Life and neckties

September 14, 2006

My current assignment for a client just outside Boston requires me to wear a tie each day. I think the practice goes back to a time when insubordinate factory workers were able to make fun of management and then run away to live in splendor in their faux sterling-silver sided homes.

But management caught on – literally (and let’s not talk about the literally/figuratively issue today, but we’ll bring it up soon). They decided to require their legions of workers to put on a tie and wear it while working.

Aside from the occasional, maybe thirty or forty a day, death caused by a worker getting pulled into a meat grinder or being welded to the inside of a Ford Focus, this helped manage workers very well.

You see, when workers misbehaved they were summarily attached to “the hook.” They called it that because it was a hook that hung from a winch on the factory floor. If the floor foreman saw a reluctant or non-productive worker, he would approach the worker with the hook and string him nicely upon it using the tie.

The move is similar to how a worm is attached to a non-productive whip of nylon thread and dropped into any body of water to bob there while fish swim past and wonder why a worm might have chosen this way to kill itself.

Then the fish all gather at cocktail parties and laugh at the people who are insane enough to wake up at 3AM, hop in the Ford Excursion and then speed to the middle of a lake in an ice-cold metal boat just to drop these worms in the water like nylon-strung pieces of art.

Bearing this in mind, there are a few things you should do:

Don’t fish. There are plenty available for about $2.50 each at sushi restaurants from Boston to Knoxville to Denver to Manhattan Beach.

Wear clip-on ties so you can stick it to the man when you don’t work without stopping for 7.5 hours a day. Unless you’re a smoker and then you can work for three hours a day because your multiple smoke breaks of eight minutes each really take about 17 minutes each and at 20 or 25 cigarettes in a pack, that’s a whole lotta not working.

Don’t believe everything you read because blogs are just here to distract the mind machines. Now they won’t pay attention to the real messages hidden in my podcast – A Life of Play.

More to come…