May 14

Glow in the Dark / Our New Business Model for the Second Half of this Decade

By Michael Salgado

Glow in the Dark

Sample Specialist 9 walked into the lab and said, “We’re missing a radioactive sample. If you happen to see this sample, do not speak to it, do not make eye contact. Notify me right away.”

“Here it is in my pocket, burning a hole through it!” Analyst 2 shouted.

“No, here it is burning the roof of my mouth like pizza just out of the oven!” Analyst 3 screamed.

“Please, notify me using form 595 when you’ve completed your daily tasks.” Sample Specialist 9 responded.

Analyst 1, always the practical one, said nothing but kept recording significant figures. This was, of course, how she became Analyst 1.

“Wait, I have it here stuck to the bottom of my shoe,” said Analyst 4, raising his foot up while leaning on a sensitive instrument.

Analyst 1 had taken the sample home to heat her yurt. She knew the price of gas and how cold and lonely nuclear winters were. She liked having a sample to talk to and look in the eye. Her yurt glowed brightest among all the others in the complex.

Our New Business Model for the Second Half of this Decade 

 

1. Contract out all our positions.

2. Breakdown our company culture and replace it with the culture of a degrading empire:
                  • Primary characteristics – complacency and intellectual sclerosis
                  • Secondary characteristics  food scarcity and forced labor

3. The Economics of Ergonomics seminars are now forbidden.

4. Six Sigma leaders and contractors defected to other companies so please stop trying to be so productive.

5. Intimidate hundreds of our contracted companies. They in turn project fear onto their employees.

6. Fight back against the unions we nurtured into monsters. Untimely compromise is unacceptable. The ACLU
is a unicorn.

7. All the employees we still directly employ, fire them and their Ph.D.s.

8. Let all work visas expire and say farewell. The cost of a one way ticket is all we owe them.

9. Sell off the consumer side of our market to competitors sleeping next to us in our king-sized beds. When their
drug patents run out then we’ll bless them and kiss them goodnight. Generics will be the death of us all.

10. Pray the market reflects our readjustments every night before bed. Moral hazard never felt so good.

11. Pray on Sunday we gain some stockholder confidence and leave a smaller sum in the collection plate.

12. Repent for our sin of hiring a CEO who sunk our entire fleet before we forced him to resign.

13. Yes, like Constantine the Great, we let our language become Christianized.

Dn.memoir

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Michael Salgado is a current student in Arcadia University’s MFA program and regularly attends and moderates the Montgomery County Community College’s Writing Critique Group. He is also a resident poet with the Lehigh Valley Vanguard this quarter. He is employed as a Senior Specialist with Eurofins Lancaster Labs. Michael’s work has been published in the Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Northern Cardinal Review, and the Wilderness House Literary Review. Michael currently resides in Lancaster, PA. @Salgado1Michael

 

Art by Drew Nowacoski, On Memoirs