Don’t have a seat, Eric. I’ll get right to the point.
I built this company with my bare hands. I woke up at four AM for 60 years and never once took a vacation. Now I admit, I didn’t come in on a Sunday once, but only to impregnate my wife during church. I eat one grapefruit a day and carry my car home from work every night for the exercise.
Frankly, Junior, you’re just not cutting it. When I started this company, no one in this country had even heard of desk lamps. They’d just sit in the dark shuffling papers until their eyes started to bleed. Honest to God, you’d go to sleep with your collars soaked in blood. Now you can walk into half the homes and offices in America and find my namesake sitting on a desk.
Let me let that sink in. 100 million desk lamps, and they all have my name on them. They don’t say, “Eric Martinson, Junior VP of Marketing, and Probable Communist.”
Eric, you’re what’s wrong with America. Do you realize that 30 years ago this country really knew how to make an industrial lathe? And I don’t mean they knew how to order one from Hong Kong, I mean they really knew how to make an industrial lathe. You’d call up some guy in Idaho and he’d call you “Sir” and that damned thing would be in your factory by the end of business Tuesday. And if it did so much as chip a lamp, there wasn’t a court in the state that’d convict you for beating the salesman to death with a chair. A chair made in AMERICA.
Now get out of my office and leave your pens with my secretary.
Sincerely,
95 Year Old Businessman
