One Of Those Days

Sometimes your day just doesn’t go right. For example, in the morning your ex gets run over by a school bus. And then, later in the day, you lose your job driving a school bus.

Or maybe you’re a CEO of a fast-food chain. One morning you head off to a shareholders meeting. You give the usual speech about how bright the future is for the company and how happy the employees are. No one in the audience laughs. Shareholders then offer up a few proposals – let’s release an annual report on our company’s effect on global nutrition, let’s study potential human rights violations in our global business.

The investors wisely shoot down this feel-good bullshit. Everything is going just as planned as you arrive at the Question And Answer portion of the meeting. The usual drones who are concerned about the stock price make their usual statements. But then a nine-year old girl steps up to the microphone. She’s cute as a button, with a big-toothed smile and thick-framed glasses. She leans into the microphone and says:

“It isn’t fair that so many kids my age are getting sick.”

You stammer out something about the company selling fat-free milk.

“I don’t think it’s fair”, the girl continues, “when big companies try to trick kids into eating food.”

Please, God, make this shit end you think to yourself as the kid delivers a knockout punch:

“Mr Jones, don’t you want kids to be healthy so they can live a long and healthy life?”

No you think, though you don’t dare say it out loud I want kids to buy more of our food so my ass doesn’t get fired. And your little speech sure isn’t helping.

The bus driver scenario is hypothetical (and borrowed from a funny person on Facebook), but the fast-food one is real. It happened last Thursday in Illinois. Ya gotta love it. It reminds me of that wonderful old saying – the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.