When Your Boss is a Jerk: Ten Coping Strategies in Dealing With Difficult Supervisors

Bosses come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors -- but they all have one thing in common: they belong to a terrorist sleeper cell that is dedicated to taking your American job and career down the toilet. It can be said in their favor that they ARE related to the owner, WILL BE related to the owner, or WERE related to the owner. And since you are not, and never will be, you have to learn to cope with them so you get enough work done to justify your measly paycheck each week and hold onto a shred of self respect. Here are ten surefire ways to deal with an unreasonable boss:

One. put a mickey finn in their coffee each morning. Knock out drops are available at any opium den or Mafia clubhouse. They are quick and effective, keeping your dopey boss slack-jawed and oblivious until noon -- and since he or she already appears that way most mornings without being drugged, who’s going to know the difference? For the afternoons try itching powder on their keyboard.

Two. be nice to your boss. Kiss up to them. Give them candy and flowers. Tell them how nice they look today. Offer to do their laundry. You’ll be very surprised at the results of such positive reinforcement -- your boss won’t change one bit and will still treat you like dirt.

Three. Buy the winning lottery ticket. Then your boss can go  stick his or her head in a pumpkin.

Four.   try walking in your boss’s shoes. Really, wait until he or she takes them off and then walk around the office in them for laughs. When you’re finished kick them off and into the nearest trash can.

Five. have a wiccan cast a spell on him or her. A toad makes for a pleasant, quiet boss. So does a bag of geodes. Avoid having your boss turned into a zombie -- that just puts them in upper management.

Six. take your boss out to lunch. Get him or her drunk. Put them behind the wheel of a race car at the Indy 500. This takes a little planning, but the results are spectacular -- you might even get your face sculpted onto the Borg-Warner Trophy.

Seven. Have your ear drums removed. If you can’t hear your boss’s drivel, it can’t drive you crazy and you’re not responsible for doing anything he or she says.

Eight. Wear a propeller beanie to work. Studies show that nobody wants to talk to someone wearing a propeller beanie. Ever. they won’t even send you emails. This works if you want to get rid of your spouse, too.

Nine. run away and join the circus; then, twenty years later, come back with a cage full of lions and sic ‘em on your old boss until he or she begs for mercy.

Ten. just shoot the bastard.

Rex Tillerson Rejects Talks With North Korea on Nuclear Program

A dictator up in Pyongyang

Didn’t think we could defang

His nuclear threat,

But he lost that bet

When Rex replied with a Big Bang.

Books Can Take You Places Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Go

A book is a barrier bigots can’t cross, a wall that the crackpot detests;

It rises to heights that true heroes can scale -- all others are treated like pests.

Though fictional tales come from out of the mind, they certainly are not fake news --

Great fiction inspires the noble instincts and never will light corrupt fuse.

So if you are down in the dumps because fools all decency now have forsook,

Fight back not with sword or computer attack, but sit down and then write a good book!

Adventures in Kooking: Creamed Chicken Guts with Squadoodles -- in a Wok, Yet.

Word must have got out somehow -- Torkildson is cooking again; this time he’s doing something unholy with chicken gizzards and julienned zucchini! No one I called answered their phones; my neighbors are all LDS and very polite, so they don’t like telling me to go to hell when I offer to share some of my culinary bounty. Well, this won’t be the first time I’ve made a gallon baggie offering to the Freezer God! Chicken gizzards are darn cheap, and, if memory serves me, they can be cooked to tenderness in just a few minutes. But to be on the safe side I think I’ll pound the daylights out of them with my tenderizing hammer first. I’m putting them in the wok, with shallots, garlic, and the zucchini noodles. Then, at the last minute, I’ll add some thick cream. And Voila! --a meal to give a king a fit.

 How to peel a shallot 

 For those of you who hesitate to operate on the delicate shallot, I congratulate you. You show some common sense. The rest of you fools can deal with it however you want -- I have yet to find a way to peel one of the damn things without losing half of it. I just didn’t want to carry a big bulky onion home from the market and only use half of it and then stink up my fridge with the other half until I figured out something to do with it. Cooking for one sucks, Food Channel. I hope you fricking know that.

 Course correction

 I decided to drop the pickled garlic and go with a pack of Lipton’s Instant Onion/Mushroom Mix instead. What? You got a problem with that? Back off, apple-knocker. I think the chicken guts are going to need to simmer a bit before I add the cream at the end, so I thought they’d taste better simmering in a soup base. Besides, I’ve had that packet laying around for eight months now -- what do you do with those Lipton packets besides make chip dip or brown finger paint?

 It screams no cream! 

