Category: Philosophy

Some Rules of the Modern Workplace: Elon Musk

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1) It’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life and your job is gonna be quite miserable. – Elon Musk

I learned the hard way that when we get into an argument with a co-worker, it can make the work life miserable for as long as that argument lasts. Depending on the work we do, and how often we do it, employment situations can trap us into spending more time with people we can’t stand than those we love. With that in mind, if we get into an argument, we need to forgive and forget with strength.

“I won’t back down,” we say, “and I have a very difficult time admitting I’m wrong, especially when I’m not!” In interoffice squabbles, it really doesn’t matter who’s at fault. No matter how great people are, they will make mistakes, and if we want to be happy in the office, it’s important that we recognize that, especially when we enjoy the work we do.

It can make matters even more difficult when it’s the other party’s fault. If it’s our fault, and we’re living in absolute misery, all we have to do is apologize to end the stupid, irrelevant argument. When the other party refuses to apologize, it lengthens and strengthens the tension. I’ve done the wrong thing so many times that I learned that the best way to end relatively benign interoffice squabbles is to apologize, forgive and forget, and do it with a noteworthy level of strength.

I got into an interoffice squabble with a co-worker, and in this instance, she was in the wrong. She immediately called me to apologize. “I’m going to forgive you and forget this ever happened.” I said that with an unusual (for me) level of anger and force, “and I don’t want to hear your excuses or explanations, so I’m now going to hang up on you now.” I heard her say, “Wait, I just want to say …” before I hung up.

Who says, “I’m going to forgive you” with strength? The source of true power, we all believe, lies in refusing to forgive. We can lord their slip-up over them for weeks, months, and even years, if we do it right. Anyone who has tried to maintain an angry facade knows it can be foolish and a little exhausting. I’m not going to talk to this person at this time when I always do, we think, and when it comes to that party, I’m going to purposely walk by them without saying a word. That will get her. We have to teach people how to treat us, and this is going to extremely effective. There are only so many punctuation marks we can put at the end of a sentence. Do we pound the point home with three proverbial exclamation points, and how often do we do it before they truly understand that we’re mad!!! We’ve all been through these mistakes, and we’ve all missed out on the good times we witness across the party room floor when we see her laughing with the group we’re normally in, but we won’t step foot in because she’s there, and we’re mad at her. A simple, powerful acceptance of an apology can be so shocking that the recipient might repeat what you said in their head a number of times.

This co-worker was a very sweet, young woman who messed up big time. We both knew it, and we both moved on to have a very good relationship in the aftermath.

In another situation, I messed up bad. I was 100% to blame for committing an almost unforgivable transgression against a very sweet co-worker. I called her up the next day and apologized. She, being a very sweet person, offered me all sorts of outs and excuses. “I appreciate what you’re doing here,” I said, “but I’m not going to accept that. I want you to know that what I did was wrong, and I apologize. Full stop.” I allowed a few seconds to tick by, “Now that I’ve apologized in an unequivocable way, let me tell you what I intended to say.” I then told her that, and how it was intended to mimic what she said about herself previously, and how I mangled it up so badly. I told her how I would’ve interpreted what I said, if someone said the same thing about me and how horrible I would’ve felt. She agreed with my summation, and she offered me total and unequivocable forgiveness, and we are good friends to this day.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made, in such situations, is to enter into it from a position of weakness. Strength in the face of what should be a weak moment can be surprising, but if we remain strong throughout, we’ll experience long-term dividends for our actions.

Our relationships with our co-workers are just as important as our other relationships. If we want to have a happy work life, we need to work as hard at them as we do all of our other relationships in life, and accepting an apology with force and strength can be as effective as offering a strong, unequivocable apology.

Having said all that, there is a small percentage of horrible people in every walk of life, and some of them seem to enjoy making our lives a living hell. There are some people, as the quote from Cool Hand Luke says, “You just can’t reach. So, you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it; well, he gets it.”

2) Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough. – Elon Musk

What a great antonym to “failure is not an option.” That famous quote, I think, refers to ultimate or final failure, and I think it fails to leave room for small failings that teach us as we go. Musk’s “Failure is an option” almost liberates those who fail. As with the famous quote, it gives room for some failure, as long as we learn, but some of the times we read “failure it not as option” as a threat to avoid trying new things. Imagine being an employee in an innovative tech company, and your boss has a “failure is not an option” plaque on his desk. We might not try that adventurous idea, because we know it’s fraught with failure, so if failure is not an option, we might not explore the possibilities of our idea. It’s a subtle difference that might not deter a strong mind, but we’re all subjected to the opinions of authority, and we all try to please them in a way that creates vulnerabilities. Am I the right man for such a bold, adventurous idea? What if I fail? Try, fail, learn. How will we ever learn, if we don’t try. How will we ever learn if we don’t fail in the beginning and on the trail every once in a while?

The bassist from The Who, John Entwistle, once said of Jimmy Page’s idea of a New Yardbirds group, “That’s going to go over like a lead balloon.” Jimmy Page loved that condemnation so much he changed the name of his new project to match it. Instead of calling his new project the New Yardbirds. He called it Led Zeppelin.

3) Pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful. – Elon Musk

How many of our friends and family tell us that our ideas are destined to fail. Some of them don’t know why we’re destined to fail, they just know a screwy idea when they hear it. Some of them know don’t know what we did wrong, but they know how to fix it. Rather than dismiss them entirely, because they’ve never tried anything so unique, weird, and adventurous, listen to them. In my experience, there’s usually a nugget, a 10% of the 10% advice they give that actually could, slip into your round hole and come out the other side looking quite different and more beautiful.

There is a certain percentage of people who are cheering you on in life. There’s a percentage who envy us, dislike us, and think we’re fools and morons for believing in ourselves in a way they can’t. Our job in life is to find that percentage who believe in us so much that they offer us the type of constructive criticism they think we need. They’re not always right, but their head and heart is in the right place, and if we listen to them often enough, we might find something we can use. It rarely happens in the moment, and some of the times it takes so long to see the merit of what they’re saying we can’t remember who said it, but every once in a while we can find a nugget to chew on.

4) Any product that needs a manual to work is broken. – Elon Musk

As with a joke, if a story requires too much explanation, then it probably wasn’t the Great American Classic we thought it was while writing it.

As someone once said of the great Russian authors. “Yeah, they’re great and all that, but some of the times I read them and think, ‘Just get to the point already.’”

I appreciate the need for character development and setting. Writers need to help us empathize with their character, and we have to be there, but as with everything else there is a tipping point. I’ve read 1,000+ page books, but I’ve rarely read one that couldn’t use at least a little trimming.

5) You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better. – Elon Musk

I began my writing career, trying to be weird for the sole purpose of being weird. My favorite books, music, and movies were weird, and I wanted to explore the deep dark caverns of my mind for the weirdest possible plot lines I could think up.

The problem was no one understood it, and I enjoyed that. It felt great to say, “You just don’t get it,” because that made me feel like a complicated, misunderstood artiste. Yet, I’ve found that if no one understands it, then no one is going to understand it. If this is you, then you’re just writing for yourself. “Right, that’s what I’m going for.” The authors I love all said that, so I said it. Unfortunately, I neglected to learn how to intertwine writing for myself and writing for others. The authors I loved already conquered the latter, so they could go forward writing for themselves.

My advice, don’t forget the context. Context makes your writing so much more entertaining for the reader.

As John Hughes wrote for Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles:

“[In me you’ve] got someone who will listen to your boring stories. I mean, didn’t you notice on the plane when you started talking, eventually I started reading the vomit bag? Didn’t that give you some sort of clue, like hey, maybe this guy is not enjoying it? You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that, that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You’re a miracle. Your stories have none of that! They’re not even amusing accidentally! “Honey, I’d like you to meet Del Griffith. He’s got some amusing anecdotes for ya. Oh, and here’s a gun so you can blow your brains out. You’ll thank me for it.” I-I could tolerate any, any insurance seminar, for days. I could sit there and listen to them go on and on with a big smile on my face. They’d say, “How can ya stand it?” And I’d say, “‘Cause I’ve been with Del Griffith. I can take anything.” You know what they’d say? They’d say, “I know what you mean. The shower curtain ring guy.” It’s like going on a date with a Chatty Cathy doll. I expect you have a little string on your chest. You know, that I pull out and have to snap back. Except that I wouldn’t pull it out and snap it back, you would. And by the way, you know, when, when you’re telling these little stories, here’s a good idea. Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”

6) I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself. – Elon Musk

I see articles that provide updates: “Edited on May, 6.” Are we supposed to do that? If I did that, my articles would all be 10,000 words, and most of those 10,000 words would be the notations on all the updates, edits, and revisions. I change everything from the big to the small. I rarely read one of my articles and think that’s just complete. There’s always something to delete or add. I take time away and re-enter with a fresh perspective.

