by Dave Barry
My dad liked his Russian hat because he was bald and it kept him warm; he did not care what it looked like. But I cared deeply. I especially cared when I was waiting for my dad to pick me up outside Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School after canteen. Canteen was this school-sponsored youth activity designed to give us something to do on Friday nights other than vandalize mailboxes; we’d go to the school, and the boys would go to the gym to play basketball, while the girls went to the cafeteria to play “Please Mr. Postman” 700 consecutive times on the 45 rpm lo-fi record player and dance the Slop with each other. Eventually the boys would wander in from the gym, and the girls would put on slow, romantic songs such as “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” and the boys, feeling the first stirrings of what would one day grow and blossom into mature love, would pour soft drinks down each other’s pants.
After canteen we’d stand outside the school, surrounded by our peers, waiting for our parents to pick us up; when my dad pulled up, wearing his poodle hat and driving his Nash Metropolitan—a comically tiny vehicle resembling those cars outside supermarkets that go up and down when you put in a quarter, except the Metropolitan looked sillier and had a smaller motor—I was mortified. I might as well have been getting picked up by a flying saucer piloted by some bizarre multitentacled stalk-eyed slobber-mouthed alien being that had somehow got hold of a Russian hat. I was horrified at what my peers might think of my dad; it never occurred to me that my peers didn’t even notice my dad, because they were too busy being mortified by their parents.
Of course eventually my father stopped being a hideous embarrassment to me, and I, grasping the Torch of Dorkhood, became a hideous embarrassment to my son—especially when, like Billy Joel, I try to sing. (I don’t mean that I try to sing like Billy Joel; I try to sing more like Aretha Franklin.) If you want to see a flagrant and spectacular violation of the known laws of physics, watch what my son does if we are in a public place and for some reason I need to burst into the opening notes of “Respect” (“WHAT you want! Baby I got it!”). When this happens, my son’s body will instantaneously disappear into another dimension and rematerialize as far as two football fields away. The results are even more dramatic with the song “Got My Mojo Workin’.”
Yes, parents: In the ongoing battle between you and your adolescent children, you possess the ultimate weapon—the Power to Embarrass. Use this power, parents! If your adolescent children are in ANY way displeasing you—if they are mouthing off or engaging in unacceptable behavior—do not waste your breath nagging them. Instead, simply do what Billy Joel and I do: sing. In fact, I think our judicial system should use this power to punish teenage criminal defendants:
Judge: Young man, this is your third offense. I’m afraid I’mgoing to have to give you the maximum sentence.
Youthful Defendant: No! Not…
Judge: Yes. I’m going to ask your mom to get up here on the court karaoke machine and sing “Copacabana.”
Youthful Defendant: NO! SEND ME TO PRISON! PLEASE!!
Yes, if we were to impose this kind of justice, we’d see a dramatic drop in adolescent crime. The streets would be safer, the adults would be in charge again, and the nation would be a happier place. Just thinking about it makes me want to sing a joyful song. Come on! Everybody join in!
Havin’ my BABY!
What a lovely way of saying how much…
Hey! Where’d everybody go?
THE NAME GAME
I want to stress that I’m not bitter about what the Philip Morris Corporation is trying to do with the name “Dave.”
In case you didn’t know, Philip Morris is test-marketing a new brand of cigarettes called Dave’s. Over the past year I’ve seen big billboard advertisements for Dave’s cigarettes in Seattle and Denver. These are folksy ads; one of them features a tractor. The message is that Dave’s is a folksy brand of cigarette, produced by a down-to-earth, tractor-driving guy named Dave for ordinary people who work hard and make an honest living, at least until they start coughing up big folksy chunks of trachea.
Of course there is no actual Dave. The people at Philip Morris are just calling the new brand Dave’s because they think the name Dave sounds trustworthy and noncorporate. This is pretty funny when you consider that Philip Morris is the world’s largest tobacco company and has enough marketing experts and advertising consultants and lawyers and lobbyists to sink an aircraft carrier, not that I’m suggesting anything.
