Rest your eyes, save America!

There are two ways to improve America’s economy.

The first way is to establish the nap in the workplace. I know, I know. Herbert, your co-worker snores. Or Sabetha, the cute one, drools. Or Oscar, the fat one, talks in his sleep and since he’s Serbian no one can understand the words. You have learned these incredibly interesting facts over the years by listening to people at lunch or being around them when they unofficially napped while the boss was gone.

    Let’s face it. You nap anyway. There’s no human on earth who has never nodded off at a meeting, in front of a computer, or even while awaiting a lucrative sale in front of the ladies shoe counter while Mrs. Highbottom decides which of the twenty boxes on the floor she intends to take home.

    And by the way, when Mrs. Highbottom hits the road with her new shoes, believe me, she’s heading home for a quick nap.

    If Americans want to beat the Russkies or the Chinese at world economic domination, more work isn’t the answer. Better work is the answer.

   I would begin by asking job candidates at their interview whether they sleep at work. If one of them says yes, either that candidate’s a dunce or an incredibly thoughtful person who simply cannot tell a lie. Hire the dude or dudette immediately.

   A nap is a quick 20-minute to a half-hour escape from work. You rest your brain.

    Installing naps into your company’s list of perks also offers a new way to honor good workers. Instead of giving them cheap watches that fall apart in a month, you can give them new firm pillows to use at work. The pillowcase is optional unless you want to put the company logo on it, that way the employee can be further programmed about the company even during sleep.

    Do you really think those Kansas State Troopers are watching you speed down the highway when they are parked in the median of the road? Please. They are taking a snooze. And good for them. Shooting bad guys requires an alert lawman. Take a nap there, Sheriff Bubba, and rest up for the real big events. I approve.

   Like many workers, State Troopers carry a significant burden. They are loaded up with guns, ammo, pepper spray, vest, clubs, lip gloss, nail clippers, jellybeans, hand mirror, and that silly hat, which all add up to big-time weight. Try to carry all that stuff around every day and you’ll need a snooze most afternoons.

    Anyway, a nap would do wonders for your boss, especially if he or she is one of those maniacal power brokers who spend their days trying to make your life more miserable than it need be. Even if a nap only takes a little bestiality out of the boss, then the time used is not wasted.

    And since you’ve napped as well, you’re strong enough to continue taking the boss’s awful abuse.

    By the way, wouldn’t it be great if there were a public shame spot on the internet where all bad bosses could be exposed for what rotten bums they are? Why should you spend half your life being abused when a little exposure on line could alert other higher-ups in your company about how cruel and small some supervisors are? Power does corrupt, you see, and many of us simply don’t know how to use the authority we suddenly receive.

    The second way to help America’s economy is by adopting official mental health days into your company’s list of perks. Say three days per year. This gives you permission to call up the boss, tell him/her exactly what you think of him/her—screaming is optional—and informing the company that you are taking a mental health day tomorrow and if they don’t like it they can lump it. This action provides two things: it proves beyond measure that you are a bit of a wacko in the mental department, which gives you official cover for your outburst, and secondly, allows you to do openly what you do secretly—get tired of working and staying home by calling in sick. Official Mental Health Days relieve workers and relieve co-workers of having to be around a person who is burning out or burning up. People who are rested and happy rarely purchase oversized firearms and bring them to work. They would rather bring in a pillow to rest their weary head during naptime.

    Work naps will help unemployment as well. Companies will have to hire sleep monitors who can read workers to sleep, using nursery tales, Biblical verses, or better yet, have them read the boss’s pointless memos. That ought to accelerate naps big time.

   For example, consider this boss’s note: Happy Holidays. We have changed the holiday turkey give-away. Instead of picking up a turkey and seeing me dressed up in the company’s bird outfit, employees will now receive a coupon for a free turkey in their mailboxes. You will have to show identification to the mailroom before your coupon is released and please sign the form provided. Please pick up the coupons Friday between 2:27 pm and 3:34 pm, so as not to interrupt the workday anymore than is necessary.  If you have any objections—religious, political or social—to turkeys, please see Miss Wescott in HR. I believe she has some chicken coupons as substitutes. She will be leaving early Friday for a convention, so please let her know ASAP, or, as soon as possible. I would like to thank the members of the Turkey Committee for their hard work in establishing this year’s turkey give-away. You know who you are.

     I would humbly suggest cutting this column from your paper and secretly place it on your boss’s desk, or under his or her windshield wiper. Put a Hershey’s Kiss next to it. Next time you come in contact with your boss, just yawn and excuse yourself. Before you leave, say something inappropriate, but say it as if it were a mistake, like a twitch or an involuntary outburst—like you’re a little nuts. It will get the boss thinking, which, in my experience, is progress. 

    Since I am unemployed, I get a mental health day every day, as well as a nap. Yet, hitting all these keys on my keyboard is just exhausting. I’m going to take a nap now. Later I’m getting my monthly pedicure and manicure. I need to rest up for that. I’ll need to go through the mail later, which is tedious and dangerous since the letter opener is a sharp object and then there are the possibilities of papers cuts, which can be very dirty and toxic. Afterwards, someone might want to come over for tea or coffee, which takes tolerance and good judgment on my part. Then I have to entertain them and I probably don’t like them in the first place. Just thinking about all this is exhausting. Maybe I need to find a job.  I wonder if the State Troopers take old guys. Just a thought.

Peaches: One more war story

 

Note: Happy Veterans Day to you all, especially to families of veterans who have a special challenge in worrying about loved ones away from home and whose support is so dearly needed and appreciated.  For them—as it is with many of us—every day is Veteran’s Day.

