Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  He sent an assistant, who traveled with him, through the audience with a collection plate, which was actually a plastic bucket, while he told people to give. The assistant came back with the bucket brimming with bills—fives, tens and twenties. While his congregation waited, the preacher dumped the money in a suitcase. He made a hasty estimate of the amount in it, decided it wasn’t enough and sent the assistant back into the audience for more.

  Jesse Jackson, who is smart enough so he shouldn’t have to resort to it, can do this vaudeville trick. Once on Nightline he appeared along with Jerry Falwell. Falwell has an appealing way about him if you don’t listen to what he says but Jackson out-double-talked him that night.

  When Jackson was backed into a corner by Falwell or host Ted Koppel, he turned on his invisible preacher-switch. His mouth started going while Falwell, Koppel and presumably the whole television audience tried to make out what he was saying. The words were all familiar. He sounded as though he were making sense but you realized that, like those double-talk nightclub comedians, it was an illusion of sense. He wasn’t saying anything. It was his vaudeville act.

  May I just say, in conclusion, that if I do not receive at least $1 million in the mail by two weeks from Tuesday, God told me He’d strike me dead!

  Praise Jesus!

  Please do what you can.

  Beware the Company Memo

  When the president or chief executive officer of a big company issues a statement saying how well the company is doing, you can bet the company is in big trouble or he wouldn’t have bothered.

  The first thing these memos try to do is establish the chief as Mr. Nice Guy. He’ll say, “I’d like to take this occasion to share some thoughts with you.” Or possibly he’ll say, “I welcome this opportunity to speak to you.”

  The literature of the company memos is a genre all its own. Memos are often written for the president by a minor executive who also works on writing rosy prose for the stockholders’ report at the end of the year and they reflect some of the style of those masterpieces of sleight-of-word.

  To understand one, you have to be able to translate what’s actually said into what’s actually meant.

  “In the past year, our company has undergone significant restructuring.”

  This usually means a lot of people got fired and one of the company’s divisions lost so much money they got rid of it.

  “We are confident that with your help we will be able to overcome the formidable obstacles …”

  This translates as we’ll be asking you to take a cut in pay.

  “We have made great strides in recent months …” the memos always say. Then they go on to say, “While we have made great progress, there is still a long way to go.”

  What the head of the company is usually trying to tell employees is that they better brace themselves for a salary cut or some layoffs.

  “Difficult times” always “lie ahead” in company memos.

  “As you know,” the company memo continues, obviously not believing that you know at all or it wouldn’t be telling you, “the economy makes us particularly vulnerable to competition from outside interests.”

  “We can no longer count on” something. It doesn’t matter what but they always say they can’t count on something.

  “In the future, as in the past, we will continue to” do something. It doesn’t matter what, either. They always say they’ll continue to do it.

  The single most popular word in the memo from the company president is “challenge.” The company faces “an unusual challenge this coming year,” or it has already “faced a series of unusual challenges” in the year just past.

  The president, nonetheless, looks forward “to a year of expanding growth and productivity.”

  The times are never just ordinary, everyday times in a company memo. “As we face the future,” times can be “demanding times,” “troubled times,” or “the difficult times in which we live.” Sometimes they are “turbulent times.”

  Even though it looks as though the company is going to fire people, cut salaries and reduce the quality of its product, “Our commitment is to excellence.” Or “We are committed to a program of excellence.”

  If the rumor is already out that the company is going to lay people off, one of the first things the president says is “There is no truth to the rumor …”

  There is never any truth to rumors in memos from company heads to employees. The company may go belly up three weeks later but at the time the president speaks, you can be sure “there’s no truth to the rumor WHATSOEVER.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  If the rumor of bad news has already proven to be true, the company head wants to “put the whole matter into perspective.”

  “Our greatest asset is you, our employees.”

  If you are one of the employees, BEWARE THE COMPANY MEMO.

  The Cost Is More Than the Price

  Why is it that everything always costs more than we think it’s going to? How come we never get used to that fact and figure it in when we take money out of our pockets to pay for something?

  We all know about the taxes on everything we buy. Why does it come as a surprise that taxes are added on to the price we see advertised? It may be unfair for us to expect people operating a retail business to absorb the tax and count it in when they write the price on a tag but that’s what I wish they’d do. I hate surprises. I wish every price I see advertised in the papers, listed on the menu or written on the price tag attached to the item included everything I’m going to have to pay.

  We call the plumber or the electrician or the television repairman, and we’re invariably astounded at what he charges. We aren’t surprised that we’re making $50,000 a year but we’re surprised that the oil furnace repairman expects to make a living too. We’re shocked that, in order to make $35,000 working a forty-hour week with some hours he can’t charge to customers, he has to ask $25 an hour for his time. It doesn’t matter to a repairman that when he arrives to fix our television set he finds the only problem is that someone, while vacuuming the living room, pulled the plug to the TV set out of the wall and forgot to put the plug back in. It still used up his time.

