the ten-gallon solution
I hate to admit it, but I have a slight case of Agyrophobia. Agyrophobia, as ridiculous as it seems, is the fear of crossing the street.
For example, did you know that more than four thousand Americans are killed crossing the street every year? Not crossing a freeway or expressway, but little ole Main Street. That’s more than died on 9/11. In fact, over the last ten years more people have died crossing the street than in all the natural disasters combined. Unbelievable.
So I’m slightly agyrophobic, but that doesn’t mean I can’t cross a street at all. It just takes me a little longer.
Now, then. My idea was to find a restaurant and give the whole thing a test run. Because I wasn’t much for crossing streets, that also meant finding somewhere close by. Living in Santa Monica, that was the easy part.
So I found myself loitering outside this little Italian bistro by the name of Puzzolente Peto, just trying to muster up the courage to go inside. I love it when they name restaurants in Italian; reminds me of the movie The Godfather.
Did you know there are undercover videos of parents actually changing their babies’ diapers right there on the tables at some restaurants? No joke. I guess when the sign says “Family Restaurant”, some people really take it to heart.
I whacked myself with the rubber mallet before I left home (by now I even had a name for her: Ruby), but it didn’t last long enough to get me inside the restaurant itself. So I went around back by the dumpster. Several more taps to the skull and I was inside the joint.
Before I could summon up the courage to even sit down, I had to hit myself twice more back behind the rubber-tree plants. Still, all this wasn’t enough. When a waiter passed by carrying a glass of water—with as lemon wedge—I knew I just couldn’t go through with it. I got the hell out of that death trap as fast as I could.
Did you know lab tests show that lemon wedges in restaurants are regularly contaminated with fecal matter? This happens when waiters don’t wash their hands after using the can, then gather up the lemons with those same bare hands. For what it’s worth, you might as well just follow them to the bathroom, kneel down, and lick their assholes clean.
What was I going to do? I couldn’t be sitting there at dinner whacking myself with Ruby the rubber mallet every five minutes. Fanny would think I was some kind of nut. Maybe I was. But the important thing is not whether you actually are a lunatic, it’s whether they know it or not. If I was going to make it through dinner I had to come up with something more subtle. More discreet. But what?
I went home, deflated and depressed. Just forget it. I’ll stay locked in my apartment while she’s knocking on my door sometime after seven. Shameless? Maybe, but I’ve learned to live with it.
So I sank into my couch and turned on the TV. There was someone going on about the Chinese. That’s when I got the idea.
According to TV, it seems it’s not enough the Chinese kidnap people and force them into slave labor these days, now they’re going around torturing them too.
While the Chinese are of course advancing in technology by leaps and bounds, they’re still a culture with one foot in the 1st century. Does that mean literally walking around with one leather-thong sandal and one Jimmy Choo pump? Not hardly. It does mean, however, that when things don’t go their way on the job, they resort not to docking workers’ pay but instead old-school torture itself, like clamping vises on their heads. Aha.
It goes like this: Say a Chinese worker drives a nail through his foot or saws one of his fingers off. Instead of losing production from that worker for the whole rest of the day, Chinese factory owners instead apply a vise to the worker’s head to make him forget all about the pain elsewhere. Genius!
According to TV, it works like a charm. Productivity in China, despite a current global economic downturn, is still on the rise. Productivity, while seemingly such a positive word, is really just corporate code for overworking and underpaying employees.
The craziest part was not how horrific the whole idea was, but that forcing people to work with a vise on their heads helped to increase production, further driving down costs and putting even more American manufacturers out of business.
“For every one tenth of one percent in productivity gains in China, one American factory closes its doors,” said TV. “Whenever you see productivity in China on the rise, buy Wal*mart stock.”
I thought: What would John Wayne do? Obviously, these were not the same Chinese the Duke fought alongside in the movie The Flying Tigers, but instead more like the Chinese in the 1955 flop Blood Alley, in which he starred with Lauren Bacall.
It gave me a great idea, though. A vise, huh? Then, I thought about the Professor and how he never misses an episode of Bonanza. Bonanza. Hoss Cartwright. That’s when I came up with my ten-gallon solution.
