When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  EXECUTIVE LESSONS

  So began an intensive period of executive mentoring sessions whereby David sought to groom Bob for the responsibilities of UGGA executive management. David claimed the key to being a successful executive was to understand the proper way to view the world and the actors who played their respective roles in the grand mosaic of life. By topic are the messages of wisdom imparted by David.

  Time, the First Lesson

  “Time is God’s greatest gift to you. You need to make the most of the precious little time you have on Earth. When Adam made his huge mistake of listening to Eve in the Garden of Eden, God punished him by commanding Adam to atone for eating that apple by working his ass off for the rest of his life. That’s the world’s first mitzvah, the very first order God gave to man, so it must be important.

  “Anyway, you need to be working every day, except God gives you a day off every week. That’s called Shabbat, or Sabbath. You get a break. You’re supposed to go to shul, if you’re a Jew like me, or I guess the rest of you are supposed to go to church or do whatever you do when you get a day off. But taking a day off or honoring Shabbat puts you in conflict with the first mitzvah. You’re not supposed to get time off, so even God tries to fuck up your mind and waste your time. You must always be on guard against wasting time. Now I know for a fact that a lot of guys skip out on shul to go to football games or just to lie around and watch TV. I’m not sure if God takes you to the woodshed for not going to shul, but he might. You’ve got to watch out for God. If you don’t listen to him, he can fuck with you. Anyway, the first mitzvah is about time management, and I’ve got some great thoughts about it.

  “Look, God lets some guys get away with watching football games and just goofing off on Shabbat. They don’t pray all day and God doesn’t kill them for being slackers, so it must be okay with him if you kind of get the jump on these slouches by actually working on the Sabbath. That way, you’re honoring the very first mitzvah and you can get ahead of guys who take the day off. Now, this kind of contradicts the mitzvah that you’re supposed to go to shul on the Sabbath, but there’s also a way to get around that. See, on Yom Kippur, we Jews get to atone for all our screwups for the year. There’s a period in the service right near the end of the High Holy Days where the rabbi yells, ‘The gates are closing!’ That means you have a limited amount of time to get to the shul and pray for God to forgive you for all your screwups all year long! It’s kind of like the two-minute warning in football.

  “So what I always do is time it to the exact minute. At the last five minutes of the service, I barrel into the shul parking lot in my Cadillac and come to a screeching stop right in front. Usually there’s a guard there, so I jump out of the car, put on my yarmulke—that’s Jewish for skullcap—and then I scream at the guard, telling him I have a life-or-death emergency. I hand him the car keys and run into the shul just in time to see the rabbi closing the curtain on the holy of holies. I bow my head in prayer and scream out, ‘Forgive me, God!’ I act like I’m really sorry in case God is watching me.

  “Then the gates close. I’ve atoned and I’m forgiven, see. I’m good for another year. The big plus about doing it this way is I don’t have to waste a lot of time listening to the service, time I can use wisely by studying stocks. And there’s a second big plus. The guard keeps my car right there in front of the shul, so since I’m also the first guy out, I just jump right into my car and take off. Then I go to the delicatessen where all the other Jews go and break the fast with them by ordering a double-sized pastrami sandwich.

  “The point I’m making is you’ve got very little time on Earth to make money, so if you can find little ways to cut corners to give yourself more time, then cut those corners. Another example is taking a shower. You can save a good fifteen minutes every other day by just throwing on some deodorant instead of taking a shower. Just think about it! Fifteen minutes a day times one hundred and eighty-two working days works out to having an extra 3.79 days a year to do something important, like calling salesmen and telling them to sell the UGGA fund! Over ten years, that’s an extra thirty-eight days! Just think of the edge you’d have on other guys you compete with if you had an extra thirty-eight days of sales every ten years!

