Team,
This is Tom Yates, CEO, with a quick announcement about a course-correction in our organization’s structure. Pembroke Consulting Group has been one of the world’s largest and most profitable professional services firms for over six decades, and it was a mistake on my part to disband our entire Accounting, Finance, and Audit teams — over 17,000 experienced leaders across nine countries — with one curt email that said, “Fuck the Bean Counters.” As many of you know, the majority of our profits derive from our world-class Accounting Services team, and the four months we’ve tried to operate without them have been an unmitigated disaster. My decision to sever ties with the soulless, money-grubbing squares was an impulsive one fueled by an attempt to bond with my teenage son. He suggested we watch a documentary called Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, which profiles the notoriously offensive punk rock musician known for his violent and obscene live performances. Desperate to connect with my son, I convinced myself I believed in GG’s anti-establishment ethos, detesting the world’s craven number-crunchers in their phony little suits who march into offices every morning causing more chaos and destruction via their spreadsheets and casually-committed white collar crimes than GG ever did with his shocking but ultimately harmless onstage defecation stunts. At the time, I believed I was going to positively impact the world by firing 17,000 heartless drones who do not understand art, passion, or love. That was all a mistake. Our clients across the board have been confused and litigious. Our internal bookkeeping system immediately fell apart, and I’m bracing myself for a nightmarish tax season. But more importantly, I have been lonely, walking the empty office remembering all the accountants I fired whom I used to consider friends. I spray painted an anarchy symbol on a wall and cut my bare chest with a piece of a broken bottle one afternoon, but it felt phony and forced. When I sopped the blood off my stomach with a hard brown paper towel in the restroom, I got a look at myself and realized this version of me — the punk rocker — was the craven one, putting on a mask and pretending to be someone he’s not. Like all of you, I derive sincere satisfaction from my work. I find helping corporate clients with their accounting needs intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. My suit is no costume. It’s as authentic to me, and to all of you, as full-frontal public nudity was to GG Allin. To be punk is to be yourself, and that’s what we have been doing here all along. I am proud to announce we’re re-hiring all 17,000 bean counters. I am thrilled to have you back.

To show my gratitude, I’ve scheduled an all-hands company retreat to Oslo, where we’ll enjoy some exciting team building activities, all of which involve burning down churches. My son recently showed me a documentary about Norwegian black metal music and it’s given me a lot of fantastic ideas about the future of Pembroke Consulting Group.

Crowded and hot; dust on sweat. Enzio Sartucci inches forward, knowing the fate of his family will be decided when he reaches the front of the line.

“Next!” the burly clerk shouts, and Enzio thinks tricheco — walrus. Enzio builds the courage to do what he knows he must. He takes his small coal pencil and fills in the NAME line on his worn immigration form: ENZIO GRANDEPENE.

“Next!”

Enzio steps forward with his small suitcase and hands the tricheco the form. “Grande pene?” the man asks, peering down at Enzio, squinting at the crotch of his old wool pants. “You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Enzio says, one of the few English words he learned on the boat. He avoids eye contact with the clerk, praying that his plan will work, that the name will be Americanized and he will forever be known as Enzio Bigpenis, a regal and stately surname that will unlock fortune and splendor. He imagines himself dining with beautiful women at Manhattan’s grandest restaurants; receiving large loans from big banks to start his railroad empire; breaking ground on Bigpenis Estates.

The tricheco shakes his head. He completes his form, stamps it, and hands it to Enzio.

NAME: ENZIO SMALLCOCK

“Next!” the man shouts.

“Aspettare, no,” Enzio says, but the crowd pushes him forward.

“You’ll thank me,” the clerk says, though Enzio does not understand him. “We don’t like false advertising in the States. Better to keep expectations low.”

*

Enzio Smallcock faced difficulty finding employment. Business owners saw his name and threw him out of their bakeries and butcher shops, appalled.

Dejected, he spent his last two pennies on a buxom prostitute, planning to hurl himself over the Brooklyn Bridge after one final moment of pleasure.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” the woman asked, leading him into an alley soaked in horse piss.

“Enzio,” he mumbled. “Enzio Smallcock.”

“Oh, poor thing,” she said. She sat Enzio on a barrel of hooves and pulled down his old wool pants. His five-inch penis boinged out and her face lit up. “My my!”

“Che cosa?“

“This ain’t so bad,” she said, inspecting his penis from every direction. “I see about forty of these a day, and I’ll be honest, I’m impressed. In fact, I’d been dreading this transaction when you told me your name, fearful I’d have to handle some strange nub. But now that I see we’re in decent shape, I’ll give you this tug on the house.”

