Logic: Not Their Strong Point

I once worked at a small company that made scrapers, putty knives and various painting equipment. Our customers consisted of Home Depot and many smaller accounts. Home Depot was about 80% of our business.

The Sales Manager - whose job seemed to be cutting out various articles and giving them to the owner of the company, in addition to flying around the country to conventions/shopping sprees - had, as far as I could tell, not brought a single new customer onboard in the 2-1/2 years that I worked there. All of our clients were holdovers from the previous owners of the company.

One day this woman came up with this brilliant idea: We'll concentrate on the smaller, mom-and-pop hardware stores and phase out Home Depot. The owner, who I'm sure either was sleeping with, or wanted to sleep with, this fool, jumped in with both feet and, soon, we started losing Home Depot's business

Needless to say, the business crashed and burned within a year. Luckily, I had moved on by then.

That whole farce came back to me not long after the last election. The Democrats, in their wisdom, decided to try to cobble together a base of small, not very powerful "customers" (e.g. pick your Democrat freakshow group) while ignoring the big powerhouse that is the vast majority of this country: normal, middle-class Americans.

And the results were the same. And, like the company that I worked for, they just couldn't figure out what went wrong. And these were supposedly the "smart" people.

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Completely off topic, but here are some anecdotes from this company that are too funny not to share.

The owner walked up to my boss (who became a good friend of mine) and made this amazing statement: "You know, I just realized that, for every putty knife that we put together, we have to have a steel blank and a handle coming in the back door". Think about that.

And this was after the guy had owned the company for five years, and worked there for five years before he had bought the place (he was a rich, urban, Jewish guy born with your proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, so he was obviously a Lefty).

Another time he walked outside while my boss and I were on break, pointed to the busy highway in front of the place and asked, "What are those big, black birds that I always see on the side of the road?".

To which my boss said, "You mean...crows?".

The owner said, "Oh, is that what they are?", and turned and went inside.

The owner loved him some German engineering. All of our machines were from Germany. He also drove nothing but BMW's.

One day I asked him why he liked BMW's so much and, of course, he went on about the wonders of German engineering. I nodded knowingly (although German engineers are as logically clueless as any others) and slipped into the conversation how BMW stood for Bremen Motor Works, which the Nazis staffed with slave labor during WWII. He looked at me like he knew that I was making a point, but he just couldn't figure out what it might be. Remember: this guy was Jewish.

On another occasion, my boss was in a meeting and our HR Manager, a complete Leftist (ain't they all?), suggested that, because our employees were almost all Mexican, we should learn to speak Spanish instead of them learning English.

My boss, being the great Conservative that he is, absolutely let her have it. The meeting adjourned very shortly thereafter with lots of startled faces.

It was an interesting place to work. Stupidity can be very entertaining.