Sorry For Being Back So Soon, But
I started reading Paul Theroux’s Hotel Honolulu over the weekend, and I just have to share this quote:
To please me, he tried to be funny, but that could be tedious, especially the formulaic jokes he told in order to define himself, or just to shock…A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.
I have a new sympathy for everyone who ever worked for me.
I would have taken a boss’s jokes over the family dysfunctional lunacy that shaped my former supervisor’s daily life. Great quote.
Heh. Yeah. I worry about the poor folks who have to endure my husband’s incessant punning, too. Oy. I, on the other hand, am genuinely hilarious and have no concerns for underlings past.
-cough-
“A boss’s comedy is always an employee’s hardship.”
That’s effin’ profound, man.
Of course, it also brings the reverse to mind. A Swiss boss and I were doing avalanche prediction systems in the Alps. Near Davos. Late spring. He walked out onto a precipice which looked fairly mortal, and I didn’t follow. He turned and opined, “You have no head for heights, Herr Lord. Come, it’s perfectly sa–!” The crusted snow broke and he slid off the outcropping like a human tobaggan, impacting 50+ feet below, breaking both femurs, only to tumble on 30-40 yards further down the jaggies in odd pitches and rolls (collarbone, forearm, wrist, ribs) before coming to a very dead-looking rest. My first thought: “Oh, great. They’ll think I killed him.”