* * * * *

“You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it
     comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.”

There was an amusing conversation yesterday between Smirk, G and I,
concerning The Monopolistic Phone Company and The Monopolistic Phone Company
Union. Smirk mentioned that The Monopolistic Phone Company Union only allowed
their technicians six roll-outs per day (basically, six jobs per day) even
though one technician admitted to Smirk that they could easily do twice that
number of jobs. G explained that the “six roll outs” policy was not mandated
by the union, but by The Monopolistic Phone Company to the union, which then
told The Monopolistic Phone Company that their employees could only do six
roll outs per day (it comes down to a safety issue—The Monopolistic Phone
Company does not want their employees rushing between jobs in those white and
gray vans, hitting little old ladies or the Boy Scouts leading them across
and thus opening them up for litigation).

So The Monopolistic Phone Company told the union to tell them that their own
employees could only do six jobs a day.

Okay.

But, as G went on, the union's executives receive their paychecks not from
union dues, but from The Monopolistic Phone Company itself. It's not that the
union executives have one job with The Monopolistic Phome Company and they do
the union executive thing on the side, no. The Monopolistic Phone Company
pays the union executives to run the union.

So if you work for The Monopolistic Phone Company, the union you belong to is
paid for by The Monopolistic Phone Company.

And as if that weren't surreal enough, the union executives belong not to the
union they work for, but for a Monopolistic Phone Company union executive
union. Yes, the executives have their own exclusive union. Run and paid for,
by—you guessed it—-The Monopolistic Phone Company.

If this sounds like something from Monty Python's Meaning of Life [1], well …
yes. It does.

Except The Monopolistic Phone Company doesn't have a machine that goes
“ping.”

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085959/

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