Do You Slow Down To 55 As You Approach The Gantry?

Bob. He's a really nice guy. He can program a computer, but he finally moved up into management as a "business analyst." He now has lunch with Bill, who controls everything the company purchases. Bill don't like it, you don't get it, it don't get bought, the company don't know nothing about it. I'm fudging Bill's real lingo because it is not very communicative. Bill is not happy with meaning, content, knowledge, clarity, data, consequences, deductions, nasty vile innuendo, foresight, resolve, conviction, slang, perspicacity, focus, low class slime, awareness, and point. He's a fart.

But Bob. Bob is a nice guy. Bob has values. Bob wears a faded blue shirt with printed palm trees on it. Bob thinks about things. His wife has nothing to say beyond, "Hey, asshole, how's it going?" Bob was made to do business analysis. Please note that I do not put quotes around business analysis. Business analysis is the art of looking at the relationship that arises between a company and its clients. You want them to buy things that you make a good profit on. You want to supply them with what they want, with what they really need to reach their potential.

Therefore, Bob slows down to about 55 mph as he approaches the gantry. What? -- you don't know what a gantry is? A gantry is a thing that stretches over the toll road you are driving on. From the gantry hangs a scanner. The scanner is always scanning, so that when you pass beneath it the scanner swipes its ray across your toll tag, grabs your info and returns it to the scanner on the returning ray, whereupon a signal goes downtown to the computer and the toll is deducted from your balance. When your balance falls below a predetermined and agreed upon amount, a draft is initiated against your credit card.

Guess what, folks? Bob likes to slow down to about 55 mph as he passes under the gantry because he doesn't want the scan to fail because he was moving too fast. And he almost causes an accident every time he does this because the drivers in the other lanes, the drivers ahead of him and the drivers behind him, are ALL DOING NINETY, because they are real human beings who are PLAYING with the established order. They know they can't beat it and are trying to get it up to a hundred and ten just for the fun of it. But Bob is a serious man, a good citizen, a solid family man -- let's just sum it up and call him A BANKER. So the guy he has lunch with, Bill, is a fart; and Bob, the guy who has lunch with Bill, is a banker.

Bob ought to be declared a national treasure -- just as Martha Graham was.

Martha Graham. They don't like her. "They." She never allowed herself to be used for any political purpose whatsoever; over her seventy year career; so they don't like her. They hate her. They teach their students that she was just one more dancer, just like all the others. Nobody special, just one more worker in the vineyard, overly intoxicated by the fume of her own vintage.