Industrial Safety
Real chemists wash their hands before they use the toilet.
Company Meetings
Most industrial meetings are called by fascists who enjoy abusing the employees who create the wealth that they mismanage. They prod chemists toward fruitless, inhospitable and brain-racking activities.
Business Education
Chemists absorb many topics in college — classes such as chemistry, physics, thermodynamics and calculus. I’d taken those plus a host of more of the same. To qualify for graduation, universities demand that future scientists broaden their horizons with a modest dose of Shakespeare and a foreign language. I should have taken a course titled “Breaking and Entering 101.” I’d seen it in the curriculum for the business majors.
Inventiveness
I intended to convert the horse pee to a gas that would crawl along the floor tiles, stripping sealer along the way, and when the chemical vapors encountered people they would shine their shoes and climb their legs while dissolving all their hair and then press on to eat the elastic out of their shorts.
The Competition
I solve problems. I invent the impossible. The hum of the customer’s machinery changes when I walk through his factory door. The sight of me puts brown skid marks in the shorts of our competitors.
Lawyers
How did I know for sure he was a lawyer? How did a man on the gallows recognize a hangman under a hood, or the baby lamb the wolf? Nature gave all predators the same eyes, odor and attitude. I identified this man as casually as I did a puffed pastry or a Rottweiler.
Vice Presidents
I collected my notes on what to do with hog pee. I wanted to draw a picture of a corporate vice-president dangling upside down from a noose around his feet and his head submerged in a pit of pig urine. The caption would say, “Remove Wrinkles the All-Organic Way.” Maybe “Pickle your pig, All Organic, All-Natural,” would be more appropriate.
Dress for Success
Who was in charge? They each looked presidential with their blue suits, white shirts and red silk ties. Someday I’d like to see a man mix up the colors and wear a red suit, blue shirt and white tie. Women wore red combinations all the time. A man in a red business suit might start a war or get laughed out of town.
Conventions
Flies are like lawyers — and chemists, teachers, writers and Rotarians. All of them travel great distances to attend a convention.
When Companies Are Sold
“Some companies wait until they have digested all the current data before they show the staff the door.”
“Then how do they develop new products?”
“They get them by buying the companies that have what they think they want.”
“Like ours.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“So how do I get to be boss?”
“You will be the only one left and you will be in charge of the old files.”
“That will be lonely,” Petra said.
Dirty Money
Sofia kicked the money away from her patron’s booth, took off her g-string and picked up each bill one at a time without using her hands. Arnold switched his focus to the cash in his hand and wondered where it had been and how recently.
Incompetent Salesmen
Any salesman in the business must have a firm grounding in chemistry coupled with an intensive knowledge of his product offerings. Those who don’t should be summarily executed for wasting planetary air. The dipstick sitting in my visitor’s chair deserved to be at least duct-taped in place while I soaked his feet in butyl alcohol and lit a match.
Personal Support
Real men slap hot iron on a mortal wound and keep fighting. Real men face impossible odds with never a quiver. Real men grab Glory by the gonads and strive for the gold. Real men spit in the devil’s eye and use his pitchfork as a surfboard to ride a tsunami of fire out of hell. Real men back up their friends in troubled times.
Business Ethics
Good cowboys always allow the black hats to draw first—and the hero, because of previous firearms training combined with lightening reflexes and a lifetime of clean living constantly pulls his gun second and prevails. My background compelled me to cheat.
Investment Bankers
Investment bankers don’t live beyond their means. They employ other people’s money as an enticement for you to give them your soul in exchange for an entry pass into their world. They exhibit zero native talent. They can’t design a circuit board, build a power plant or spell potassium permanganate but they can make your dream happen.
Patience
Who in hell decided patience was a virtue? An adage of that sort was generated by a monk in a remote hermitage who had zero stress in his life and whose job description consisted of copying a book by hand over a time-line of forty years.
Landscape Maintenance
“I exceeded the dandelion quota for my yard and the Dandelion Committee evened the score.”
Dogs
I longed for a dog. Dogs went for help. They always returned leading either Timmy’s mom or John Wayne and the Texas Rangers. Lassie, Rin-Tin-Tin or Marmaduke—I could have used some help. I had to be my own dog.
People and Machinery
Centrifuges move objects in rotation around fixed points. Lighter materials within the objects move to a location nearer the center while the denser ones are forced away. When people are involved, the process is called running in circles.
Entourage
Heavyweight boxers, rock stars and dot-com billionaires travel with an entourage of publicists, nutritionists, personal trainers, beauty queens and bodyguards. Guys like me normally journey with no-one but a cell phone and their mother’s number on the speed dial.
Business Presentations
When I couldn’t look brilliant I buried the opposition in bullshit. My goal was to suffocate them and to keep piling the manure until they surrendered.
Trust
Real men trust their chemist. They believe that what arrives from the lab is infallible.
Marketing
Why not go for broke and build the personal deterrent from hell? I had all the requisite parts—horse pee, cheese-water and the reject solution from the soap factory. I wanted a smelly, foamy and sticky liquid bomb that would offend everybody—recycling of industrial waste at its worst. I wanted a brilliant trade name for my invention. I had a logo in mind—a cow pissing on a flat rock.
Sex in the Office
I tried to recall situations when it might be appropriate to screw the boss’s wife. None came immediately to mind. I’d skipped that chapter in my Thermodynamics class.
Amateur Chemists
Who was he to challenge my chemistry — an amateur who might have once dated a chem major? Most of the audience couldn’t read the periodic table. They’d never measured a solution, invented a product or written a technical paper — but they all thought I was a lunatic out of control.