I went to another blog on the subject of errors, rewrites, and editing. Most of the writers wrote that their readers will accept a certain error rate, so they don’t go back to fix their article and correct every stupid, little thing. “Every passionate writer is going to commit some errors, so I don’t go back and edit,” they write. “I leave it raw, as is, and I think my readers understand.”

My first thought was that these people must be way smarter than I am to survive the fear of everyone seeing our there, their and they’re type errors. I see errors in big time writers’ articles every time, and I’m mortified for them. I see errors in my own work, the ones I catch anyway, and I shudder. How many readers saw this, I think. They’ll probably never be back. Every time I write an article, it’s edited at least ten times before I hit publish, then I go back and try to catch whatever errors I missed the first 309,000 times through, and I always find something. I don’t know how these writers, who presumably write something once and never go back, live with that fear that someone out there knows that they’re less than intelligent. All the power to them for being so strong, but I could never do it.  

7) People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working. – Elon Musk

I went to work for two promising, young companies at different points in my life. The only thing these companies had in common was they didn’t know what they were doing. I found this confusing and exciting when I was younger. I was on the ground floor of a ground-breaking company that would eventually become a Fortune 500 company. The rules would change on almost a weekly basis, and our method of operation, as employees, would have to adjust accordingly.

“This customer is telling me I’m doing it wrong,” I would tell the help desk operator. I called them for nothing more than confirmation of my knowledge.

“You are doing it wrong,” the operator would say. “Check your email from May 23.” The changes were so drastic, so often, that an employee could get dizzy simply sitting in their cubicle desk. Every supervisor and manager said, “The minute you get comfortable with a standard method of operation, it will change.” Working in various cubicles for as many years as I did, I got used to that overused line, but I never worked for a company where that was actually true. It was, as I said, confusing, dizzying, and a little exciting.

I went to work for another promising, young company again, later in life, and I quit quite early on. The sentiment in Musk’s quote was a primary reason why. I didn’t want to go through all that humbling humiliation all over again.

Money: A Love Story

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“I spent most of my life making money for someone else,” Eduard Pennington said. “It wasn’t just one day, one week, or even one year, but at some point I realized I wasn’t just wasting my talent, I was wasting time. I enjoyed my time at the corporation, and they treated me better than they should have, but I wasn’t getting younger. I just got tired of doing it for someone else, and through a series of painfully slow, very boring investment platforms, I eventually had the money to do it for myself.”

Some people feel the passion when they hear tales of romance. I get the same charge hearing someone passionately talk about making money. I might be lonely in this corner of the world, but when I hear anyone talk about how they made theirs, I’m not the least bit envious. I’m inspired.  

Eduard Pennington is, was, and always will be a regular schmo. There was probably nothing fancy about his clothes or his car when he was a middle class employee, and nothing changed after he became the multi-millionaire next door. When we speak to him, we notice the confidence of a life well-lived, but we don’t hear the smug arrogance those of us who grew up on cartoons might suspect from such a character. Eduard Pennington is, as depicted in the 2010 book, The Millionaire Next Door.  

“When we look back on our lives, we remember the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Eduard said. “The years I spent working for myself were the highlights. It was so stressful, in the beginning, that it affected my health, and the idea that I made such an idiotic mistake leaving the comfy confines of the corporate world to do this kept me up many a night. I also worked so many hours, getting my business off the ground, that it took a toll on my relationships with my wife and my kids. I still regret missing out on some vital parts of their youth, but other than that, those were the best years of my life.”

