Ammo Grrrll has a regular blog entry on Power Line every Friday. Today’s entry triggered a memory of awards ceremonies past. I think I’ve got her beat.
I worked for the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) a division of Texas A&M University. Every Labor Day, instead of eating hot dogs, TEEX employees gathered for the yearly awards ceremony. The supreme muckety-muck, a guy by then name of Bradley, decided that we didn’t need Labor Day off. Our time would be better spent listening to him drone on and on.
They say Bradley was a retired Lt. Colonel. I don’t know. But his annual Labor Day extravaganza was carried off with the precision of a the D-Day landing. There he was up on stage droning on and on. Behind him were his cadre of sycophants, soon to be award winners and those who had survived TEEX long enough to retire and get the watch.
One of the retiree’s had the bad grace to upstage Bradley. He keeled over and fell out of his chair. Several of the people seated next to him broke ranks to attend to him. The sycophants made note, there would be consequences. Bradley droned on. Soon, the paramedics arrived. They initiated CPR. Bradley never missed a beat. The paramedics deployed the defibrillator. The audience got a first hand view of it in action. Bradley continued, the show must go on.
The paramedics loaded him onto a stretcher, exit stage right.
Everybody agreed that it was the most effective statement regarding members of TEEX that Bradley had ever made. Nobody had any doubts as to where they stood in the organization. I always wondered, did the widow get the watch? I suspect that she didn’t after all the dead guy never accepted it,
