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Christmas shopping is tougher than ever this year. Search as I might through the stores (why is it that people are upset about colorized films and their alleged effect on artistic integrity, but nobody complains about the insipid sound of a once-meaningful song when it has been converted into shopper background music?), I can't find what I want.
The scores of uninvited catalogs haven't been very
helpful, either. None of them contains a book I'd like to
buy, called How to Build a Three-Car Garage from just
Six Months' Worth of Catalogs.
There are many other holiday purchases I just can't find, and I suspect many other people feel the same way. So I might start my own mail-order business and offer these hard-to-find items:
· The Washington Holiday Decorator Kit. Turn an
ordinary bush into a glowing tree with the Thousand
Points of Light
in this set, providing you can figure
out how to turn them on. Other features include shrinking
poindexters, imported Salvadoran nuts and the
easy-to-operate Junior G-Man Lie Detector (How can you tell
when a politician is lying about no tax increases? His lips
move.)
· Your blue-collar friends will thank you daily
for this amazing new insulated coffee cup. With its unique
gimbal mount, the cup always stays upright while attached
to the belt, so that hot coffee is always in immediate
reach. This useful item comes from Productivity
Disincentives, a local firm whose motto is Quality
Products for Leisure on Company Time.
If there are white collars on your shopping list, they'll love another selection from this product line -- the Automatic Boss Switch for office computers. It is so advanced that it can sense when a supervisor walks into the room. It then instantly replaces Flight Simulator with a screen of impressive spreadsheet numbers; when the boss leaves, the game automatically resumes where it left off.
· Who hasn't visited one of those unfortunate
homes where the VCR still blinks 12:00
? Millions of
Americans, no matter how hard they try, haven't been able
to take full advantage of these marvelous machines -- until
now. The revolutionary new VCR Master Controller
allows you to tape one program while watching another,
record a program unattended while you're out, and enjoy
split screens and other advanced features. Please be
advised, though, that the VCR Master Controller
consists of a 12-year-old child, and thus has substantial
operational costs. Further, it's works only for a couple of
years -- by the time it's 14 or 15, it is gone a lot and is
never around when you need it.
· 10,000 Excuses for Every Occasion. A
marvelous and necessary book packed with tested
justifications for lapses that range from the personal to
the corporate level. No longer will you be a deadbeat who
doesn't pay bills, but someone bravely confronting a
temporary negative cash-flow situation,
or else you are
merely heeding professional advice from our accountant
who told us to hold our cash for the next three months so
we will have a more favorable balance sheet when we go
public.
When you're consistently late for work and generally
sneak away early, why use some lame excuse like congenital
sloth when you can announce that the vital concept of
?quality time
is now entering the business arena, and I
have been chosen to serve in the vanguard of that
movement
· Know someone whose talk is getting tiresome
because he always harps on the same dismal subject? Save
your sanity by giving him a membership in the Cause of
the Month Club.
Each month, he'll receive a full
assortment of explanatory literature, initiative petitions
and picket signs, all tied to a prime-time TV special. In
January, he'll picket fur shops; February delivers the
Greenhouse Effect; March means child abuse; April showers
bring acid rain, and so on through the year. Your friend
will still be whining all the time, but at least the topics
will change.
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