Company Y has approximately 300 thousand Associate Vice Presidents. An accomplishment for a company of about ten thousand employees world-wide. Given the ratio of AVPs to schlubs, you really can't swing somebody's surrendered sense of dignity 'round without hitting one of these middle management types. Two facets of our corporate culture favor the endless proliferation of AVPs. The first factor is the pay structure. AVP is the highest rank you can get and still have to work for your dough. Anything higher, and the various options, bonus structures, and other bennies insure that the company's money tap flows constantly into your bank account, no work required. Second, there's a belief, clung to with a fundamentalist's fanaticism, that good management can solve any problem. This is not, I think, a wholly absurd philosophy. Good management, where management means he strategic deployment of resources and information, can get you out of bad pinch. The weakness in this approach only becomes apparent when one realizes that "good management" is defined by Company Y as "the geographical proximity of somebody with the title Associate Vice President." AVPs are a matter, really, of superstition. Company Y uses AVPs the way a vampire hunter would use crosses, they assume that the mere fact of their presence will ward off evil.

    For an example of just how ubiquitous and entrenched this bias towards AVPs-as-hex-signs is, I was once sent to project manager training. During this training, we were given a fiction project to spec out. The teach wanted Gantt charts, budget projections, that sort of thing. Sitting down with my team, I said, "I think we can all agree that we wont feel comfortable unless we make our first action item 'promote AVP to head up project.'" Not only was this not taken as a satire of our company's bizarre AVP creation habits, it was placed in the project plan as the first action item.

    I bring this up because, recently, the rank and file has started to burlesque this strange quirk of our corporate culture by appointing one another AVPs in a Red Queen-ish game of titling and re-titling. When somebody is making a coffee run, AVPs of Flying and Buying are appointed. We have an AVP of Keeping It Real, an AVP of Putting Feet Up on Desks, and an AVP of Cutting This Crap Out. I've held several titles at this point, including, but not limited to, AVP of Who Has Extra Staples, AVP of Nice Cool Glass of Shut the Fuck Up, AVP of No She Didn't, and AVP of C.K. Dexter Haven, You Have Unsuspected Depth. I've appointed several AVPs, including, but not limited to, the AVP of Smelt It, the AVP of a Life Unexamined is Plenty Fine with Us, and the AVP of If They Move, Shoot Them?

    This is, I think, as close as any of us will get to a promotion any time soon.

Sunday School

    Last class of Sunday school was last week. I decided to wake the kids up and we read the first ten pages or so of Christopher Hitchens's new book. Reaction was mixed. More notable than their reaction to the Hitchens text was the fact that, of the handful of kids I had in class, all of them seemed to believe that the United States had an established national church, and most of them seemed to believe that our nation was officially Roman Catholic. I have no idea where they got this notion. The conversation turned to the Constitution which, as far as anybody seemed to know, protected free speech and had something in there about guns.

    I should point out that all these kids are bright middle and high school students. Most of them attend fancy-pantsy magnet school for advanced students. Two of them will graduate in a matter of days. And yet, somehow, they were not familiar what I feel is a pretty basic fact of American governance.

    One of them also asked where the Pennsylvania Dutch lived. I don't know what to make of that either.