There was an amusing conversation yesterday between Smirk, G and I, concerning The Monopolistic Phone Company and The Monopolistic Phone Company Union. Smirk mentioned that The Monopolistic Phone Company Union only allowed their technicians six roll-outs per day (basically, six jobs per day) even though one technician admitted to Smirk that they could easily do twice that number of jobs. G explained that the “six roll outs” policy was not mandated by the union, but by The Monopolistic Phone Company to the union, which then told The Monopolistic Phone Company that their employees could only do six roll outs per day (it comes down to a safety issue—The Monopolistic Phone Company does not want their employees rushing between jobs in those white and gray vans, hitting little old ladies or the Boy Scouts leading them across and thus opening them up for litigation).
So The Monopolistic Phone Company told the union to tell them that their own employees could only do six jobs a day.
Okay.
But, as G went on, the union's executives receive their paychecks not from union dues, but from The Monopolistic Phone Company itself. It's not that the union executives have one job with The Monopolistic Phome Company and they do the union executive thing on the side, no. The Monopolistic Phone Company pays the union executives to run the union.
So if you work for The Monopolistic Phone Company, the union you belong to is paid for by The Monopolistic Phone Company.
And as if that weren't surreal enough, the union executives belong not to the union they work for, but for a Monopolistic Phone Company union executive union. Yes, the executives have their own exclusive union. Run and paid for, by—you guessed it—-The Monopolistic Phone Company.
If this sounds like something from Monty Python's Meaning of Life [1], well … yes. It does.
Except The Monopolistic Phone Company doesn't have a machine that goes “ping.”