  Nowhere is the final amount we have to pay more surprising than in a good restaurant. The steak is listed on the menu at $16. You’re probably with someone, so you double that and figure you can get out of the restaurant for twice that plus a few dollars. Maybe $40. You have a drink first, a salad, dessert and coffee. The waiter gets 15 percent. By the time you get out of the place, the dinner costs you not $40 but $63.

  When I eat in a restaurant, I always guess what the check is going to be when I see the waiter coming with it. In all my years of eating out several times a week for either lunch or dinner, I have never … never … been surprised by a check that was less than I thought it was going to be.

  We all know about cars. We all know that there are always additions to the list price. If you want your car with wheels and an engine, they are extra. No matter how many cars we buy, we’re still surprised when the final amount we have to pay for a $15,000 car is $18,230.84.

  The worst experience for a young married couple is finally realizing how much the $150,000 house is actually going to cost them. By the time the banks (there are usually several), the real estate agent, the surveyor and several lawyers take their piece of the action, the couple usually has bought a house they can’t afford.

  The trouble with having to pay more than you expect for everything is that when you get paid for anything yourself, it’s always less, not more, than you thought you had coming. If you’ve ever stood in a line with people picking up their paychecks, you’ve watched while one person after another gets the check, rips open the envelope and looks at it shaking his or her head. Employees know about Social Security, they know about taxes and deductions for medical benefits, but they can never believe that they have so little left when the paycheck comes.

  I yearn for a
world where you get what you pay for and you pay what is asked for, nothing more. I want all the prices to be in even numbers and to include local, state and federal taxes. Nothing will cost $1.99 or $199. Any gas station advertising unleaded regular for $1.29.9 instead of the real price, $1.30, will be fined $999.99.9 and they’ll have to pay in exact change.

  For Fat People Only

  I’m only talking to overweight people now. The rest of you can move on to another page.

  Haven’t you often felt it was unfair that, day after day, you see skinny people eating french fries and chocolate fudge sundaes and never gaining a pound? Haven’t you noticed that a lot of people eat exactly the same things you eat and they stay the same weight while you blow up?

  It is one of the unfairest things I’ve come across in my lifetime, but there’s good news. Thin people of the world owe an apology to all of us average, normal, everyday overweight people.

  If we’d all been falsely imprisoned, we wouldn’t have been more falsely maligned than we have been by thin people all these years. They always suggest it’s our own fault, and it is not.

  Why? Because according to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, which seems to have a monopoly on medical announcements, it isn’t fat people’s fault that they’re fat. After all these years of being looked down on by people who act superior because their collarbones stick out, the truth finally has emerged. It isn’t us, it’s our metabolism that’s to blame.

  It was only a matter of time before the scientists, in their maddeningly slow, methodical way, discovered it, but they finally found out why a lot of people get fat through no fault of their own and why a lot of people stay thin through no virtue of their own.

  I’ve suspected all along that it wasn’t my fault. All overweight people know in their hearts it isn’t their fault. We can be around thin people who are eating the same things we eat for weeks and while we get fat, they stay the same.

  Make no mistake about this announcement; it’s good news for over-weights. It could mean the end of Weight Watchers and the feeling of inferiority we all feel because we’re fat.

  It’s really good to know my weight is not a result of weakness or any flaw in my character. It is apparent that I have a very lethargic metabolism. A big piece of chocolate cake goes farther in my body than it does in the body of a skinny person. (I prefer “skinny” to “thin,” just as I prefer the word “overweight” to “fat.”) It isn’t that fat people eat too much, it’s that their furnaces are always banked.

  “Obese people,” says Dr. Jules Hirsch, a doctor at Rockefeller University in New York, “are born with a handicap.

  “Just like people born with other handicaps,” Dr. Hirsch says, “they’ll have to learn to live with theirs.”

  Next thing you know, they’ll be giving us handicapped, overweight people stickers for the windshields of our cars so we can park right up near the entrance to the store in the handicapped parking places.

  The doctors who made this report say that when an overweight person makes a big effort to diet and loses weight, his or her metabolism declines even further. As the metabolism declines, the body uses less and less of the food taken in and turns the rest to fat. That’s why it’s so hard to keep off the weight you lose.

  The researchers for this project kept track of their subjects for two years. They found that the people who were destined to gain weight burned eighty calories a day fewer than people of comparable weight. Dr. Eric Ravussin of the National Institutes of Health estimated that a person who burns a mere eighty calories a day less than usual would gain nine pounds a year.

  According to these figures in the story, I must have a world-champion low rate of metabolism. I’ve been gaining nine pounds a year for years. It’s wonderful to know that it isn’t my fault. And if my body runs at idle all day long, I should think it would last longer than if I were racing my engine.