  “Even when you go to the grocery store you should think about making every second count. Take those plastic bags they put on those little stands around the store. They expect you to waste your time every time you pick something up, like a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. They want you to get the carrots, and then walk around looking for the bag rack. Then you’re expected to take one bag and put the carrots in the bag. Then you walk to the lettuce, pick out a bunch, and then walk back to the bag rack for a bag to put the lettuce in. Don’t waste your time. Just take the roll of bags off the bag rack and carry it with you in your cart. When you go to check out and there’s a line in front of you, don’t waste your time. Just go to the service desk, hand them what the groceries are worth and walk out with your groceries.

  “You can apply this same relentless scrutiny to all sorts of things that waste valuable time. For instance, do you really need to shave every day? Do you wear shoes that lace up or loafers you can just slip into? How about going to restaurants instead of grabbing a sandwich?

  “Examine your driving habits. If you consistently drive ten miles per hour above the speed limit, chances are no cop will bother you, unless you’re in a school or church zone, because the cop makes more money nailing the guy who’s going twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. So when you just kind of zip along peppy on the gas pedal instead of driving like a slow-motion barge, you rack up saved minutes.

  “Stop signals and red lights are the same way. You come to a red light, you slow up a little, and you look up and down the cross street. You see there’s no cop and you can beat it across the intersection before an oncoming car can hit you, so you go for it. You just saved probably a full minute or two. Beating five red lights every day gains you five minutes a day. Three hundred days of driving a year and you’ve just saved twenty-five hours that you could use making sales calls! See what I’m driving at?

  “Driving in stop-and-go traffic is another time waster. There wouldn’t be stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic if there were no communists in the first place because they make all these rules about driving carefully and stopping when you have an accident and exchanging insurance cards and licenses and registrations. If there weren’t so many communist obstacles to getting around expeditiously, people with big tough cars and trucks could just push these idiots in their tiny little tinny cars right off the road. If those tin car douche bags knew the big cars and trucks could just shove them off the road, they’d drive a lot faster so they wouldn’t get hit in the first place. Then traffic would flow smoothly.

  “Unfortunately, the commies have taken over the country, so you need to do the next best thing on your own. You need to buy an old Cadillac, one of those iron battlefield tanks they used to make in the 60’s or 70’s, or an old Ford pickup truck. Those old Caddies and those old Ford trucks last forever, and you can get parts for them. But the reason you need to have one is they scare the living shit out of other drivers when they see you driving anywhere near them. They can tell from looking at your car that you won’t give a second thought to ramming them if they get in your way or if they won’t let you cut in line. I have one, as you know. I even took a sledgehammer to the rear passenger doors to bang them in so it looks like I just don’t give a shit about having accidents with it. It scares the crap out of people just to look at my car.

  “Here’s another thought on stop-and-go driving. Sometimes on a freeway there’s a shoulder lane. You’re supposed to stay off it unless there’s an emergency. Well, an emergency is how you define it. Squandering God’s greatest gift, the gift of time, creates all kinds of emergencies. Suppose somebody is late to work because of traffic. Then maybe something doesn’t get built on time and somebody ends up dead or injured, or maybe somebody can’t get to a d
octor’s appointment on time and the doctor gets upset and goes off and plays golf, and then cancer doesn’t get diagnosed on time. Do you see what I mean? These communists have fucked up the entire world, but you can’t let them get away with wasting your time. The way to beat freeway traffic is to either use the shoulder you’re not supposed to use, or turn on your headlights and blow your horn while you bang into the back bumper of the car in front of you. Wave your hand wildly and scream while you do this. Other drivers will get out of your way and you’ll eliminate a lot of wasted time.