Money is not the root of all evil. It is neither good or evil. It is contained wholly within the specimen on which it acts. We define it, and it defines us. If we are bad guys, the pursuit of money can make us worse. If we are good guys, the pursuit can make us better. In its finest form, money is a byproduct of human ingenuity, hard work, and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

“You can get rich working for money, my dad once told me,“ Ed said, “but you can get stinking I-hate-you wealthy when your money starts working for you. Money is power,” Ed added to his dad’s saying, “and power buys you freedom, and that freedom permits you to do what you want to do.”

In the middle of the decade Ed spent working for himself, his company eventually turned a profit. He began delegating most of the authority, and some of the work, to his employees as the profits increased. He trusted them to run the company the way he saw fit, but the resultant free time did not suit Eduard Pennington. He grew anxious and itchy, and in the the process of trying to find something more productive to do he “almost accidentally” developed a device (pre cell phone era) to help make the work of his employees easier. He did it for the money. He did it for the profit, and he did it so well that his company’s profit margin began to dwarf that of his nearest competitors’. After years of pounding them, the competition came-a-knocking. Eduard quickly patented the device, and he shared everything about it with them. He then permitted them to pour through his accounting books to determine the ins and outs of how he was beating them. They waked away believing the difference was this device, and they bought it. Then, their competitors bought it, and so on and so forth, until the device took off. It wasn’t long after the competition incorporated the device into their business that they couldn’t imagine how they got along without it.  

“Word got around, and they came-a-knocking,” Eduard said of a number of entrepreneurs who walked into with bountiful checks in hand. “They knocked loud and hard. I couldn’t believe the numbers they were writing down. I should’ve seen the bidding war that ensued, everyone said I should’ve seen it, but I didn’t. I was wholly unprepared. The problem for me was, they didn’t just want the device. They wanted my whole company. My company, my little baby, and the thing I built from a little granular idea was now a number. It was a gigantic number, for me, back then, but it was still just a number.

“I hated them for putting me through this, and I loved them at the same time,” Eduard continued. “Ten years into this company, and I never wanted to do anything else. My plan had been to see this company to its bitter end, my end, my retirement, or whatever came first. If I told you the number they wrote down, you might consider it an easy decision, but this was my whole life, my routine, and my identity that they wanted to buy. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, but I just couldn’t imagine, in my wildest dreams, ever turning down the kind of money they were offering.

“I took a month of long-sweaty nights mulling over the plusses and minuses of selling my company. They thought I was playing a card. They thought I was being strategically patient. I wasn’t. I was making sure giving up what I spent ten years building, was the right decision. I hired corporate analysts to project the growth of the company ten years, twenty years out, and I paid advisors, lawyers. I even contacted other owners in my industry to see what they thought.

“Even with all that, I still regretted selling it,” Ed continued. “I regretted it before I signed the documents, I regretted it after, and I regret it to this day. I don’t think I would’ve done with it what they did. Maybe I would’ve, I don’t know, but they took it to another level. God love them, they knew what they had, much more than I did, and I knew a lot, but they took it to the stratosphere. They gave me a lot for it, but if they ever decide to sell, they’ll probably get fifty times what they gave me, based on what they did.”

Eduard Pennington lived the last thirty years of his life The Millionaire Next Door. He took two extravagant vacations to celebrate the prize of his ingenuity, and he bought a verified and minted Babe Ruth-signed baseball to give his reward a tangible quality. Eduard then took care of every one of his immediate family members, in ways big and small, and he made sure they never had to struggle in life the way he did. Then, he did something revolutionary with the rest. He invested it.

“I went boring,” he said. “Boring, old blue-chip stocks with high dividends, bonds, and real estate. I have no creative investments, other than maybe the Babe Ruth baseball, and no sexy, innovative stocks are in my portfolio. My plan was to live on dividends, interest, and appreciation. My financial plan was to go so boring that you might fall asleep before I’m done telling you what I invested in, but that was my plan.”

There are a number of reasons I find Eduard Pennington’s story so beautiful, but one of them is purity. He pursued the American dream from his nook of the world, and he found it. His journey did not involve backstabbing, fraud, or deception. It involved some appreciation of his business, but that was thanks mostly to his hard work and ingenuity.

Eduard Pennington was a good man who worked his fingers to the bone, and he learned so much about his industry that he developed a revolutionary product that eventually went international. He surrounded himself with good and honest men and women based on merit, and they proved their value to his company for a decade and beyond. If you’re reading this with the notion that somewhere around right here in this article, the other shoe will drop to expose some of Eduard Pennington’s character defects, this isn’t that story.