According to an article in Advertising Age, Philip Morris made up a whole story—described by a Philip Morris spokesperson as “a tale of fictional imagert”—about how the Dave’s brand of cigarettes got started. Here’s the story, as quoted by Advertising Age from Philip Morris promotional materials:
“Down in Concord, N.C., there’s a guy named Dave. He lives in the heart of tobacco farmland. Dave enjoys lots of land, plenty of freedom, and his yellow ‘57 pickup truck. Dave was fed up with cheap, fast-burning smokes. Instead of just getting mad, he did something about it… Dave’s tobacco company was born.”
Is that a heartwarming and inspirational tale of fictional imagery, or what? A guy—a regular guy: a guy exactly like you, except that he doesn’t exist—gets FED UP with the status quo. So instead of just sitting around and complaining, he gets up off his imaginary butt and—in the great “can-do” tradition of Americans such as John Wayne, who courageously pretended to be many brave heroes before he died with just the one remaining lung—”Dave” decides to make his own brand of cigarettes.
Philip Morris does not provide details regarding how, exactly, Dave raised the money to build his cigarette factory. Maybe Dave robbed a nursing home; maybe Dave borrowed the money from other members of his neo-Nazi group; maybe Dave sold his huge collection of child pornography. You could make up any story you wanted about what Dave did, because Dave is not real! That’s the kind of fun you and Philip Morris can have with tales of fictional imagery.
On the other hand, you must be very, very careful when you talk about real people. An example of a real person would be Geoffrey C. Bible, who is the chief executive officer of Philip Morris.
Because Geoffrey C. Bible is real, you should not use the name “Geoffrey C. Bible” in a derogatory way. You should not, for example, say, “Darn it! The dog made Geoffrey C. Bible on the carpet again!” Nor should you permit your youngsters to use expressions such as “Tommy stuck his finger way up into his nose and pulled out a big old Geoffrey C. Bible!” Nor should you say that a person caught engaging in an unnatural act of romance with a sheep was “doing the Geoffrey C. Bible.” That would be wrong.
It would also be wrong to make up a tale of fictional imagery about Geoffrey C. Bible, such as:
“Down in the heart of Philip Morris corporate headquarters there’s a guy named Geoffrey C. Bible. Geoffrey C. Bible enjoys plenty of employees and a corporate jet. Geoffrey C. Bible was fed up with so-called ‘scientists’ saying that cigarettes kill more people every year than alcohol, cocaine, crack, heroin, homicide, suicide, and O.J. Simpson. Instead of just getting mad, Geoffrey C. Bible did something about it. He deposited his enormous paycheck.”
So does everybody understand the ethical point here? You may NOT take liberties with the name “Geoffrey C. Bible.” You may, however, take the name “Dave” and do pretty much whatever you want to it. As I say, I’m not at all bitter that Philip Morris has decided to appropriate my name, and my father’s name, and the name that a lot of regular guys who really exist have used over the years, a name that has apparently earned some measure of trust, which is why Philip Morris wants to attach its new cigarette brand to this name, the way a leech attaches itself to your leg. Who knows? If this strategy works out, maybe it’ll inspire a whole bunch of new cigarette brands with trustworthy names. I bet that even as you read this, some marketing people, somewhere, are batting around the concept of “Jesus” cigarettes.
They need to keep coming up with ideas. They’re in a tough business: The people who use their products—and I am NOT
implying that there’s a connection—keep dying of lung cancer. It’s an unfortunate situation, and I for one am getting fed up. But instead of getting mad, I’m going to do something about it.
I’m going to start calling lung cancer “Geoffrey’s disease.”
BORN TO BE JERKS
Recently, when I was having a hamburger at an outdoor restaurant, two guys started up their Harley-Davidson motorcycles, parked maybe twenty-five feet from me.
Naturally, being Harley guys, these were rebels—lone wolves, guys who do it Their Way, guys who do not follow the crowd. You could tell because they were wearing the same jeans, jackets, boots, bandannas, sunglasses, belt buckles, tattoos, and (presumably) underwear worn by roughly 28 million other lone-wolf Harley guys.