Watching it froth in the wok I intuited that this was not destined to be a creamed dish, so I’ll keep my Western Family half pint of heavy whipping cream for a rich gravy or curry another day. Also, those squadoodles really fried down to next to nothing -- they must be all water. So I toasted a bagel to go along with the meal. At the last minute I decided against the soup mix, too. I had just called my son Adam, who eats zoodles till they swim out his nose, and he told me not to let them simmer very long or they’d lose all their crispness. And there’s nothing worse for a man to discover than a limp vegetable noodle. Nothing. Not a darn thing. Nothing else that can ever go limp is half as bad as a limp vegetable noodle. No Siree. Nothing. Nada. Oh, wait . . . .

 The proof of the pudding is in the eating

 Now I’m ready to sit down and eat the stuff. Living alone, I always have a book on the table to read while I eat. Sometimes, when the book has been real interesting, I’ve crossed the line into indigestion because I forgot to stop eating when I felt full. But this appears to be a small enough portion that I won’t suffer from literary-induced dyspepsia. I’m reading Gene Fowler’s biography of Jimmy Durante, called Schnozzola. The results are occasional dyspepsia when I get too involved in my book.

The Results

Oh crap

The debriefing

It appears you cannot stir fry giblets or gizzards; it vulcanizes them into tire patches. The squadoodles turned out okay, but were still a little too limp for this manly man’s liking. And I forgot to butter my toasted bagel until it had cooled down -- bleck. Luckily I only cooked half of the giblets and a third of the squadoodles, so I may be able to salvage something out of it after perusing some real recipes online. In the meantime, it all goes into the freezer to become part of my cryogenic culinary baggage.

I guess the neighbors were right.

"No One Dies Tonight."

At KGCX I learned that people dislike having their names mispronounced. Especially dead people -- or, rather, their relatives. The Everson-Coughlin Funeral Home handled most of the stiffs in Williston and paid ten dollars per obit announced on the air, as long as they were handling it. One of the first obits I read was for a Richard Sylvester Koch. I pronounced ‘Koch’ as cock. Even mild mannered Oscar got on my case about that. So I learned forever after that Koch is pronounced like the soft drink -- Coke.  Except, apparently, in New York, where a Koch is a Koch, with no apologies.

Another thing I quickly learned was that there’s news and then there’s news. The real news was handled by the Williston Daily Herald and KEYZ Radio. The paper had six full-time reporters covering everything from church basement suppers to murders. KEYZ had Ben Innis -- the Wise Man of Williston. Born and bred in a log cabin on the Missouri within a stone’s throw of the town’s Pioneer Park, Ben knew everyone -- and everything. He was more familiar with the skeletons in the closets of the elites than he was with his own wife. Sometimes he seemed to announce the news before it actually happened, such as the time he said on his evening broadcast that the city council had voted unanimously to reject a zoning change for the Maisy Building. The council meeting wasn’t until eight that night, but Ben told me “those idiots won’t pass it just because old man Maisy is from Idaho -- he’s not a local.” And Ben was right -- it didn’t pass.

I, on the other hand, was not expected to handle any hard news. Not if it interfered with business. This was brought home to me when a prominent furniture store owner killed himself. He’d been ill for a long time and his store was going into the toilet, so one evening he pulled out a hunting rifle and drilled himself. “Self-inflicted gunshot wound” is how the paper and KEYZ phrased it. KGCX didn’t phrase it at all, because, in the words of station manager Bill Anderson, “They’re one of our biggest advertisers -- we can’t air anything about it; otherwise they’ll yank their advertising.” When I pointed out that the paper and the other station were running it without any undue loss of revenue he just shook his head warily and said “You don’t understand the nature of the beast yet, Torkildson. Just kill the story.”

So I killed the story. And realized, in the parlance of today’s internet world, that I was to produce nothing but clickbait. I began wondering if maybe the clown academy idea was not such a bad idea after all. If I could actually get it up and running I could say ‘adios’ to KGCX and their faux news.

I was now having lunch with Becky Thingvold twice a week at the Service Drug Store. She lapped up the baloney I provided about the clown school I meant to open, and the paper published these fables with a straight face.

