Vice Presidents on Parade
Michael Estabrook
I did a slide presentation at
the Annual Awards
Banquet and roasted them, all 4 of the
brand new Vice Presidents, and threw in
the President of the company too
just for good measure, I suppose.
I found old photos and made them into
slides, used anecdotes
from their illustrious careers, and from
history and mythology, too. I compared
Tim, our Ph.D. Microbiologist,
to a chubby amorphous bacterium.
'In the old days we called him names like
Timmy, or Tim-O, or Timmy-Wimmy,
or sometimes, and this is my favorite, we
just called him plain old Fuck-Face.'
And Leon, another Ph.D. in
something or other,
I compared to a Gargoyle, 'Beneath this
serious, stolid, unflappable, intellectual
veneer lurks a wild, slavering,
savage sort of beast.'
Then for Gerald, our French VP, I showed
that famous painting of Napoleon Bonaparte
by Jacques Louis David,
the one with his hand in his jacket,
but said that in Gerald's case
his hand is in his pants.
And finally there was Nick
who I likened to a statue of Hercules.
'Notice please the striking resemblance
between the Hercules of old and our
very own Nick of today - the broad shoulders,
the massive pectorals, the thick powerful
thighs, the peculiar absence of even
a run-of-the-mill penis.'
Anyway, it was a great evening,
everybody agreed, a memorable evening.
Doug, the President of the company,
said I was like Johnny Carson,
that I had missed my calling.
And while everybody seemed to have
such a great time, and while for months
afterwards they all circulated the video-tape
of me up there insulting the hell
out of them, I still have the same
exact job today that I had
back then, back in 1989. Guess Doug
wasn't kidding when he said
I'd missed my calling.