 Willie was a weasel.

    He was one of five soldiers in my small unit. We operated a 105-mm artillery Howitzer.  Imagine a 50-pound bullet about a foot-and-a-half long That’s what the gun could shoot. It could go a maximum of seven miles or shorter depending on the situation. The shells were high-explosive, white phosphorus (liquid fire), bee hive (filled with lethal fish hooks that were meant to kill in a large circle), and others. All the rounds came in wooden boxes, two to a box, for which we found many uses.

    There was me, Tony, Sammy, Joe, and the Weasel. Tony was laid back, never said much. Joe was always talking about home and drove us crazy. Sammy was constantly in search of more food. He could eat more than any of us. I was the handsome one. (This is my story.) Then there was the Weasel.

    This was 1969, in Vietnam. We were one of six guns that made up an artillery battery. We would be dropped into a jungle clearing, where we’d set up the Howitzers and get to work killing Commies and supporting infantry units operating beyond the barbed wire that surrounded us.  That was, after all, the point.

   The left-over boxes from artillery shells could serve as protection by filling them with dirt and building a sandbag and box parapet. We made them into benches, shelves, boxes for mementoes or they could be made into a cooler. This tale concerns the cooler.

   You could make a cooler by nailing the Styrofoam packaging to the inside of busted up ammo boxes. If you were lucky, you could get big blocks of ice from nearby villages.

The ice blocks always came with rice or wheat bits in them. I don’t know why and frankly I don’t care.

   When we received boxed rations, the thing I liked most was canned peaches. All of us did. I liked them so much, I always put them in the cooler to get them nice and cold before I partook. Problem was that the peaches were not in everyone’s food packets so if you got a can of peaches it was a treasure. One day my peaches disappeared. And there was only one suspect.

    Keep in mind that all these guys including me had weapons, knives, access to grenades and other lethal weapons including high-powered machine guns. If you ticked off someone in your unit, a dispute could always be settled by beating one another to a pulp. Or, you’d keep in mind that there were lethal weapons around and acted accordingly. All these actions could put you in LBJ, or as it was called, Long Bihn Jail, followed, no doubt, by Leavenworth.

    Here’s the thing: Willie was built like a brick. He was shorter than the rest of us but he had square shoulders and a thick muscular chest covered in black hair. He rarely put a shirt on and was always lurking.  His chest and face always seemed to have the residue of food on them, as though he had just finished somebody’s meal and had the crumbs to prove it.

    Willie’s job was to make sure a round went into the gun the second the last one was fired. In essence, he kept the gun loaded. In this he was unbelievably quick, keeping up with all of us so the rounds could be delivered efficiently and lethally. Hundreds of rounds might go out in a day, and all of them were needed now, not later. So the missions were critical.

    We were busy, so it was hard to keep an eye on each other, although each of us had the other’s back, even the Weasel’s. In fact, the faith you put in the other guys was undisputed. When a fire mission was announced, we were on the gun in an instant, and got a shot off immediately to center the entire battery. Our role was called center-piece, which meant our aim was used to adjust the firing and once adjusted the whole battery was ordered to shoot.

     Some missions went on for hours. Some occurred in the hot sun, during a monsoon rain, or deep into the night where the hot day left behind a shivering cold.  Of course, we were shot at by the enemy and sometimes by our own guys. Mistakes happened. Our own mortar rounds from our own guys might stall in the air over our battery and then drop and explode wherever they landed.  Artillery rounds could remain stuck in the Howitzer until removed unexploded. These were lethal times. So peaches in calm moments took on a special importance. They provided a healthy break from insanity.

     I went to the cooler after a mission—prepared to savor the ripe sweetness of peaches. I would trade any medal you offered for that can. This was a can that didn’t hold much, mind you, but enough. A few tasty bites. Life had, at that moment, been reduced to one need…peaches, in thick sweet sauce, cool and delicious. Save your stinking promotions; give me peaches.

    The cooler was not full. Hardly. A few bottles of this and that, a few cans of really crappy food from home only Sammy would eat. But no peaches.

    To say I went crazy is probably an over simplification. I knew in my heart, Willie the Weasel had struck and that was that. I looked around and there he was sitting on a box smiling. He was always smiling, but smiling like a funeral director smiles, in the knowledge that one day you’re going to be paying for one of his caskets.

    Willie had that ‘I just enjoyed a can of peaches smile,’ when I went up to confront him.

     Before I said some bad language, Willie the Weasel said: “Not me, I didn’t take anything.”  This was before I even asked. I began a bad language tirade and Willie just sat there as though he’d been through many a scene like it before, which was true—being a weasel. Nothing really fazed this guy, which made him a good soldier. He just did the work and lurked around. When he was nearby, pens disappeared, books, spare change, whatever was out and unlocked.

    I suspect the enemy had weasels too. But I’d take our weasels over theirs any day. Weasels invade civilian life as well as military life. You’ve probably got weasels working in your office or at the factory or somewhere within your family. Look at all the weasels that just ran for political office. Some of them were even elected.

     But when the chips are down even weasels, the American soldier versions anyway, rise to the occasion. So for the first time since it occurred, I want to publicly forgive Willie the Weasel for stealing my peaches. I’m glad I didn’t shoot you or leave you tied up in the jungle some night to deal with whatever might be slithering out there, man or beast.

    Consider this ordeal over with. You can stop looking over your shoulder despite my threat to follow you to Florida and take care of you properly. I’ve never been to Florida and don’t have any urge to go. There are plenty of peaches in Florida, you weasel, so have at it. You’re history to me. And by the way. Thank you for your service.