No Such Thing as Bad Publicity

I am now going to commit the cardinal sin for a blogger and write about working life. Names will be omitted or changed to protect the innocent. Oh bugger, lets be honest, to protect me. Going and getting myself dooced out of a job with a nine-month baby back in the fold would probably not be such a bright idea.

My boss, gentleman that he is, also happens to be the company’s founder. As such, he plumps neatly into the category of entrepreneur. The one curious thing that I’ve found about nearly all entrepreneurs is how they can be so easily described by one simple phrase - ‘People who are easier to admire than like.’ That might be just the begrudging Mick in me talking but still, they are the type of people that make you want to shout – ‘I see all that you have achieved and I take my hat off to you Sir - but PLEASE do not sit beside me on this airplane fore I know that you are going to bore me shitless for hours with your homespun wisdom and personal philosophy in life!’.

Sr. G on the other hand, seems to be the exception. He is well read, soft spoken, has a decent sense of humour and seems to have a paternal kind of fondness for all his employees and this, in my humble opinion, puts him well above the rest of his ilk. His decency as a human being was well tested last week when one of his employees opened his big, fat mouth and made a wisecrack in front of the whole company that should have left him flipping burgers for the rest of his working life.

About six months ago our company contracted a representative in one of those smallish west African nations that is currently in a state of relative peace. The local rep., who is doing a fine job, recently asked us for some kind of giveaway merchandise to promote our company amongst his potential punters in the region. After thinking it over our boss decided upon a box full of baseball caps with our company name and logo proudly displayed on the front.

A week after the caps were sent off, we were all chatting at the coffee machine with Sr. G pontificating on the wisdom of choosing a cheap but practical piece of merchandise with a high exposure factor when muggns here pipes up with an alternative point of view.

‘When you think of it, most west African nations are either on the point of civil unrest or have a neighbouring country at civil war. So can’t you just see it, in a couple of months time, Newsweek magazine does a special about child soldiers around the world and on the cover, a photo of an ten-year old west African boy on a dusty road wearing a combat jacket and carrying an oversized AK47. Perched on his head is a pretty blue baseball cap and if we look a little closer, we can easily make out a company logo and name. Free publicity associating our company with child exploitation, now THAT is what I call a high exposure factor.’

Everybody laughs out loud including the Boss and then there’s one of those rare and magical comic moments. As the possibility of this actually happening slowly starts to sink in, Sr. G’s smile begins to fade. It takes a full ten seconds. He then turns and gives me the type of look that Jack Palance gives Billy Crystal in City Slickers. I’m sure he came close to saying ‘I shit bigger n’ you’, but he was already hurrying back to his office to try and cancel the delivery. What a lark.


So anyway I digress. Did you want a large fries with that order?

Rogue Thought for March

Yesterday, I thought of the perfect name for a petite Chinese porn star:

Mousey Tongue

Just Because You're Paraniod ...

As for this whole flap about Dubai Ports World taking over US ports ... I find it rather suspicious that Republican congressmen are beating up the president over this. Surely they are doing it to improve their re-election chances in November.

But why is Bush defending the deal? It seems like a contrived stance to give the Republican congressmen an issue on which they can differ with Bush, while playing to the anti-Muslim sentiment in middle America. Yes, that's right, I think it's all a smokescreen to stop Bush's unpopularity from loosening the Republican stranglehold on the Congress ...

At War With Myself

(Tell the neighbors, wake the kids, LtE is posting!!!)

Sweet Jahsus ... what a tough morning today.

You see, your man Lung The Younger and I stepped out last night, to watch a football match and drink too much beer. As it's a more infrequent occurrence these days (thanks to Lung The Younger Junior's needing bathing, nappy changing, etc.), we tend to grasp onto those last few moments of the evening, and have just ... one ... more ... beer.

Of course, this morning I felt rough and took much longer than usual getting out of bed. La Doctora showed no pity and kept haranguing me to get up (for this is a spouse's role in such a situation), and it occurred to me that my first-thing-in-the-morning-self is a different being than my last-thing-before-going-to-bed-self.

No, really ... when I wake up in the morning I clutch the pillows and beg for five more minutes of sleep ... I start making elaborate calculations about how quickly I can shower, and what if I don't shave today, and I'm sure the bus will arrive just as I get to the stop this morning ...

And yet, my last-thing-before-going-to-bed-self is a bloody lunatic*.

The absolute last thing he wants to do is go to bed. There's so many fun and interesting things to do instead ... debate politics, look out the window at the city lights, or just have another beer. My first-thing-in-the-morning-self would kill him, if he could, because of all the suffering he causes. But he just goes blithely on his way, having fun, and building up a sleep deficit that he'll never pay.

Of course, I'll re-read this in the evening, and think "What a whiner ..."

Praying to make it to lunchtime,
LtE

*Note, I am writing this in the morning, when my first-thing-in-the-morning-self holds sway**.

**Can you do anything with "sway" besides hold it?

Pavlovian Lyrics – A Rant.

The other day while distractedly listening to the radio, I heard an old familiar tune that brought me way back to the heady days of my youth. And strangely enough, the song managed to conjure up exactly the same sensation as it did way back then. That sensation being the desire to call directory inquiries, find out where the composer lives, go round to his house and kick him repeatedly in the larynx while wearing a pair of hobnail boots.

The composer in question is Adrian Gurvitz and the song is ‘Got To Write a Classic’, may a pox be on them both. This shitty, vapid jingle annoys me so much that it can turn this otherwise docile specimen of disappointing manhood into a white-knuckled psychotic, ready to bludgeon his crooning nemesis into a blessedly silent pile of pulp.

It’s not actually the melody that pisses on my nerve endings so much. The tune is about as insipid as a lukewarm tub of cabbage water but I have to confess, it does get inside your head. Much in the same way the buzzing of an electrical pylon echoes in your inner ear long after you’ve moved a safe distance from it. But the slightly catchy nature of this perfidious melody just makes things worse because it brings to mind those God-awful lyrics.

A lobotomised, dyslexic seven-year old could have written better lyrics than these. Did Mr. Gurvitz actually write this guff down or did he just shout the words out spontaneously while suffering from a blood-sugar imbalance in a recording studio? Or was the rhyming scheme perchance randomly generated by his spanking new Commodore 64?

I mean why the fuck does he have to express his desire to write a song an attic for Christ sake? It’s like saying ‘I want to paint a watercolour landscape in my bicycle shed and then knock out a bit of pottery in the downstairs toilet’. No, no. Stupid concept. Should’ve left it out, Ade.

Especially considering that now your caught in a bind. You have to find a word to rhyme with ‘attic’ and the only one you can come out in your insulin-deprived mental state is, (yes you got it) ‘addict’. And now you’re thinking, ‘How in the sacred name of Peter Frampton, am I going to work ‘addict’ into a fluffy love song?’ Fortunately, headstrong artist that you are, you bravely sacrificed any chance of aesthetic credibility by distorting the whole verse to incorporate the image of someone shooting up in a loft.

Other fetid bits of penmanship from this sticky mess of musical candy floss:

‘I’ve been living my life, one day at a time’…Woohoo! Scraping the bottom of the cliché barrel. Move over Bryan Adams.

‘And it’s not what I mean, I mean it’s not what it seems’ …I mean like Duh, I mean like Totally, I mean like Hello? It’s sad and sorry situation when any random valley girl could quite legitimately sue your ass for plagiarism.

You know, I actually think that my bilious hatred for this song comes basically from a feeling of acute embarrassment for it.

So what song or lyrics do you most love to hate?
Deliver onto us the fruits of your commentry.....