When I grow up and earn untold millions of dollars I will use my vast wealth to hire someone whose entire job will be to make sure my TV doesn’t sit idle while some shitty show comes on. Apparently I’m too busy to handle this responsibility all by my lonesome, because quite frequently I’ll find myself in some other end of the apartment thinking “Why the fuck is that on and more importantly why has it been on for 20 minutes?” Hence: the hire.
But I won’t just be doing it because I hate Wheel of Fortune. I’ll be doing it as a way to stimulate the economy. If I can give some poor lost wayward soul a job, a salary and a place to sleep at night then it will be as if I’m giving something back. Granted I won’t be offering a place to sleep and I won’t be paying this person in actual money, but my heart’s in the right place.
Vegetables. Tubers, peppers, root vegetables. I’m thinking I’ll pay him or her in yams or bell peppers depending on how the crops come up that year.
Oh, did I not mention I’ll be running my own sustainable farm? Sometimes I neglect to mention it because I find it makes for better conversation when I refer to it as if you already knew and then ask if I neglected to mention it. Silly me!
Because I’ll be so busy getting my photo snapped for the money I’ll be appearing on, I won’t actually have time to manage the person I hire to manage the television and for that reason I’ll be hiring someone to manage that person. And then, because you can never be too safe, I’ll be hiring another person to micromanage the manager of the TV manager. Should that prove insufficient, I’ll add another person to the team. “So great to have you on our team!” I’ll say with a big smile before slamming myself in my office and never exchanging another word with him except for the occasional dissatisfied grunt. You really can’t coddle people, you know? It’s a very tough lesson I learned but I’m glad I learned it.
“You can coddle eggs and you can crack people, but you can’t crack coddled eggs,” my governess used to say to me in between chapters of The Trumpet of the Swan. I figured it was the alcohol talking, but I think I’m beginning to see her words in a new light.
I should probably tell you that I won’t be doing any of the actual farming myself either as I’ll be too busy training my lipizzaner stallions. I’m be farming out the farming —pun intended— to a team of interns. They’ll be unpaid but will receive college credit. Naturally I’ll have to hire someone else though to pat them down when they go on break and at the end of the day because so help me, if I find that any of those ungrateful bastards have helped themselves to a five finger potato discount, well, there’s going to be hell to pay.
I know it sounds harsh but it’s just that I’ve learned that it pays to be distrustful. In fact, that’s what I’ll be paying my team for.