“Here’s why I became a clown” I told her at the beginning of our luncheon confabs. “I read a book by Harpo Marx when I was a kid, called Harpo Speaks!. In the book he tells about going to Russia in the mid 1930’s on a goodwill tour for the State Department. One evening he was scheduled to do a show in Moscow at 7pm, but the stage manager nervously told him to wait. Finally, at nine that evening he was told to go on. He immediately noticed that despite his best efforts at zaniness the audience sat like wooden statues and kept staring at a darkened balcony as if waiting for a cue. Finally a roar of laughter came from the darkened balcony and the audience immediately began laughing and cheering and clapping. Harpo couldn’t understand what was happening, so he just finished his show, took his bow, and got off. That’s when the stage manager told him that Josef Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator, had been the one who held up the show and then burst out laughing at Harpo’s antics. In fact, he now wanted to meet Harpo up in the balcony. Harpo was understandably nervous, since this was right in the middle of the Great Purge, when Stalin had tens of thousands of Russians executed for no reason except he didn’t think they were good Communists. So Harpo goes up to see Stalin and they chat a minute through an interpreter. Stalin tells Harpo he enjoyed the show and that it took a lot of strain off him for the night. And then a clerk comes in, bows, and whispers in Stalin’s ear. Stalin smiles, shakes his head, and tells the clerk something that surprises him. The clerk leaves, Stalin shakes Harpo’s hand, wishes him well on his Russian tour, and leaves with his burly bodyguards. The translator stays behind and tells Harpo, with tears in his eyes, that the clerk was from the execution detail, telling Stalin that the killings were ready to commence. Stalin had replied ‘no one dies tonight.’ He was in too good of a mood after watching the clown perform. The translator then kissed Harpo’s hand and told him ‘You have saved hundreds of lives today!’”

Becky was visibly moved by this story. She knocked over the ketchup bottle to grab hold of my hand after I said softly: “That’s why I became a clown -- so maybe someday, somewhere, no one has to die.”  I thought perhaps we were going to kiss right then and there in Service Drug. But instead she said: “What a great line to end my next piece on your school! This might get me the Sevareid Award!” Then she hurried back to the newspaper office, thanking me for the fried egg sandwich I’d gotten her. I stuck around a while in the booth, idly breaking wooden toothpicks in half.

Bill Walsh, copy editor and authority on language, dies at 55

A copy editor has died and gone to his reward.

His punctuation strictures now can safely be ignored.

I’ll use a semicolon; if I like -- and desecrate --

Hyphens and quotation ‘marks”, and misspell fete as fate.

How beautiful the world now seems without his expertise:

My dangling participles, how lovely they increase!

Donald Trump Condemns Snoop Dogg on Twitter for Satirical Video

My homey Snoop has done the poop on my man Trump.

BUMP!

Yo yo, my bro, you is a ho 4 tryin’ 2 cap my man.

BEDPAN!

You act a fool, you just a tool; dis ain’t Old School.

DROOL!

This wanksta rap you did was crap; you do for Benjis, right?

SOUND BITE!

Back in da hood you ain’t no good; so don’t you bust my crib.

FIB!  

Neil Gorsuch Has Web of Ties to Secretive Billionaire

Supreme Court justice must depend on impartial decrees

That never are influenced by a monetary squeeze.

But Gorsuch and the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz

Are thick as thieves with many hidden Faustian-like roots.

Money often paves the way for judges to decline

To hear a case that might give rise to rulings out of line.

Unsealed Documents Raise Questions on Roundup Weed Killer

Monsanto says that glyphosate in Roundup is so mild

You can spray it ev’rywhere, from corn to orchids wild.

Of course they had researchers in their pocket to report

There was no chance of cancer when you used it by the quart.

And so the world sprays merrily from Bali to Duluth;

The only thing that’s being harmed is irritating truth.

The Circus Comes to Tioga

(continued from “A Letter to Tim Holst”)

I have always tried to avoid being snooty about my circus clown pedigree. I started with Ringling Brothers in 1971, and over the ensuing years worked with just about every other circus there was. I don’t say I was a runaway hit with any of them, but I worked ‘em nonetheless. Many great clowns did their best work away from Ringling, like Dick Monday, Barry Lubin, Bill Irwin, Steve Wolski (as Harpo the Clown), and Peter Pitofsky. Me, I just did the work.  

But I never could completely shake a patrician air when I visited smaller shows -- giving the impression, I suppose, that I was slumming. But some of those mud shows . . .

The glorious North Dakota summer of 1981, when I was stuck trying to impress Becky Thingvold with plans for my make believe clown academy in Williston, comes to mind. Despite the oil boom that began gnawing at the pristine prairie, the air still sparkled with the heady tang of sage as prairie chickens strutted among the morning glory vines like returning conquerors. It was a good time to be young, in love, and without a car. I loved hiking more than driving. If you ever get to North Dakota you should definitely do some hiking. Get a good trail book like the one below.