The streamers and Hollywood would never pay one dime for Eduard’s tale, because he loved his wife and children, he didn’t cheat anyone, and he never hurt anyone. He wasn’t a bad guy, and they want bad guys, because we want bad guys. Bad guys are the angle, the promise they make in their summaries, and the selling point to get us to click on their movies. We want tears and pain from the side characters, and a ruthless bloodlust from our main character. No one wants to read a story about a man who loved his wife almost as much as he loved his mother. No one wants to read a story about a nice man who never faltered in his dream to make the most honest money he could, that’s just boring.

***

“Money is not the root of all evil,” someone far smarter than us once said. “Money provides definition. When a bad guy pursues money, it can make them worse. A good guy pursuing his dreams can become a better man in the pursuit.” The idea of money is intangible quality with no definitions of its own. We define money and money defines us.  

Once he took the money and ran, some might suspect that Ed did it all for the money. That seems so obvious to us now that it’s not even worth discussing for many of us. Yet, Eduard loved what he did, and he regretted getting out. “My friends and family said things like, you’re still a young man, and with that money you can do whatever you want,” Eduard said. “I thought that was right and logical and all that, but the truth was I didn’t want to do anything else. I still don’t, but I couldn’t turn the money down, because I didn’t want to be known as the person who turned that money down. I didn’t want people to there goes Eduard Pennington, the guy who turned down big money, and right after he did it, his business fell apart. Every industry, hell every business, goes through cycles, and it was possible that the value of my company could’ve gone down. It didn’t, but it was possible.”

Eduard Pennington did it all for the money. He worked for someone else, because they paid him. He opened his own business for the expressed purpose of making more money, and like all upstart businesses he skimped and saved during the early, desperate years. He even dipped into his nest egg to see to it that his employees were paid on time. He didn’t do this because he was a good man. He did it, “Because it was good business,” he said. “I interviewed and hired every single one of these talented men and women, and I paid them top dollar for their skills, because I knew they could make me more money. I don’t care how loyal your employees are, if they find someone who is going to pay them so much more than you, that will test their loyalties. It’s just good business to find the market for their talent and pay them more than that.

“Why else do you do anything in business?” Eduard asked when asked if he has any concerns that we might view him as a greedy capitalist. “I spent most of my life making money for others. When I went into business for myself, my goal was to make as much money as I could.

“Let me amend that slightly,” Ed said. “If you do it solely for the money, you’ll end up miserable. If you love what you do, and you’re good at it, money is more than a byproduct of all of your efforts, it’s the reward. If you’re not getting paid what’s the point?”

Fighting Coyotes

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“I had a mean case of the coyotes,” Riley Frandsen said to explain his unorthodox, yet natural means of protecting his property. I didn’t need a guide or interpreter to tell me what that meant, but Riley was so stacked with anger and frustration that I felt compelled to provide him a launching point:

“What does that mean?”  

“They were going to the bathroom in my yard, all over my yard. It was so disgusting. They ripped my garbage apart and threw it everywhere, and they were scaring the hell out of Murphy,” Riley said, stressing the latter point as if it was the most important. “Murphy, here, was afraid of going out in the backyard,” he added patting his nearly 100lb. setter while holding my gaze. “I’m serious. When he left this little patio, he did so only to go to the bathroom, and then he wanted back in quick. He got to the point that he was going on the patio, because, I think, he didn’t want to leave the lighted area. He used to love the backyard, staying out for hours, running around, barking at non-existent matters, like any good dog will. Then it was, one to two minutes, and he’s scratching at the door to get back in. It’s sad is what it was.”       

I wasn’t paying too much attention. I’m normally a pretty decent listener, but a story about a man living in a relatively remote location, having problems with coyotes, didn’t captivate my attention. I had a whopper of an unrelated story all locked and loaded, and I couldn’t wait to start it. As such, I was committing the mortal sin of all good listeners: I was waiting for him to finish his story, so I could start mine. 

“What does a man do when coyotes start peeing all over his land?” Riley asked himself when I forgot to ask. “You pee right back is what you do. You reclaim your land.” If I was rudely half-listening up to that point, those lines brought me back in. My story was gone.