And of course, once they got their engines started, they had to spend the equivalent of two college semesters just sitting there, revving their engines, which were so earbleedingly loud that I thought my hamburger was going to leap from my plate and skitter, terrified, back into the kitchen. I believe many Harley guys spend more time revving their engines than actually driving anywhere; I sometimes wonder why they bother to have wheels on their motorcycles.
Perhaps you, too, have experienced an assault of Harley-revving; and perhaps you have asked yourself: Why do these people DO this? What possible reason could they have for causing so much discomfort to those around them?
As it happens, there IS a reason, and it is an excellent one: They’re jerks.
I’m not saying that ALL Harley guys—some of my friends are Harley guys—engage in this obnoxious behavior. I’m just saying that the ones who DO engage in it are jerks. And I am not afraid to tell them so, even if they are large and hairy and potentially violent. I am not afraid to say: “Okay, Mr. Loud Harley Guy, you got a problem with me calling you a jerk? You want to DO something about it? You want to express your disagreement by tapping out lengthy Morse code sentences on my skull with a tire iron? Then why don’t you—if you have the guts—come see me PERSONALLY at my place of employment, located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.? Come on if you dare, fat boy! Ride right into the lobby!”
And let me also say, while I’m at it, that I’m sick of you people who park in spaces reserved for the handicapped, even though you are not, personally, handicapped. You know who you are. Many of you even have those little rearview-mirror handicapped signs, which you got from a friend or relative, or which you once needed because of some temporary medical condition that has long since been cleared up.
One of my hobbies is to watch when cars pull into handicapped parking spots, and see who gets out. Very often, in my experience, these people appear to be totally unhandicapped: no wheelchair; no crutches; not even a trace of a limp. I realize that some of these people have problems, such as heart conditions, that are not visible. But some of them, to judge by the sprightliness of their walks, are off to compete in the decathlon. Their only handicap is: They’re jerks.
What we need in this country—I would pay extra income tax for this—is an elite corps of Handicapped Parker On-Site Medical Examination SWAT Teams. These teams would prowl the streets, wearing rubber gloves and armed with X-ray machines, CAT scanners, scalpels, drills, saws, and harpoon-sized hypodermic needles.
When a team spotted a handicapped-zone parker who could not immediately prove that he or she was handicapped, that person would immediately undergo a severely thorough on-the-street physical examination conducted by burly personnel who have attended medical school for a maximum of four hours including lunch (“Hey Norm! Which ones are the kidneys again?”). These examinations would involve full frontal nudity and the removal of enough blood, organ, and tissue samples to form a complete new human; also, if the SWAT team found a Harley guy revving his engine in a handicapped-parking zone, it would employ the 250-foot intestinal probe nicknamed “Big Bertha.” The idea would be that if you weren’t qualified to park in a handicapped zone BEFORE the physical examination, you definitely would be AFTER.
And let’s talk about you people who always send your food back in restaurants. (I KNOW this has nothing to do with handicapped parking; I can’t stop myself.) I mean, sure, if the food is truly BAD, if it has RODENTS running around on it, okay, send it back; but what about you people who ALWAYS send your food back, thereby turning EVERY SINGLE MEAL into an exercise in consumer whining? I’m sorry! You’re jerks! Especially if, when the bill comes, you also ALWAYS insist—even if everybody ordered basically the same thing—on figuring out your EXACT share (“Well, I had the Diet Sprite, which is ten cents less than the iced tea…”); and then you decide that a 5 percent tip is adequate, thereby forcing your friends, who are embarrassed, to put in more money.
Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you. Put your ear right down to the page:
YOUR FRIENDS HATE IT WHEN YOU STIFF THE WAITER. IF THE SERVICE IS OKAY, YOU SHOULD TIP 15 PERCENT. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO TIP, THEN DON’T EAT AT RESTAURANTS.
