At an Office Job meeting some months ago, the invited speaker was a college football coach (for some reason).  He went to the podium and spoke enthusiastically (and endlessly) about the football players and so on, none of which had to do with the parents or their kids.  And yet on he went, giving me material to haiku about.

 

He’s got that gung-ho
attitude.  He’s a winner.
Euthanize him, please.

Coaches are basically motivational speakers with hundreds of sports plays smashed into their heads.

Coach Buck Bobby-Joe
Johnson has a story for
everything today.

“Lemme tell you about this one kid,” he said many, many times.  None of the stories were pertinent to the meeting’s purpose or its participants in any way.  But football is huge, and the players are mini-celebrities, so he had a pretty captive audience.

He says it’s “college
football, not football college.”
Why’s he our speaker?

Needless to say, I was unimpressed with his presentation, nor am I particularly enamored of any celebrity athlete-types.

For a football coach,
he sure is enthused about
education.  Right?

He kept emphasizing the football players’ scholarly pursuits, as if that’s why any of them attend college (or that anyone in the room gave a shit).

Then someone else stood up to speak, as if that’s what we needed: more monologuing.

This guy’s got a mouth
on him.  The crowd loves him.  These
parents are sold now.

This guy had started his own email/blog thingie about college sports, and could not stop talking even though he kept saying, “I’ve been speaking too long,” and “I said I was going to keep it short, and I’ll finish soon.”  Still, the crowd was with him, so he had no reason to shut up.

I’d had enough of listening to white men wax poetical about their hard-on for football.  It was time for dessert.

The vanilla cake
was apparently made by
Hello Kitty.  Yum!

The cake had lace and pink shit all over it.  I couldn’t figure out what was edible and what was decoration.  I think the point was to kill us with sweetness in more ways than one.

 

“The most precious gifts
are those unwrapped by the heart.”
Christ, what does that mean?

The time then came for the parents to endlessly thank each other for all their endless giving and “hard work.”  The speeches were the worst part.

So many awards!
How thankful can a group of
volunteers be?  Guh.

What a monumental waste of time.  So much money spent on gifts and certificates and crap, I could not believe the self-congratulatory nonsense my coworkers and I witnessed in just three long hours.  I felt like shouting, “Feed some homeless people, you rich, white bastards!”

On an unrelated note, my search for Facebones pulled up this “Jem” (pun very much intended).