Up: Who Cares?

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Executive Decision

By Ford, Frank Bernard

a: The one they call Jinky, from Accounting? He okayed his early retirement package.

b: That's...good?

a: Very. I never found out what he did in Accounting.

b: I saw him once. He took stuff out of his incoming tray and put it somebody else's. Roscoe was department head then, and he said he didn't care what Jinky did because he, uh, Jinky, was temporary, on loan from Engineering.

a: Engineering thought he was on loan from Accounting.

b: Holy God!

a: Yeah, holy God. Shareholders'd love this story. Not to put too fine a point on it: He did absolutely nothing for eighteen years. Hey, you can do nothing for the executive branch in Washington but that's expected by any realist. Besides, you're out in eight years, max. He got raises.

b: Could be piece on Sixty Minutes.

a: If it is, you and I are gone, and without a pension! Loose Lips Sink Schleps.

b: Holy God!

a: I'm not worried. They got bigger fish to fry. I'm worried about this place and its diminutive meddlers and gossips. I'm worried, always worried, about knives circling in the air.

b: It'll be forgotten. Jinky will.

a: I don't want it that way...exactly. Who gets Elizabeth Marriner Skelton Award at Retirement Dinner?

b: Bob Ingram, ran the industry-wide conferences for forty years and was state capital liaison and a complete workaholic. He bleeds company colors. Wife threw him out once and he slept in a janitor's closet in Engineering 'cause a senate committee was coming through.

a: Anxious to get their face in the trough at Leonardo's?

b: Hofbrau Haus actually. Pork, sauerkraut und beer! Lots of farting and singing.

a: How sweet. Bob Ingram's career and our collective life. Scrub his name out. Jinky gets the honor.

b: Man! Isn't that cynical even for us?

a: I got my reasons. Call 'em what you will.

b: There must be a lesson in all of this.

a: Who cares?