Enzio did not understand the specifics of her words, but her positivity needed no translation. She pulled his average penis until he ejaculated into a crate of bananas. He offered to pay her, but she pushed the pennies back into his pocket. She then pointed to his penis and gestured that it was a pretty good size. “Not Smallcock,” she said. “Perfectly okay cock.”

For the first time since setting foot on American soil, Enzio smiled. He leapt with joy and relief, and he decided not to hurl himself over the Brooklyn Bridge. He kissed the woman’s cheek, then danced out of the alley, slamming into the big chest of the tricheco from the immigration office. Enzio hugged the large man, who tipped his cap to Enzio. “You’re going to do big things, Smallcock.”

Enzio turned back to the prostitute. “Name?” he said. “Name?”

“Donna,” she said while tugging off the tricheco, sitting naked on a pig carcass. “Donna Hogshit.”

With his two pennies, Enzio purchased a crate of olives and pressed the oil into empty bottles he scavenged at the docks. His olive oil was not the purest or the best-tasting, but he sold it under a brand named for the woman who’d given him the confidence he needed: Hogshit Olive Oil. Customers purchased it when they could afford no other. They’d brace themselves for an offensive smell and sour taste, but when they uncorked their bottles and discovered average olive oil, they were thrilled, and they told their friends about this inexpensive product that surpassed their low expectations. Word spread, and Enzio became a modest success.

While Hogshit Olive Oil was never a best-selling brand, Enzio’s humble outlook ensured he was much happier than his competitors who made millions of dollars but always expected more.

At age eighty, he broke ground on Smallcock Slums, a nice four-bedroom house that far surpassed the low expectations of Donna Hogshit-Smallcock. She grinned as Enzio carried her into their home.

It’s come to my attention that rivalries have developed between our offices in San Francisco, Austin, and Toronto. I want to make sure everyone in the organization knows I hear you and I take these concerns seriously. Managers in our fantastic San Francisco office have expressed frustrations that some of their counterparts in Austin are dim-witted Neanderthals who seem to be drunk during the work day. When I heard these allegations, I immediately stopped the conference call I was hosting, got on a plane, and personally investigated the matter. In speaking with the managers at our cutting-edge Austin office, I gathered more information on their experiences working with their counterparts in Toronto, who, according to the Austin team, are lazy, moronic dumbasses who don’t know how to use computers and wouldn’t be qualified to work at a fucking Burger King. One of my goals as CEO is to foster an environment where every employee is empowered to do their best work, and so I made it a top priority to dive deeper into these worrisome claims. I flew to our world-class office in Toronto and met with the managers there, who let me know that their counterparts in San Francisco are inbred jackasses with under-developed brains, who must have been born on some sort of nuclear swamp to be as stone-cold stupid as they are; and on top of their natural idiocy, they have zero work ethic and seem to clock in one hour a day while spending the rest of their time bitching about everyone else instead of doing any fucking work.

With all this great feedback to pore through, I cleared my calendar and reviewed each individual complaint myself. I’m proud to say that after this thorough analysis of everyone’s valid concerns, I’ve come to what I hope is a productive conclusion that will guide the future of this fantastic organization. What I learned is that every single one of you, across all three offices, is a birdbrained dunce, an incompetent dope as sluggish as you are thick-headed. Barely-functional simpletons who create far more problems than you solve. I have no idea how any of you dimwits make it to the office without dying each morning. But this finding isn’t anything to be ashamed of. It’s not just us. Everyone working at a desk in an office anywhere the world is an easily-frustrated, constantly-confused nitwit who tricked someone into employing them. This is who people are; this is what work is.

The path forward is not to streamline communication or adopt new project-management software. No, our future is all about lowering our expectations of each other. Stop setting impossible goals for your colleagues like reading more than two sentences in an email or preparing anything before showing up to a meeting they scheduled. From now on, the expectation we have for each other will be that no one knows how to read, and no one knows where they are, or why they’re here. At all times, expect your co-workers to be baffled, out of the loop, and mad. Plan ahead for your colleagues blaming you for their ineptitude. We are all overly-confident dullards who got lucky. So let’s cut each other some slack, embrace our shared incapacity, and understand that simple tasks and basic projects are going to take a very long time here, because, again, we’re all stupid and terrible at our jobs.

I look forward to working alongside you on many more frustrating projects, and to one day dying in an office fire caused by one of you making a mistake with your USB-powered mug warmer.