Also, you should never, ever, no matter what, butt in front of people waiting in line without asking their permission.
Also, if, when you talk to people, they keep backing away from you, it’s because you’re TOO CLOSE, all right? SO DON’T KEEP ADVANCING ON THEM LIKE A HUMAN GLACIER.
Thank you, and I apologize for using so many capital letters. I can be a real jerk about that.
THE PEOPLE’S
COURT
Today, as part of my ongoing series entitled “Advancing Your Career,” I’m going to address the often-asked question: Should you set fire to your supervisor’s beard?
But first I need to formally apologize to the Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders for a column I wrote a couple of months ago in which I stated—without having done any research—that people who repeatedly rev their extremely loud Harley-Davidsons in crowded public places are jerks.
Well. You talk about stirring up a hornet’s nest. I have not received so much irate mail since the time I criticized Neil Diamond.
(NOTE TO NEIL DIAMOND FANS: Please don’t write to me again! I now worship Neil as a god! I have a graven image of him to which I ritually sacrifice goats!)
(NOTE TO ANIMAL-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: I’m just kidding!)
(NOTE TO NEIL DIAMOND FANS: Not that I am saying Neil is not worthy of goat sacrifice!)
In their letters to me, the Harley-Davidson people made four basic points:
I am scum.
There are important mechanical and safety reasons why Harley-Davidson engines need to be extremely loud and revved a lot.
I am lower than scum.
Perhaps I would like to have my skull crushed like a Ping-Pong ball under a freight locomotive.
Here are some actual unretouched quotations from the letters I received:
“Dear mr Barry yes you are a looser and yes you are anal retentive.”
“You are an idiot! You should be writing you’re so called journalism for National Inquirer.”
“My loud Harley might catch your attention from concentrating on singing your favorite Barry Manilow song.”
“I don’t guess you know that lawyers, Doctors, country singers own Harley.”
“You (bleeping) polyester buying, penny loafer sporting, polka-dot tie wearing, bus riding, no life having (motherbleeper).”
So I just want to make this sincere statement of apology to those Harley riders whom I have offended: Don’t you EVER accuse me of listening to Barry Manilow.
(NOTE TO BARRY MANILOW FANS: Just kidding! I love Barry’s work! Especially the Dr Pepper commercial!)
Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up, I want to share with you an item from a newsletter published by the Utah Department of Employment Security, sent to me by alert reader John Balmforth. The newsletter has a feature titled YOU BE THE JUDGE, which presents a case concerning whether a company was justified in discharging an employee (referred to as the “claimant”). Here, according to the newsletter are the facts, as determined at a hearing:
“During a discip
linary discussion with his supervisor, the claimant lit the supervisor’s beard on fire with a cigarette lighter.”
“Shortly thereafter, the claimant refused to follow instructions from his trainer and, when rebuked, the worker pressed a Post-it note on the trainer’s forehead.”
Okay! You be the judge! Was the employer justified in firing this person? Think about it while we play the Jeopardy music:
Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo DOO doo-doo-doo-doo-doo…
Time’s up! The answer, according to the Utah Department of Employment Security is: Yes, the employer WAS justified. The newsletter points out that “not only is setting a person’s beard on fire dangerous,” but also the forehead Post-it note indicates “an absence of professional behavior.” The department apparently did not give the employee any credit for refraining from attaching the note with a stapler.
Speaking of assaults, I have here a chilling news item from the September 3 edition of the Asbury Park Press, alertly sent in by John F. Coffey II, attorney at law. The item, which was written by Sheri Tabachnik and which I am not making up, begins as follows:
“A Belmar man who was throwing uncooked pasta out the window was charged by police with stabbing a man who was hit by the rigatoni, police said.”
The article states that the victim and some friends were walking on the street at about 2 A.M. when “some people in an apartment began throwing uncooked pasta out the window at them.” Words were exchanged, and the pasta-wielding perpetrator allegedly came out of the apartment and stabbed the victim. According to a police spokesperson, “He must have hit him in an artery because he was gushing blood.”