KGCX Radio boasted both a full-time news director and a full-time sports director. I did the news in Williston, and Dewey did the sports from the home office in Sidney, Montana. He had a car, and was unusually willing to chauffeur me to distant news events to tape actualities for the station. He prided himself on being a Company Man -- always willing to drive the extra mile for the good of the station. We had both gone to Brown Institute of Broadcasting together back in Minneapolis. That is why he and I drove fifty miles one summer Saturday up to Tioga to catch a matinee of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I figured it would make a good leading story on my newscast on the coming Monday, when there was always a paucity of gripping headlines.

You may never have heard of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I know I never had. It was one of those hastily thrown together ragbags that sprouted, and then wilted, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, in the rich alluvial plains of the Upper Midwest thirty-five years ago. It was a time when everybody had a little money and everybody had work. Various circus and carnival sharpers would stitch together a few circus acts for a quick tour of the hinterlands to gouge the hayseeds for a few kopeks and then mysteriously dissolve before John Law could lay his hands on them for operating without a license (or any talent.)

And Tioga was about as out-of-the-way as you could get. It had a gas plant (courtesy of the oil boom) and a small rural hospital run by three doctors from India -- all named Patel. It’s ten miles off the main highway and at that time was surrounded by yellow bursts of rapeseed.

Dewey parked near the big top (about the size of a modest rambler) and we flashed our KGCX business cards at the ticket taker, a pimply youth who seemed more interested in picking his scabs than in our media credentials.

“Three dollars admission” he said listlessly.

“But we’re from the biggest radio station in Williams county!” I protested. “We’re here to do a story about the show.”

“Three dollars” he replied stubbornly.

I paid for myself and Dewey. The bleachers were half full of youngsters who probably wished they had gone to the Municipal Wading Pool instead. I remember little of that performance. There was a lion act, with three arthritic creatures sluggishly going through their paces, looking ready to collapse at any moment. Some horses were trotted out to do next to nothing while their trainer bellowed and cracked a whip at them. A camel was paraded around. And the candy butchers swarmed about like flies, offering popcorn, cotton candy, hot dogs, pickles on a stick, lukewarm cups of melted ice with a little Coke added as an afterthought, and circus coloring books.

Then there was the clown. I had seen him earlier in the show, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, shoveling up after the horses and camel. He reappeared near the end of the show in a ghastly unpowdered whiteface and dressed in what appeared to be oversized polka dot pajamas. He walked around the tent with a suitcase that was stenciled with “The Morning Paper.” He stopped occassionally to open up the suitcase to reveal a roll of toilet paper.

After the show I sought out the owners for an interview, but was shunted from surly acrobat to sullen roustabout without ever discovering the perpetrators of this tanbark travesty. It probably didn’t help that I kept introducing myself as “Tim Torkildson, formerly of Ringling Brothers.” So I settled with recording some of the departing audience.

“It’s a circus” said one young girl helpfully. “They had lions. I’m going home to wake up mom to make me dinner.”

“Can I say hello to my girlfriend Janey on air? Are we live? Hi Janey -- it’s Mitch!”

“That wasn’t much of a show” said a mother manhandling a feisty three year old while attempting to keep the howling infant in her arms from plummeting to the ground. “I wonder why the Rotary Club brought this thing here in the first place. I bet they got fleeced on it.”

Dewey and I drove back to Williston, stopping at Service Drug where I bought him a fried egg sandwich, known locally as a “gut bomb.” Dewey went to a Little League game and I went up to the studio to cobble together my leading story for Monday. I decided to use Mitch’s recording as the closer. For comedic effect (I hoped.) Then I went over to the Red Owl supermarket, where you could pick out a steak from the butcher’s counter and they would grill it for you right there in the store. Becky was in Minot covering a political rally, so I read Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” late into the night.

Next day, Sunday, I went to the small LDS chapel for services and then took a long Sabbath nap. At four in the morning on Monday I was at the station, feeling smug about my circus ‘scoop.’ Nobody else would have it. That’s when I learned, from the AP wire, that St.Joseph’s Catholic Church in Williston had burned to the ground on Saturday night. I still used my Hooper Brothers story as the lead. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste, especially since the station would not be reimbursing me for any of my time or money.

When the station owner Oscar Halvorson came in later that day he said “Nice story on that circus up in Tioga. Start the news with something happy, is what I say.”

His wife Faye had a different opinion about my morning newscast.

“Why didn’t you have more on the fire?” she demanded. “You’ve got no sense of local community! I don’t know why Oscar ever hired you.”

I spent a good part of Monday afternoon thumbing through my paperback Thesaurus, looking up synonyms for harpy: Shrew. Hag. Termagant. Virago. Xanthippe. I’d be using them all in my next letter to Holst.  

(to be continued)