Topper called the soon-to-be ex-CFO of Omdemnity Insurance into his office, explained what he wanted to do and told him that he needed a few million dollars in petty cash.
Flabbergasted, the CFO said, "Sir, that's hardly petty cash."
"Maybe where you come from, sweetheart," said Topper, "But we're going to Vegas, baby, Vegas! Don't look at me that way, it's a corporate retreat. I mean advance. Advance! We're movin' forward!" The phrase, "moving forward" had become Topper's rallying cry for his wide and varied program of reform. He said it so loudly, so often and with such enthusiasm that he felt no one could possibly argue with the logic of so brilliant a slogan.
The CFO was not persuaded. He pushed his eyeglasses up on the bridge of his nose and asked, "And how much is this excursion going to cost?"
Topper beamed with pride and said, "I'm glad you asked. Two part answer. First part is, you're fired. Second part is, why do you care? You don't work here anymore!"
"But, Mr. Haggleblat!"
"It's not gonna cost a dime. We're going to make money on this deal."
The now ex-CFO of Omdemnity Insurance made a skeptical face.
Topper snapped his fingers and Stevie placed a stepstool next to the ex-CFO, who took a step back. Topper held up his hands as if to show the strange, number-minded creature that he meant no harm. "It's okay. It's okay. I just want to look you in the eye when I say this."
Topper climbed the stepstool and motioned the accountant closer. Under the misapprehension that he still had a job, the ex-CFO fell for it. Topper put his hand on the man's cheek and said, "You gotta spend money to make money." Then Topper slapped the man as hard as he could.
Topper jumped off the stool and snapped his fingers. "And let that be a lesson to ya!" He stormed out of the room with Stevie following close behind, carrying the stool.
As Topper walked through the building, Adjustor after Adjustor fell in behind him. By the time he got to the front of the building, Topper was being followed by a small army of expressionless men in impeccable suits. Topper marveled at how well Edwin had trained these men. They had so completely become their corporate functions that they seemed to have forgotten they were individuals. And now Topper was going to remind them who they really were. He didn't want a well-oiled machine, he wanted an unruly, unholy, pillaging tribe.
Like the Pied Piper of middle management, Topper led the Adjustors waiting buses. From there they went to the airport where they boarded a chartered flight.
"Does anybody know where we're going?" Topper asked the plane full of Adjustors. Since none of them knew with an absolute degree of precision, they maintained efficiency by not wasting time on speculation.
"Enh? Nobody? Okay, I'll tell you. We're going to VEGAS BABY! VEGAAAAAS!"
There was no response from the crowd.
"And you know what we’re going to do there? We're going to have FUN! And that's an order. And after we've completed that very important task, then we're going to work together to make a shit-ton of money."
Still nothing.
"What's the matter with you guys? Doesn't making a shit-ton of money sound like fun?"
Topper got a smattering of light applause, like one might expect to hear at a golf match. Jesus, thought Topper, this is going to be tougher than I expected.
It had been a dark and sweltery night. Topper awoke to find his head pillowed on a gigantic breast. His ear was tickled by both the nipple and the heartbeat of the beautiful woman with whom he shared his bed. A breast and a beautiful woman's heartbeat; on the most primitive level, he was completely satisfied. But there was more. Oh, there was more. For, since coming to Vegas, Topper's motto had become: Nothing succeeds like excess.
As he got out of bed, he had to crawl over two more beautiful, amply endowed women. He knew none of their names, and that made it all the better for Topper. As he placed a knee on a particularly soft bit of woman, she gave an absurdly erotic moan of protest. He considered waking her up for a recap of the night’s debauchery, but then he thought better of it. Let the ladies sleep the sleep of wicked exhaustion. Topper had work to do. After all, he was an important man now. A rich man with a company to run.
Under the weight of his hangover, he staggered from the bedroom and into the light. The view that greeted Topper was of desert mountains and impossibly blue sky. For a man with a view like that, anything was possible. Far, far beneath him were the little people in their little world—the Las Vegas strip and attendant cities and principalities, casinos, flop-houses, swimming pools, taxicabs and broken dreams.
He squinted against the bright light of morning and wandered counter-clockwise through his living room. His penthouse had a 360-degree view of the world around it. After 43 degrees of walking, he came upon the coffee table where he had left the pile of cocaine the night before. He chopped off two generous lines with a Joker card and inhaled them like a pig sucking down truffles.
