Anonymous
Gentlemen, your new manager of corporate planning: Larry B Henderson! Yeah!
Leaving his fifth interview with the big non-profit health insurance carrier, Larry was sure they'd offer it to him now. These folks want to change, get really customer-friendly, and I'm the guy to do it for them. They as much as told me so today. This company's going places, and I'm going with it!
For Larry, a freewheeling consultant, this was his golden opportunity - reorganize a major firm that had grown fat, happy and bureaucratic over the years and draw a regular, big-bucks paycheck twice a month too. Plus the benefits and perks. Yes! He took his wife out to dinner that night. The next morning, tearing yesterday's page off his Far Side cartoon desk calendar, he stopped short, gaped at it a moment and laughed out loud.
A 747 jetliner was taking off from an airport near a swamp dragging a big old bullfrog along with it. Mistaking the plane for a smaller, more edible flying object, the frog had shot its tongue out to capture it, and got stuck to the plane. There was this frog, tongue latched to the jet's fuse large, zooming skyward with an astonished look on its face.
That frog is me, he thought, the plane is the company, and we're both taking off to new heights. Prophetic. And funny, too. He liked it so much that he faxed copies to each of the people he'd interviewed with, from the personnel director right up to the president, along with a note explaining how he felt.
He expected at least a couple of calls about it, but nothing. For five whole days, nothing. On the sixth day, he got a letter saying they'd promoted somebody from inside the company.
Larry was convinced the cartoon cost him the job.
"I should have realized," he said to his wife. "Nobody had any sense of humor there. I thought it was funny; they must've thought it was weird."
"Maybe they just don't like frogs," his wife sympathized.