  I can hardly wait to get home and celebrate with a big dinner and a bowl of ice cream for dessert.

  Ms. Misses the Mark

  The other day I was watching a little of the Today show with a cup of coffee and I heard Senator William Armstrong of Colorado call Jane Pauley “Miss Pauley.”

  I liked it and thought how unusual, how proper and how appropriate it was. The senator might have called Jane Pauley several things:

  He could have said “Jane” as most guests do, even though they aren’t on what is known as a “first-name basis.”

  He might have said “Mrs. Trudeau” because Jane Pauley is married to the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, but has not taken her husband’s name for her professional career, so calling her “Mrs. Trudeau” would not have been appropriate.

  Senator Armstrong might have endeared himself to some women by calling Jane Pauley “Ms. Pauley” instead of “Miss Pauley,” but Ms. is awkward to use. It’s awkward because, while the idea of not identifying a woman’s married status may be a good one, people don’t know what the letters stand for so they aren’t sure how to pronounce it. Like Harry S. Truman’s middle initial, the letters Ms. aren’t an abbreviation for anything. They’re just an invented word, and it’s pronounced “Miz.” (To further confuse the issue, that’s the same way Southerners pronounce “Mrs.”)

  Senator Armstrong’s “Miss” was perfectly friendly though slightly formal, and it sounded good for a change. He wasn’t trying to kid us into thinking that he was one of Jane Pauley’s close friends.

  Guests on television shows who have never heard of each other before they go on the air often strike a false note by sounding too chummy. Everyone is Ed, Linda, Helen or George. You can listen to an hour discussion on television without ever hearing a person’s last name. Politicians, in their effort to be everyone’s best friend, are the worst offenders.

  I often watch the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on public television. The guests usually call Robert MacNeil “Robin” because they’ve heard that’s his nickname. A nickname should be reserved for good friends. If we don’t stand back and preserve some of the little formalities, we’re going to destroy the good things about genuine familiarity. When I call a close friend by his or her nickname, there’s a touch of affection that goes with it. If everyone who meets that person for the first time also uses the nickname, the virtues of a nickname are lost.

  Television hosts also do too much greeting and thanking. They thank everyone to death. When you thank someone, the implication is that the person has done you a favor. When the anchorman or -woman on a television news broadcast comes back on camera after a report from the field by a correspondent, he or she invariably says, “Thank you, Ed” or “Thank you for that report, Ed.”

  In so doing, the anchorman is assuming an importance for himself that he doesn’t have. He’s being condescending. The correspondent is not doing the report for the anchorman. The reporter is doing the report because that’s what he does for his salary. They both work for the same company. It is no more appropriate for an anchorman to thank a correspondent than it is for the correspondent to thank the anchorman. Time is precious on network news broadcasts and even small amounts of it shouldn’t be wasted on trivial and meaningless formalities.

  There are several other meaningless phrases that ought to be eliminated from television interview shows. One is the obligatory “Come back and see us again.”

  The television host’s idea of the best way to end an interview, no matter how dull it may have been, is to say, “Thank you for being here and please come back and see us again real soon.”

  He knows, the guest knows and everyone watching the show knows there isn’t a prayer the person will ever be invited back.

  Giving Business the Business

  American businessmen spend half their time extolling the virtues of competition and free enterprise and the other half trying to eliminate them. They go to church on Sunday and start breaking the Golden Rule first thing Monday morning when they get to the office.

  Making something these days is just a sideline for many
big U.S. corporations. The product is nothing more than an inconvenience. It’s a formality. Chief executive officers have people who do that sort of menial production work for them. They don’t know anything about the product their company makes. They have little interest in the quality of their product and not much faith that quality makes much difference. They go with advertising and aggressive salesmanship. They worked their way up from salesman to sales manager to vice president of marketing to their present position. They don’t know how to make anything. All they know how to do is sell, and they’ve reached the pinnacle of their profession when they sell the company … or buy another.

  There are still thousands of good, small companies in the United States whose executives have a genuine concern for their product and the company’s employees, but at the rate the small fish are being eaten alive by the sharks, not many of those will survive.

  The first thing a big corporation does when it takes over a smaller one is to make an announcement: “We do not plan to make any immediate changes.” Ha! That means it’ll be three weeks before they start firing people.

  Employees are often propagandized to believe that they belong to a family. This suits the business purpose of the company. When the business is sold, the family idea is dropped. No more bowling trophies paid for by management. Loyalty goes out the window and dismissal notices go out in the mail.

  The sad fact is, employees usually feel more loyalty to a company than the company feels for them. Employees tend to endow the corporation with a heart it doesn’t have.

  It matters not to takeover corporations that they are firing employees who made the business worth acquiring in the first place. They do not concern themselves with such human aspects of employment as the production-line worker whose aging mother has cancer and whose wife has been in an auto accident and cannot take care of their three children.