
It may be hard to believe, but this charismatic firecracker is actually pretty lousy at public relations.
GateHouse— Reader(s) may be shocked to learn this, but I have never been CEO of a major company, at least as far as the federal government is concerned (and if any of those vultures are reading, let me reiterate my assertion that VrabelCorp LLC is strictly a Bangladeshi music-teaching non-profit with absolutely zero ties to the pirated-DVD market, and I don’t even know why you’re looking at me like that).
While we’re on the subject I’ve never been the CEO of a small company, or a mid-sized company; frankly, whenever I end up accidentally in charge of something, that thing basically has about 25 minutes left before it becomes a smoldering crater in the dirt.
And yet even if I were, say, dealing in bootlegs of “Marmaduke” that originated in the Eastern markets I’d still remain Jean-Luc Picard compared to Tony Hayward, the quote-fingers CEO of BP, which has poured what appears to be Magic Shell all over America’s birds in the past few months via a plucky little exploded well that just WILL NOT STOP GURSHING OIL INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO, no matter how not-hard they sort-of try things that will probably not work because they’ve never been tried because no one evidently planned for a well that WOULD NOT STOP GURSHING OIL INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO. On the one hand, they’ve sort of ingeniously created a Mobius Strip of convoluted and deeply deserved blame; on the other, they’ve made it so that shrimp in 2016 will cost about $42,000 a pound.
Luckily for those of us who write humor because it’s less time-intensive than hand-scrubbing pelicans with toothbrushes — which is less fun than it sounds like, even if the pelicans are wearing funny costumes — most of the people involved on the BP side of things here are … well, what’s the word for self-aware gaffe machines whose seeming every utterance is so forehead-slappingly disengaged that you cannot help but think wonder if they are perhaps from some division of the multinational oil conglomerate that also runs the carnival?