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Who Moved
My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison by Andy Borowitz Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Snickers If you’re looking for a book to read while
enjoying a snack at Borders or its like, you can finish reading Andy Borowitz’
new book, Who Moved
My Soap, before your second refill gets cold. While a few paragraphs
brought smiles and a few snickers, I laughed more when I saw the gag before
and after photos of Martha Stewart’s proposed jail cell. Here’s an except (pp.
6-11), all of Chapter 2, “From the Big Board to the Big House”: Here's a little quiz.
Who said this: "I'm innocent, man. I was framed. And if anybody says
otherwise, I'll kick his ass." If you guessed Kenneth
Lay, the former CEO of Enron, that's a good guess—but you're off by a mile.
It was actually said to me by my cell mate, a career criminal named Snake
(not his real name). Snake, who has the powerful, muscular build of a younger
Amold Schwaizenegger and the hard, don't-mess-with-me facial features of an
older Joan Collins, proclaimed his innocence the first day I arrived in Cell
Block Six, and he rarely misses an opportunity to reproclaim it; in fact,
Snake talks about his innocence almost as much as CEOs talk about their
severance packages. To hear him tell it, Snake has been framed for a
remarkable string of car thefts, armed robberies, and assorted other felonies
going back twenty years. When I asked him who, exactly, would have had a
vested interest in framing him for these crimes. Snake looked at me as if I
were an idiot and said, simply, "A woman named Faye Resnick." I
thought it best not to explore the matter further. Snake is not alone in complaining that the criminal justice system has
treated him unfairly. Nearly every prisoner I've encountered since I came
here vehemently protests his innocence and takes absolutely no personal
responsibility for having wound up behind bars. When I hear them go on in
this vein (and they do go on), I must admit that I feel very much
alone—because unlike them, I really am innocent, and it's not my fault that
I'm in here. You're probably familiar
with the unfortunate chain of events that led me to Cell Block Six, unless
you've been too busy fleeing from the authorities to read a newspaper. No
other recent business scandal has eclipsed the spectacular collapse and
bankruptcy of the company I headed, the energy-telecom-pharmaceutical giant
called Shamco International. I'm not one to dredge up ancient history, nor do
I enjoy rehashing a story in which I have repeatedly and unjustly been cast
in the role of scumbag. However, since the credibility of this book depends
wholly on the credibility of its author, I feel obliged to tell you my side
of the story, which, by the way, also happens to be the truth—regardless of
what my jury unanimously thought. Founded in 1997 by me and my then-business partner, the
world-renowned fugitive financier Viktor M. Saurian, Shamco was a
conglomeration of three smaller companies—KleptoCom, Larcenex, and Fungible
Data—that Viktor and I acquired through a complex series of stock
transactions, arbitrage plays, and one very successful bake sale. Making the
disparate cultures of those three companies mesh was no small feat,
especially since one of them, KleptoCom, turned out not to exist at all. It
was rough going at first, and Viktor and I were forced to slash payroll and
overhead, eventually moving our offices from a former Arthur Treacher's Fish
'n' Chips restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, to a twenty-four-hour photo booth in
the middle of a CVS parking lot. But before you could say "Dow
30,000," all of our hard work paid off in spades: Shamco became one of
the high-flying momentum stocks of the late 1990s, even dwarfing such
then-hot Wall Street darlings as tubesocksbyrnail.com and 1-800-CATFOOD. Flush with paper wealth,
we moved our corporate headquarters from Dayton to the Las Vegas Strip and
went on an acquisitions binge, investing in such far-flung businesses as
genetically engineered cow manure and Liza Minnelli's marriage. Growing like
a pesticide-resistant weed, Shamco eventually came to acquire twenty more
companies and six U.S. senators. Suddenly, Viktor and I became feared,
envied, and sexually attractive. As our company's stock price rocketed to
increasingly
empyreal heights, I had to pinch myself so often that I eventually hired a
Stanford MBA whose only job was to pinch mei freeing me up for more pressing
tasks like strategic planning and going to antique oar auctions. But, as a wise man once said, "Nothing lasts
forever'—and Shamco, sad to say, was one of those nothings that didn't. I'll never forget the day when our magnificent
company, this towering monument to our hard work and other people's money,
came a-tumbling down like a house of maxed-out MasterCards. I was on the Isle of Capri throwing a gala birthday
celebration for my new bride, Conspicuosa von Mammon, a former Miss Benelux
whom Viktor and I had met just two weeks earlier when she brought nachos to
our table at our favorite restaurant near the Shamco corporate campus, Senor
Wiggles Grill and Bar. I won't go into lengthy details about our courtship,
because there aren't any: The moment I saw Conspicuosa, I fell wildly, madly
in love for the first time in my life. One week later, she became
my third wife. On the weekend that Conspicuosa turned twenty-six,
I flew two thousand of Shamco's senior vice presidents to Capri where, for
forty-eight hours, they drank, tanned, drank some more, bad complimentary
Botox injections, and chowed down on a lip-smacking array of gourmet delicacies,
including super-spicy "hot hot hot wings" at a food station manned
by none other than Queen Elizabeth II. (She doesn't do many corporate events,
but she's available, so long as you're willing to pay her appearance fee and
her hefty room service bill—-apparently, the lady goes through Toblerones
like she hasn't eaten in a year.)
Naked footmen, their glistening bodies painted with two coats ofgenuine24K
platinum, waited on my inebriated executives hand and foot. A ten foot tall
ice sculpture rendering of Eduard Munch's The Scream spewed
Cristal champagne from its gaping, horrifying mouth. The party, in a word,
ruled. But as Sunday night drew to a close and the best and the brightest of
Shamco International sang an unforgettable rendition of "Happy Birthday"
to Conspicuosa—led by Celine Dion, Luciano Pavarotti, and several key members
of the Goo Goo Dolls—1 got a call on my cell phone that would change my life
forever. "This is the SEC," the voice on the other end said. "Sexy who?" I shouted, straining to hear over Pavarotti's
ear-splitting high A. "The SEC. We'd like to ask you a few questions." Snapping out of my Gristal-fueled mellow, I immediately referred the
caller to our general counsel, who at that vary moment was dancing the
Lambada ("The Forbidden Dance") with magician David Blaine, a late addition to
the weekend's swollen entertainment roster. Heaving my phone into the blazing
luau-style bonfire, I dashed away and boarded the Shamco corporate Concorde,
flying back to Vegas faster than Wayne Newton with a second mortgage to pay. Minutes after the plane
touched down in Nevada, my limo driver, Kato, whisked me off to the Shamco
campus, where I immediately started feeding seventeen thousand pages of
highly sensitive financial documents into a custom-built nuclear-powered
paper shredder I'd bought for situations just like this. Its inventor, a
former Microsoft
genius who'd been exiled from Redmond when he made fun of the shape of Steven
Ballmer's head, had promised me that this technological marvel could eat the
Shanghai phone book in 4.3 seconds, a new world record. What made this chapter even funnier is
that Borowitz’ parody of the Isle of Capri isn’t nearly as decadent as the
Dennis Koslowski and Tyco original. Order a tall latte and grab a copy of Who Moved
My Soap for a chuckle or two, but don’t expect to laugh out loud and spit
out your coffee. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
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ă 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Who
Moved My Soap.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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