While You’re At It, Pick Up A Board Stretcher, Part 2
This happened in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as told by my father. It happened in a small country east of the Iron Curtain, where meritocracy was sort of turned around. Your career wasn’t determined by what you knew or even who you knew. The one point that would determine your status in life was your (and your parents’) devotion to the Party. If your parents weren’t big enough fans, you would never attend a university or get a decent job, and vice versa.
Enter Alfons. (Obvious fake name is obvious.) Alfons’s parents were devoted communists, so he was pushed through a university, passed with flying colours without doing any work and, having his fresh Master’s degree, was placed in a cozy middle-management office job in one of the country’s largest wood processing plants. This place did everything — trees went in, furniture went out. It covered something like eighty hectares of land.
One fine day, the huge wooden board that served as the tabletop of a massive table saw snapped in half. Line outage was a big problem even in the communist paradise of planned economy, so even Alfons left his office and made his way to the shop floor in order to help the workers stand around and shake their heads. After a while, he asked no one in particular:
Alfons: “What are we going to do?”
Everybody knew Alfons was barely more intelligent than any random piece of lumber found in that plant, and the foreman didn’t give a f***, so he said:
Foreman: “We’ll weld it.”
Alfons: “Weld it? We can do that?”
Foreman: “Yes, we need a special electrode for the arc welder. They should have one at [Department].”
Alfons was now ready to save the day, and off he went to [Department]. Halfway across the campus. On foot. [Foreman] obviously picked up the phone and called [Department] to warn them. When Alfons got there, they said, “Sorry, we’re out, but there should be one over there.”
Rinse and repeat, with Alfons running across the campus from place to place only to hear that they couldn’t help him. At last, he got to a place that couldn’t be reached by phone for some reason, and the lady there explained to him the full extent of his stupidity.
Thus ended the quest for the Wooden Electrode. The nickname stuck.
Question of the Week
Have you ever served a bad customer who got what they deserved?
