I would be far more likely to take Staples up on their kind offer of $10 off (any in-store purchase of $40 or more) if the offer wasn’t mailed to my apartment on a thick, POST CARD-SIZED PIECE OF LAMINATED PLASTIC.
Coupons expire 5/4/09, but landfill-choking junk mail is forever.
In The Big Money, a brief consideration of workplace goodbyes.
“I need to stop complaining, and I need to eat my lunch.”
—Erik Benson (is back to basics)
“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man—you were not going to as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived—you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Or course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied–but I, for one, would not have chosen any other…. And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
