COMMENTARY By Alice Potteiger Wilkes Capital Times Staff Writer I was tired. Hungry. Chilly because the Mac lab is always ten degrees colder than any other room in Olmsted, except the TV Studio. Arising for final departure, I realized I had to PEE. It was one of those pees that sneak attacked because your brain had Vulcan-Mind-Melded with a digital interface for one fourth of a day and you’d slouched for nearly as long. My kidneys and bladder had slunked halfway up my back, temporarily numbing all neu ropathways to relief notification, and time passage, and the churn ing of the spheres in general. So when I finally touched down from orbit and regained a standing position, all them liqui filled organs suddenly came slamming into the front walls of my gut. BAMMO! Encroaching on my hasty departure, a DOS-user-at-a-Mac Strategic Plann By Crispin Sartweli Capital Times Advisor Memo From: The Office of Strategic Planning for the Strategic Plan To: All Associates Re: Planning the strategic plan ning plan This year the organization is launching into an exciting new cycle of strategic planning for the next strategic plan. We wel come your input as long as your suggestions, in keeping with the policies laid out on page 927 of the company’s strategic planning handbook, are trivial or impossi ble or both. Please keep in mind that our planning for the strategic plan must not not be strategic. Planning that is astrategic, antistrategic, protostrategic, pseudostrategic, or metastrategic will not be tolerated as we design our plan for the strategic plan. For example, the suggestion made by many of you vis-a-vis the last strategic plan that we hire mercenaries to assassinate our own board of trustees and to sur round our own facilities and Urine the Wrong Place hailed me desperately. I assisted him as patiently as possible while clenching my can’t-pee yet muscles tighter than the cylinders around the pistons of the last engine I froze up. Finally, I made it to the Rest room. Yes, Restroom with a cap ital “R” because it’s the only pri vate public restroom on campus and it’s w-a-y spacious. Relief and paradise all in one sitting. But, tearing my jeans apart as I leaped toward the throne, I sud denly heard the sailor in me echoing off the barf-powder pink tiles: What the... #%+\?H GeeEEeeZiz! Piss! piss! PISS! Piss on the damned seat. Not just a drop or two but the after math of a tsunami splashed all across the left side of the seat. In previous seat-pee encoun ters, to deal unballisticly with this base rudeness I have amused myself by visualizing these para noid pissers hovering sideways above the bowl, shoulders braced against one side of the level them with artillery fire were not welcome. We applaud the fact that you are thinking outside the box and that we have instituted a self-cor recting, creative organizational culture. Yet such a suggestion is clearly tactical rather than strate gic. The suggestions, on the other hand, that the organization achieve total world domination by 2025, or, alternately, that we simply give up and tumble into the existential abyss of meaning lessness and despair, were most welcome. As you engage in your own process of planning for the strategic planning for the strate gic plan, we would like you to access all helpful resources. In the last cycle, we imple mented the works of Stephen Covey and found, after the 27- year process was complete, that they consisted entirely of inco herent gobbledygook. This was not in itself a prob lem, nor was the bonfire of 7 Habits books that associates made in front of the facility. What disturbed us, rather, was that Covey did not focus on strategic planning for the strate gic plan, but rather on the strate- stall, feet against the other, and nothing but the straining screws of the tissue holder beneath their hands to keep them from falling. Much like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas when he gets squinched up in a chimney with his knees above his head for a few seconds. But this was in the Royal Restroom. It has no stall walls, just one of those screwy sinks that resembles a big square ceramic bed pan. On that note, I wonder why she didn’t bypass the toilet and just back up to the sink. It would’ve taken far less contor tionism than whatever she must have gone through at the throne. I’m guessing it involved some masochistic bondage around the handicapable toilet rails as well as feet on the seat. Too bad she didn’t slip. The ultimate question, linger ing like the odors in our ventless restrooms, is this: exactly what villainous encounter do these ng for the Strategic Plan gic plan itself. We’ve decided that this time that we must “get back to basics.” Therefore we have provided all associates with a cheaply bound copy of the complete works of Joseph Stalin, the father of strategic planning. Stalin was a man with a vision of the future, a man with goals, a man whose five-year plans, show trials of political enemies, and brutal purges have served as a model for the organization from the outset. Please consult these inspiring yet grindingly repetitive volumes as you design your personal mis sion statement for the strategic planning process for the strategic plan. Let your Stalin be your guide One issue that must be addressed head-on as we plan for the strategic plan is implementa tion. It has come to our attention that, bizarrely, a few of you have read and made some feeble attempt to implement the last strategic plan. This must stop immediately, as implementation may well interfere with the strategic plan ning process. paranoid females think awaits them in placing their bared thighs and butt cheeks where others have gone before? Speaking for myself and the majority of us chicks using the restrooms around here, we are definitely using the paper for wiping instead of the obvious other choices: a.) using our hands and then wiping them off on our clothes, or b.) smearing ourselves to dryness directly on the seats. Attention Seat-Pissers: all the anatomy that REALLY matters is suspended in the air over the water. And for all the unenlight ened out there, we do have a cus todial staff who play a fine game of tidy bowling every night. Come on, “ladies” please. Spare those of us who have real fears to entertain (sitting on toi let seats isn’t one of them). If you’re so uncouth that you don’t have enough class to wipe your urine deposits off the seats, then freakin’ buy some “Depends” Service to our clients must likewise be fully curtailed, so that the entire organization can master the rudiments of Stalin’s bold vision of strategic planning planning and prepare itself to meet the demands of all our future tomorrows. We are on the verge of a new .millennium, a bold new era of pointless information, unfair competitive practices, self-help books made of human skin, hip hop albums by Billy Joel, and friends don’t let friends drive dnjnir m © Wvl I U.S. Department of LOU'IOI Transportation undergarments and pee on your own damned bottoms. Truly, it’s a shame video sur veillance of restrooms is illegal. The sociological survey purpos es alone could reveal phenomon al data. Or, for you vichyssoise voyeurs vorldvide dahlings, how about a cancam... “toilet tanked.com?” Plus, we’d know who didn’t wash their hands on the way out. Am I just full of crap? You never, never know. There’s got to be a web designer somewhere who’s thought about this. I sagely recommend to any webmeister wannabe’s who have it in themselves: Don’t get caught with your pants down! Think of the bloated revenue potentials for personal hygiene and health products ads and links. With a site like that, surfers and advertisers might soon be saying, “Piss on ‘jenny- cam’.” officious twits Therefore we must forget about the present and devote our selves wholly to devoting our selves to the future. The organization hopes you will share this inspiring vision for a new century, a century filled with glittering possibilities for the century after that. All input to the strategic plan for strategic planning must be in this office by 5 p.m., Dec. 31, 2099.
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