Category Archives: satire

HOW I MADE MY FORTUNE


At the time I first went to work for Mr. Byron my family was in a sorrowful state. My dad, much as I can recall, was one of those roving kinds, called himself a carpenter or contractor, depending on the kind of job he was aspiring to, and was subject to fits of disappearance, sometimes for months on end.

“Ain’t your Dad’s fault,” Mom would tell us. “It’s the saddening fate of a contractor to make himself scarce once he’s signed for a job.”

To our pitiful cries of “when’s he coming back?” Mom would only say, “Lord knows, my dears. I suppose when the weather turns and he can’t be expected to do the job—certainly not before.”

Mr. Byron was second cousin to my dad and far and away the most successful member of our extended family. He’d already been through 14 bankrupt mortgage finance companies, and I was being apprenticed to work in his 15th.

“It’s this way, my boy,” he told me at the start. “You get three years to bankrupt your business. In the first year, you do a praiseworthy job and make a fair living. For the next two years, you do execrable work, providing financing to impoverished homebuyers, ignoring complaints, messing up their paperwork, picking up virtually every penny that falls to the floor, and you make a god-awful fortune! By which time there are so many lawsuits pending, so many angry customers ready to shoot you, that only a fool would stay in business. True, there are those mortgage companies that swim against the current, but nobody in the industry thinks much of them or appreciates the damage they do to the general reputation.”

Now to look at Mr. Byron you wouldn’t have thought he’d be old enough to have outlasted 14 bankrupt businesses, working with the customary three-year life cycle.

“Well, you’re a smart lad, all right,” he beamed in answer to my query. “No, I long ago reasoned that since time worked in a linear fashion I could only overtake it by multiplying my efforts. Generally speaking, I’m partial to moving two or three businesses through the bankruptcy cycle at the same time. Fact is, my biggest moneymaker in the current cycle, aside from the mortgage business, is what I call my ‘Honest Response’ Answering System, which takes phone calls from irate customers of banks, mortgage companies and private contractors like your dad, and assures the caller in the most humble fashion that their problems will be resolved within a day, or that their missing contractor will absolutely, without question, be out to do the job first thing in the morning.”

Well, I put myself into apprenticeship to Mr. Byron and within three years had worked in five separate businesses that no sooner made a fortune than they went belly-up, with Mr. Byron and his overworked attorneys left much the richer if not also the wiser. If I had any difficulty with this arrangement it was not with the constant change in my employment positions but with the lack of change in my outlook. In all that time I had earned barely enough to sustain myself, much less my hungry brothers and sisters back in our tenement apartment.

I steeled myself to the fact that I must discuss my privation with my employer, and did so one evening after work. Mr. Byron, instead of feeling put upon, broke out in a wide grin and clasped me in brotherly fashion around the shoulders. It was then that he gave me the advice that would truly lead me on towards making my own fortune.

It’s a valuable lesson you’ve learned, my son,” he said, “namely that fools serve the needs of the wise while wise men serve the desires of fools. Fact is, you’ll never make your fortune in service to the greed of others. Knowing that as you now do, you should be ready to begin amassing your own fortune by joining the Republican party and turning your agile mind to the weaknesses of the witless and the weak. All you lack, I should say, is what we in the business world term a ‘Specialty’.”

It was barely two weeks later that I opened for public accommodation my first auto dealership. And my first decision as a budding entrepreneur was to hire my father to manage the service department.

AH MITTY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU!


Dear Mitty:

I hope you don’t mind my calling you Mitty? ‘Mitt’ sounds so stiff, so formal, just like the blood-sucking billionaire we used to read about. The venture capitalist vampire who sucked dry the lifeblood of a hundred soon-to-die companies.

So, allow me to call you Mitty. If only because we slept together all those years.

Hey, It’s not easy to woo and screw an entire state, but you made it look like child’s play. Swooping down on us. Climbing in our window. A lover who came in the dark and left before dawn. We can still feel the lingering kisses, Mitty, and recall the eager, sophomoric foreplay of your 1994 senatorial campaign, not to mention the SLAM-BAM-THANK YOU M’AM screw job you gave us before you left. Many of us recall that fourth year of your ONE-AND-ONLY term as governor, when you couldn’t find the interest to spend even half your days in the state. It was tough living with someone who was never around, Mitty. Clearly your love—if love it was—had fled somewhere else.

Though your marriage was consummated in Massachusetts your heart was now committed to Washington, D.C.

And what about when you testified about Massachusetts’ liberals down in Washington, Mitty? These days, you castigate Obama for apologizing for America. You were still our governor and you were dissing us to a panel of senators as if Massachusetts and its citizens were some objectionable lab-bred culture.

Hey Mitty, it’s not easy shifting your shape from a moderate’s to a conservative! The things you have to do, right?

And so you left us; leaving your job as our top officeholder unfinished. How many people can govern a state for three years and finish their mission, Mitty? There was so much you still could have done. You had already developed strong relationships with the legislature, knew how to get things done. But you heard another voice calling. Once again, desire was rising. Here within reach was another object of affection to woo and screw. A new siren’s call to chase after.

I guess we should feel proud you left us for a bigger state. But not just any state, Mitty, or one state, but the entire United States of America! And if you don’t win them through election, whose to say you can’t buy them later?

Well, anyway, let me end this before I start to sound bitter. Don’t want you thinking your abrupt rejection has left us sad or bitter. Other states might feel exploited or cheapened by your quick, loveless encounter, like a prostitute who feels undeserving of a goodbye kiss. But we always secretly knew you would love us and leave us.

No hard feelings, Mitty, we were only looking for a cheap thrill ourselves.

Your landscapers asked to be remembered.

Affectionately,

Deval

For The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
(signed by)
Deval Patrick
Governor (in his SECOND TERM)