Escalator Riding For Beginners

President Karen didn’t like to lose the election. But his sole professional skill, as it turned out, was not even a skill and everyone knew it. It’s something anyone can do. It has no value. But since it was his only ‘skill’ he used it. This ‘skill’ was firing people. Not like a Boss. But like a Karen. Post election he called the manufacturers of viagra and sacked them over the phone. “We don’t work for you, president Karen,” they said. “But I lost my election…” he whimpered from the 11th green. “We have nothing to do with elections,” said the Viagra execs. “It’s already been ten days and still no election….” Cried Karen. “We deal with erectile dysfunction,” said exec #1. “Covfefe?” Said President Karen. Karen waddled into the member’s section back at the clubhouse and sacked an illegal immigrant he had hired just a week earlier. “Why you sack me?” Said Philip (he was from Dakota which Karen mistook for a central American tinpot dictatorship) Because he had dared speak Karen sacked him

The folks at the dump hate my guts. That's okay, I'm used to it. I don't care one way or the other about them and I think this shines through my fragile, porcelain exterior.  They, like so many before them, sense my absence of a.) loyalty to their tenets, and b.) deep respect for the importance of their line of work. While a.) is true, b.) is not necessarily true. It is a nuanced respect. Nuance is difficult to get across in the brief episodes which find us, the dump workers and me, at loggerheads. Now normally, in a sane town, the folks at the dump, like, the workers, would hide in a low shed, sweating, eating corn chips and watching soccer games - diverted only every whistle-blow by online gambling. But our town has no budget for such a low shed. Indeed not even for the corn chips. So the dump workers are forced to either stand guard at the cul-de-sac of sorting bins or else hide in the trees around the perimeter sucking on German tree sap and posting sticky-fingered