Tag: Curiouser and Curiouser

In the Cross Hairs

Interviewer: “So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?”
Frank Zappa: “You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?”

A while ago, I described our west coast sales manager as a man with weirdly movable hair. It is movable, of course, because it has been simply plopped into place. A good stapler would have been of great service to Don and considerable relief to those around him. I once came close to stabbing that precarious postiche with a club sandwich toothpick. In 2012, an iceberg the size of Manhattan broke free from Greenland’s massive Petermann Glacier. The massive chunk of ice slid into the sea. The process is called calving. Well, Don’s head always looks like it is about to calve a wad of hair.

Henry works in Credit. Henry has blue hair. Well, at least the kind of indigo blue that you get when you comb in a clump of Kiwi shoe polish and rub to a perfect shine. I imagine that without the goop, his hair would be gray. I also imagine that if he washed out the indigo, his hair would fade to a peculiar shade of periwinkle. Which would look odd next to his olive Mediterranean skin.

A good stapler would have been of great service.

Dolly Parton once said that she was never bothered by dumb blonde jokes. First of all, she knew she wasn’t dumb. And second, she knew she wasn’t blonde.

Albert, who works in our Customer Care Center, does not have blonde issues. He does, however, have food issues. He is an eating machine. He surrounds himself with crinkly bags of Cheetos, piles of sunflower seed shells that make his desk look like a killing field, and leftovers from other people’s lunches. Not surprisingly Albert is… uh… lumpy. Today, Albert came to work with his head shaved. He is participating in a campaign to raise money to help kids with leukemia. There are men who look cool with their heads shaved. Like, say, Vin Diesel or Michael Jordan or the Dalai Lama. Albert does not. His head is oddly shaped and… well… lumpy. But – what the heck – he’s cool anyway.

So what is the lesson in all this? I guess it’s that you shouldn’t judge a head by its hair. Real or otherwise.

Draw Strings

We were in one of our monthly operations reviews a while back. Various operations managers held court, putting up on the wide screen arrays of numbers that numbed and points that seldom made a point. My mind tends to wander – as do my eyes – in such meetings and I noticed, to the left of the screen, an easel with a pad of 3M self-stick easel paper. On the sheet was a technical drawing left over from a previous meeting.

I had no idea what the drawing was supposed to represent. It looked like some kind of compressor with tubing and a circular object coming out of the loop. Perhaps it was a balloon. Of course it couldn’t be a balloon but, in the absence of more information, why not? For the ignorant, nothing and everything are possible.

The thing about the drawing is that it I’m pretty sure it was there when we met for the same operations review one month earlier. Yet another month went by and I – and, apparently, only I – noticed it was still there gracing the left corner of the conference room. Well, grace is probably a large word, because the drawing was as crude as it was curious.

Anyway, at a break, I sauntered up to the easel when no one was looking, took a marker and wrote Helium Machine under the drawing.

I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame – and then I drew that too.

A week or so after that, I went up to the easel and, when no one was looking, took a marker and colored in the balloon looking thing. I made it a bright orange, just so no one from Minsk to American Samoa could miss it. A few days later, I drew a pin with the no (circle-backslash) symbol around it. Underneath, in print letters, I wrote NO BURST.

This went on for a long while, new elements being added to the sheet with each passing month. On the lower left, I drew the edge of a table, onto which were placed, in sequence, some very colorful balloons, a party blower and, finally, an invitation to Jane’s birthday party. I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame – and then I drew that too.

To be fair, every element looked sort of technical. I even wrote in a mathematical formula with a sigma, a cosine and several square roots. Not once, in the seven months since some engineer first drew some device on that easel did any of the senior managers say anything about it or the absurdly complex and highly suggestive post-modern piece of artwork that it had now become.

I guess broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow was right. The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.