ABOUT IT!
   And the best part of it is—as you will see, once we get into how businesses work—YOU NEED NO SPECIAL SKILLS OR QUALIFICATIONS TO BE PART OF A BUSINESS. All you have to do is figure out what simple concept the other people are really talking about when they use their complex business terms. For example, when your husband says the “Accounts Receivable” won’t “balance,” what he means is, he has these two NUMBERS that are supposed to be the SAME, but instead they’re DIFFERENT. Is that pathetic, or what? I mean, really, would you call that a PROBLEM? Especially if you compare it with, say, a situation where you’re at the shopping mall Burger King and you have finally managed to get your food and your children and your packages to a table, and just as you start to bite into your Whopper junior, your two-year-old knocks his chocolate milk onto a priest, your six-year-old commences projectile vomiting and your four-year-old wanders off, enraptured, in the company of a toothless man with needle marks and Nazi tattoos. Now THIS is what I would call a PROBLEM, and you have to deal with it ALL BY YOURSELF.
   Meanwhile, back at “work,” your husband is drinking nice hot coffee in a nice clean vomit-free office, fretting about his two little NUMBERS with the aid of a COMPUTER and probably three or four CO-WORKERS, all of whom will eventually go have a nice quiet lunch featuring MARGARITAS and NO CHILDREN.
   So trust me, housewives. You’ll do FINE in the business world. Your husband does, right? How hard can it be?