  “When you drive and someone cuts in front of you, just speed up and pass him so you get back in first place. Always see your time as more valuable than the other guy’s. Once there was this redneck in a brand new pickup truck; it was one of those Dodge Rams. Well, he passed me, so I passed him. Then he made a huge mistake. He tried to pass me again, so I rammed the side of his Ram with my Caddie. Well, he starts flashing his emergency lights and waves me to pull over, which I did. He pulls up in front of me, kind of half on the shoulder of the road and half in the driving lane. I sit in the car and wait. He gets out of his truck and starts walking back to me, carrying a baseball bat. Well, I can see he thinks he’s going to smash my windshield in, and maybe my head too, so I just sit and wait until he gets real close. Then I gunned the car and drove straight at him, like I was going to run him over. You should have seen him dive all the way over to the side of the road. I blew the horn as I drove by him. He was screaming and swearing, but I just drove off. You just can’t let people waste your time and get away with it.

  “There’s one other thing about driving that’s important. Every once in a while, a cop will follow you and flash his lights for you to pull over. You know you’re about to get a ticket, right? Well, there’s a way around getting a ticket. First, you need to prepare in advance. Buy about ten or fifteen candy bars, and take the wrapper off one of them and leave it on the front seat next to the wrapped ones at all times. Got that? Okay, I see you are nodding your head yes.

  “Now, once you know the cop is behind you, slow down. Drive very slowly, almost imperceptible slowly, and slightly weave the car back and forth on the road, like you’ve got control of the car, but it’s actually kind of hard for you to stay in control. Got it? Okay. Then, you look for something to run into as the car slows down, like a tree or a telephone pole, or somebody’s parked car. Just don’t ram the car into any people.

  “You need to go slowly as you do this, so you don’t hurt yourself too much. Ram into something, or if you can’t pull over because you’re on a freeway, just kind of gradually scrape your car against another guy’s car. Then, when your car stops, just fall over on your passenger seat and rub the candy bar on your face around your lips and make a mess. Hershey’s chocolate bars are great for this.

  “When the cop comes to the window, just lay on the seat like you are passed out. The cop will open the door and shake you. You act groggy, like you passed out. Then you mumble ‘sugar’ just repeat that one word a couple times, and very feebly point to a candy bar. Now, the cop will think you have diabetes and he’ll panic. He’ll shove a candy bar into your mouth. You eat some of it, and then you slowly act like you’re coming back to life. You thank the cop for being such a savior. Tell him you think he might have saved your life. Cops like hearing that. “Tell him you’re sorry for the inconvenience, that you noticed there’s something wrong if you don’t get sugar every once in a while. You’ve meant to see a doctor about it, but you haven’t had time to get in to see one, you’ve been working so hard to make money to pay your back taxes to the city that employs the cop. You’re trying to be a good citizen so the cop can get paid so he can feed his wife and kids.

  “Soon, you’ll have the cop feeling so sorry for you he’ll be crying right along with you. Then, offer him one of your candy bars in case his sugar ever gets too low. By then, he’ll be glad to let you drive off without a ticket. I’ve done this routine twice and it’s worked both times.

  “A great way to reduce wasted time is cutting in line when two lanes of traffic are trying to merge into one lane. The commie time wasters will always be happy to sit in the longest, slowest-moving lane, so the correct move is to pull out of the slow lane, get into the fast lane or pull onto the shoulder, and race ahead of all the slowpokes. Here’s where having an old Cadillac tank-type car is a huge advantage. Most drivers will let you get back into line when you’ve reached the front because they’re afraid you’ll smash into their new plastic car if they mess with you.

  “One objection to having an old clunker is that they use a lot of gas, but they really don’t. The gas other people waste by sitting in line in their new mileage-efficient cars waiting to go nowhere is actually a cost for them and a time-saving opportunity for you. You just roar right up to the front of traffic lines and jam yourself right in there. Sure, some people will blow their horns at you, but they’re just jealous because they didn’t have the chutzpah to do it themselves. A lot of them just blow their horns and scream to impress their wives anyway, so just ignore them. Always carry a ten-foot piece of surgical hose, a hammer, and screwdriver in your car. If you forget to stop at a gas station and run out of gas, you can always stop next to one of those little plastic cars, punch a hole in its gas tank, and siphon off some gas into your car. If you get good at this, you can avoid gas stations entirely and save even more time.”

