Bob's Blog 9-7-13: Thy Mouth Runneth Over

Bob Here.

You've probably all heard of being in the right place at the right time, correct?

Well, one of the many and varied ways I have found in mastering the art of getting in trouble is saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

This unfortunate tendency might seem pretty straightforward, but it can actually take many forms, ranging from telling completely inappropriate jokes to good old-fashioned foot-in-the-mouth disease.

Or, as one former business associate put it, I tend to suffer from "verbal diarrhea."

Now, I'm sure you can well imagine that this condition has resulted in many socially and interpersonally awkward situations. But it has also affected my life on dialysis. I'll talk about that more in a little bit.

But just to give you a little better feel for the types of ill-timed, insensitive, tasteless phrases I've uttered over the years, I thought I'd provide a couple of my better examples. You know. Just to set a baseline.

In my pre-retirement years, my company was evaluating the potential purchase of a drug store chain. Like any mergers and acquisitions deal, there was a lot of what we called "due diligence," which is really a fancy way of saying, "know what you're getting into before you make the leap."

Anyway, we came to a portion of the discussion where we discovered that the chain made a substantial portion of its sales in tobacco and alcohol products.

This took everyone in attendance, mostly senior executives of the company, aback some, and nobody really knew what to say about this revelation.

Well, just leave it to me.

"Look at it this way," I blurted out without any forethought. "Now we'll be able to make our customers sick and cure them all in the same store."

Not actually sure whether it was an attempt at humor or a serious statement, but a moment later, it was like I was looking at a picture of the people running the company from an annual report.

They were all just staring at me, no one knowing what to say.

Long story short, we ended up passing on the deal. And, I didn't get fired, both positive outcomes from my perspective.

Now, it's a terrible generality, but I found in my travels that many business people don't appreciate attempts at humor in inappropriate circumstances.

When I was still working in Finance, I had the occasion to meet with an external auditor in his office. I immediately sensed that the guy was completely devoid of any hint of a sense of humor.

Don't get me wrong, this is not unusual in my former field. Finance people are inherently very dour types.

A typical finance professional's idea of a hot time is boning up on international accounting rules.

But this auditor guy was in another sour and dour league.

He looked like an attempt to smile would cause his face to crack.

His running expression looked like a combination of doom, gloom, and constipation.

Unfortunately for me, when I encounter people like this, I have an overriding desire to break through the facade. This has been true most of my adult life, even though my long-term success rate has been maybe 10%, at best.

As a result, my encounter with this guy quickly degenerated into the train-wreck category.

We introduced ourselves and I sat down in front of his desk. I brazenly picked up a picture off of his desk.

"Hey, when did you get to meet Barry Manilow?" I asked.

He just looked at me. Then he said, "That's my wife."

"Right," I said, hurriedly putting the picture down as if it was radioactive. "So anyway, I understand that you had some question about our expenses for the last quarter?"

He shuffled some papers on his desk. Then he said, "Yes, I'd like to discuss which costs have been capitalized."

"Hot dog. I was hoping we'd get to do that, heh heh."

He ignored that completely and we started going through a long list of expenses line by line, an exercise that makes an hour in the dentist chair seem like nirvana.

I remained serious for a while, but the discussion was so dry, I rapidly started to get bored. And after I had fully recovered from misidentifying his spouse, we discussed a certain accounting handling of an expense, and a light bulb went on. What we need here is a good accountant joke. I thought, everyone likes jokes about accountants, right? Even accountants like them.

"By the way," I said, "Do you know what an accountant's wife does if she can't get to sleep?"

He just looked at me warily.

"She leans over to her husband and says, 'So honey, tell me about your day.'"

He didn't exactly laugh, but he blew some air out his nose, in a kind of snort. I considered it a moral victory.

We eventually got to a line called 'Consulting Costs.'

"Anything capitalized in your consulting costs?" he asked.

"I hate consultants," I said. He just looked up from his papers as if I had slapped him.

"The only thing capitalized in Consulting is a 'W.' A capital 'W' for Waste-of-Money," I continued. "Personally, I've never met a consultant who was worth their weight in cat spit. As far as I'm concerned, that capital 'W' can also stand for 'Worthless Swine.'"

He was watching my little diatribe mesmerized. I don't think he could have been more stunned if I just started clucking like a chicken out of the blue.

It took him a minute to recover, and he looked like he wanted to ask something else about our consulting costs, but thought better of it.

We got through the rest of our expenses without further outbursts and the meeting came to a merciful end.

As we're walking to his door, I asked, "So, what's up for the weekend? Got any heavy partying planned? Maybe a Blackout Party of some sort?"

He gave me a quizzical look, and I'm pretty sure he didn't know what a Blackout Party was. (Frankly, I'm not exactly sure either.)

He just ended up saying, "No. Have a nice day." And he looked really glad to see me go.

Now, as I may have mentioned once or twice, being on dialysis gives one a lot of free time, and, at least in my case, a lot of time to cook up new ways to misbehave. Call it boredom. Call it a personality disorder. Not sure which, probably a little bit of both.

While I was still in-center, my regular nurses and staff members were onto my antics, so on the occasion when we had temporary fill-ins, my deviate mind would go into high gear looking for some new hijinks to pull.

One time, a substitute social worker came moseying around, saying my assessment was overdo and asking if I would mind if she did it in the absence of the regular person.

"No, not at all," I said enthusiastically. "Sounds like a great idea. Let's get started."

My regular nurse just happened to be walking by and she eyed me suspiciously, knowing that I normally hate these assessments with a passion.

Anyway, the social worker asked some question about having enough of a support system in place.

"Oh yes," I said. "As long as I have someone to change my diaper regularly."

She had started to write some notes but this response stopped her in her tracks. She was looking at me, probably trying to see if I was kidding, but I kept a perfectly straight face.

I could see that the wheels were turning on whether she should ask a follow-up question, but she apparently thought better of it.

"Okay," she said doubtfully. "So, what originally caused your kidney failure?"

"Heavy drug use," I said, completely serious.

Again, that same questioning gaze, but this time it took a while to go away. I just returned her look as if to say, "What's the next question?"

She eventually looked back at her clipboard and quickly jotted something down, and I guessed that whatever it was, it included the word "lunatic."

When she looked back up, I suddenly looked off in the distance and said loudly, "JUST STOP IT AND GO AWAY! I'M BUSY RIGHT NOW!"

Then I looked back at her, completely normal. She was just staring at me, wholly confused as to what to do next.

I saw my nurse off in the distance look up at my outburst, but she just shook her head and went back to her business.

At this point, the social worker was looking at me like there should be somebody chasing me around with a butterfly net, but she eventually got up the gumption to try to end the session gracefully.

"Well, that's about it," she said, cutting the normal half-hour process to about three minutes. "Do you have any questions for me?"

I thought for a minute. "No," I said, "but do you think you could do me a favor?"

She just nodded weakly, a look of pure terror on her face.

"Could you ask the dietician if my baked beans are ready yet?"

"B...b...baked beans?" she stammered.

"Uh huh," I just nodded and went back to reading my book.

She proceeded to disappear into the back room. I looked over at my regular neighbor, and he had never even looked up from what he was reading, but he had a hint of a suppressed smile on his face.

Later on, as I was leaving, the poor girl was working at the nurse's station and I stopped and tried to explain that it was all a put-on and I apologized to her, but she still looked relatively certain that I had gone around the bend.

So, over the years, I've learned what it takes to deal with the consequences of kidney failure. Now, if I could only get the mouth thing under control...

Anyway, thanks for reading. Hope you all have nothing but positive things to say going forward.