“You pee right back?” I asked, guessing where he was headed, but I wanted to hear him say it. “What does that mean?”

“How does a dog mark their territory?” Riley asked. “They urinate on it, right? They were marking my territory as their own, and I didn’t know where they were marking, of course, but they obviously did such a thorough job on my lawn that my buddy, Murphy, was afraid to leave the patio after a while. So, I started urinating back, around the perimeter of my land, as a way of taking my land back.

“So, anytime you have to pee, you run out here and do it on your lawn?”I asked

“I started out doing that,” he said, “but I did some research on it, and experts say that morning urine is the most concentrated and potent.” 

“I’ve also heard that beer urine is some of the most concentrated and potent,” I said. “Is that true?” 

“I wouldn’t know, because I have no control group … My morning urine has had at least some beer in it since I was fifteen. And to answer the question every one else asks, I have to do it again after every rain.” As Riley and I went silent, with a beer in hand, looking out at Riley’s backyard, I broke:

“I am sorry. I know this isn’t funny, but it kind of is.”

“Oh, I know it is,” he admitted with a smile. “I’ve taken this story into town, and they laugh just as hard as you do, because it’s funny, but I’ve tried everything as you can see. I put up that privacy fence, an eight-foot privacy fence, and I saw one jump it one night, scared the hell out of me. I grabbed my rifle and scared it off, and guess what he did. He jumped it again a couple nights later. They’re not scared off by gunshot, not long-term anyway. They’ve not afraid of motion detection lights, and the name brand coyote repellents don’t scare them off either, not long-term. Nothing did, until I began marking my territory. I have to protect my dog, and my property right? I see it as marking my territory in the way any other animal would. I see it as informing them that this is my land in their language, and they respond better to that message than any of the other ones I tried. I don’t know why it works so well, but I think it has something to do with their fear of humans. Our urine is also very high in ammonia, which most animals hate. I still hear them, off in the distance, but I haven’t seen them once since I started doing this. They appear to consider the smell unbearable. It is an olfactory repellent to most mid-level predators. It can also be used as a pesticide. The scent of human urine can be used to confuse and deter rabbits, squirrels, and unintelligent people.

“Not all predators are repelled by the scent of human urine however,” he continued in a matter-of-fact manner, as we sipped on his beer. “The debate on whether bears are detracted or attracted to human urine is ongoing. Some say larger bears, like grizzlies, might actually approach a camp lined with pee that campers put there to detract bears. They say that bears now so associate humans with food that any sign of humans will attract desperately hungry bears, and they know the scent of our urine. Others claim that bears are naturally curious creatures, and the smell is so foreign to them that they investigate. They’re just in our campsite to see what the smell is, in other words, but when we start screaming and running away, their other instincts and impulses cause them to do the things they do to us. 

“Reindeer, apparently, go nuts for our pee,” he continued. “And yes, I did some research on that too. I didn’t specifically search this out, but it was an offshoot of an offshoot, a rabbit hole that I followed, until I ended up learning that reindeer have a natural salt-deficiency, and our urine is high in salt, so they crave it, like we do Ruffles. The Inupiat people of Alaska found that all they have to do is pee in a reindeer trap, and they’ll have a nice meal at the end of the night. Imagine all of the trial and error that went into that finding. The Tozhu people of Tuva in Russia like to keep reindeer around for whatever reason. I assume they occasionally kill and eat them, but they’ve found that if they offer a reindeer a bowl of urine every once in a while, the reindeer will hang around their homes, waiting for the next bowl to arrive. The Tozhu say that the salt-deficient reindeer crave our urine so much that they’ve learned our patterns, and when they see a man who they think is about to pee they will all rush up on him and jockey for pole position, for lack of a better term.

“I know it’s funny,” he said. “I knew that before I told my neighbor, who was trying everything he could think up to free his home from the coyote invasion. He thought it was hilarious, and he told everyone he knows, and I know they were all laughing their heads off, but you know what happened don’t you? You know the end of this story don’t you? You can see it coming. That’s right, they kept laughing at the image of me peeing around my property line while they went through all of the prescribed fixes, and now everyone in town is peeing out their own property line. It’s funny, and it’s the only thing that works.”