  Bob looked at him askance. “It sounds like you make a lot of friends driving like you do.”

  “I don’t care about friends. I don’t have any, I don’t need any, and I don’t want to make any. Friends slow you down. They have ideas about things and their ideas are never as good as mine. That reminds me about avoiding slowing down while you are driving, like when you come to an intersection and there’s red lights stopping you, and you are back behind the first car at the red light. Well, say you’re going to be turning right, or left for that matter, onto the cross street. Now you’ve got a choice. You can sit there like a schmuck or you can take the bull by the horns. If there’s no building on the corner, just grass or small shrubs, you don’t have to sit there and suffer through this intolerable communist waiting around bullshit. You just turn the car’s wheels into the curb and gun the motor. That jumps the car up over the curb and you can cut across the corner and get where you’re trying to go while all the schmucks just sit there waiting for the light to turn green. It’s the Occam’s Razor principle.”

  “I always thought Occam’s was about using the fewest assumptions to solve a problem, getting the most likely answer that way.”

  “Well, you’d be wrong about that, or Occam was wrong. It doesn’t matter. The whole point of Occam’s Razor was to solve the problem. Just get her done, see? My way gets it done.”

  “Okay.”

  “Getting stuck in a long line of cars because some repair crews are working on the road and they’ve closed down traffic to one lane is another situation you need to know how to manage. Most people just sit there patiently and wait for the line to move along at a snail’s pace, but that’s a huge time-wasting mistake. The proper thing to do is make a hard right turn onto a neighborhood street. Then race as fast as you can down the side street, make a left turn at the first cross street, and race through the neighborhood for about ten or twenty blocks. Turn left again and race back onto the road ahead of all the suckers who waited in line. You save all kinds of time by using this tactic.”

  “But in neighborhoods there could be little kids playing in the streets. Shouldn’t you drive cautiously?”

  “Hell no! Never slow down just because it’s a residential neighborhood. If some little kid is in the street, that’s just the democrats teaching that kid to be irresponsible. Those kids have democrat communist parents who haven’t taught them to respect the rights of drivers to rule the streets. Now I’m not telling you to run over the kid. That could get you into trouble. It might even be expensive. There’s a simpler way. When the kid is out in the street, you just drive arou
nd him. Just bounce the curb and drive through the kid’s front yard, see. You don’t even slow down. The kid won’t even notice anything is happening. You might tear out some bushes and flowers and you might put tire tracks through the yard, but that’s unimportant. The important thing is to save time. The key to doing this move successfully is to take the curb one wheel at a time so you don’t knock the front end out of alignment.”

  “That’s quite a lesson. I never would have thought of it.”

  “You’re learning very valuable things. You’ll appreciate it more after you’ve practiced these tactics yourself. Here’s another one you should employ to keep ahead of communist time wasters: intimidation. You should keep this in your repertoire. We’ve been discussing them for a while now, so I want to make sure you’re getting the concept, so answer me this. When you see a bunch of people running a marathon to raise money for breast cancer, crippled kids, multiple sclerosis, or to commemorate some kind of historic event, like the Boston Marathon, what do most people see?

  “Well, everybody sees a worthy cause and public participation, a community bonding sort of thing.”

  “Exactly right,” exclaimed David, “but that’s not what’s really going on with these things. They’re really communist community organizers who are trying to fuck up everybody’s minds and lull them into la-la land. Their real goal is to disrupt normal business commerce, snarl traffic, and keep people from thinking about making money so they’ll become more dependent on the state and therefore vote socialist because socialists are just about legitimizing the theft of stuff from hard workers and giving free stuff to lazy bastards. It’s just glorified bullshit and it’s not what God wants to go on here. It’s about justifying, in the minds of the people, the notion that it’s okay to be lazy and dependent upon others, and that’s plain wrong.”