The drug did its trick and Topper felt new false strength and confidence. As a cocaine lion roared in his heart, he opened his mouth and yelled, "Time to make some money!"
"Maybe you should take it easy," said a concerned, gravelly voice from behind him. Topper turned and saw Stevie pushing a room-service trolley filled with breakfast.
"Aw, hell yeah, breakfast!" said Topper as he advanced towards the food.
"You look like death," said the loyal chauffeur. "You should slow down a little."
"Slow down? What is that?" Topper said through a mouthful of bacon—sweet, sweet bacon, the fatty cocaine of meat products. "I tell you what, when I stop havin' fun, I'll take a break. I'm having the TIME OF MY LIFE! Besides, we're close with them, I can feel it. We're going to turn this company around."
"Uh-huh," said Stevie. "You want to bet on that?"
"Oh, baby, there's nothing in this town I don't want to bet on."
"You haven't seen them for a few days, have you?"
"What, it was the weekend! I wanted them to have some fun and loosen up. They needed it after living under Edwin's thumb."
"Do you know what day it is?"
"Whattaya mean? It's Monday."
"Try Thursday!"
"Wow, not only was last night great, it lasted four days! I love this town."
After breakfast, Topper cleaned up and took the elevator down to the meeting rooms. The Adjustors—or Badass Division, as Topper had renamed them—were in their morning meeting around a u-shaped conference room table. They were paying careful attention to a man in a cheap suit who stood next to an easel with a pad of paper on it.
The walls of the room were lined with sheets from the pad that contained seemingly incomprehensible diagrams. Since no one had seen him yet, Topper decided to watch quietly and see how it played out.
"So," said the man in the front of the room, "if you remember from last time, the group had decided that Timothy was going to conduct a survey of best practices of..." he stumbled over the words, "bank robberies and report back to the group. Timothy?"
A young man in a black suit, one of the undifferentiated mass of Adjustors that Edwin had assembled, stood up. Right away, Topper didn't like him. He was one of those kids who always had the answer for the test, but never had any good questions of his own.
"Well, I couldn't find any secondary research at all on the subject. In fact, what little I could find was anecdotal at best," Timothy said, with no confidence whatsoever.
"Go on," the man in the cheap suit said encouragingly, "Tell us what you found."
"Well," said Timothy, "I found some sites on the internet, and there was this, uh, movie…" He trailed off, looking at his feet. The awkward pause hung low in the corporate miasma. Undeterred, the consultant charged onward.
"Okay, okay, this isn't a problem. We've learned an important learning here, Timothy. We have a known unknown now. What I'd like to do now is conduct a SWOT analysis of a bank, and the retail banking sector in general." He flipped a sheet of paper over the back of the easel and divided the fresh page into four parts. "For those who aren't familiar with this tool, we're going to write down what we know about the Strengths, Weaknesses, Op—"
Topper could take no more. He climbed on top of the table and said, "What is THIS BULLSHIT?"
All eyes turned to him. Surprise quickly turned to understanding among all the Adjustors. This was Topper. This was what he did. But the consultant took offense to this dwarf interrupting him when he was in full consultant swing.
"Excuse me, sir, but are you part of our working group?"
"Part of your working group? Part of your—I'm the Chairman and CEO of this outfit! You are part of MY WORKING GROUP! Understand?"
The consultant was flustered, but bravely soldiered on. "Oh, Mr. Haggleblat, I am terribly sorry I didn't recognize you. It's just when you were so disruptive, I thought—"
"You thought that perhaps some other rabid dwarf had snuck into the building and infiltrated your meeting with a sinister design to—hey, wait a minute, you don't work for me, do you?"
"No, I'm an outside consul—"
"BULLSHIT! What is this bullshit?" Topper paced the length of the table and addressed the Adjustors. "Gentleman, guys, fellas, whattaya doing? What do we need this pencilneck for? Why'd you bring him in?"
"Well, we wanted to make sure we were doing the best job possible," offered Timothy in a voice that suggested that unless he could find some secondary research on his own opinion, he wasn't prepared to trust it.
"Well, I don't want you to do the best job possible. I want you to do a fast job. A brutal job. I want you to have fun. Y'know guys, FUN. You remember fun? Back before school and intramural soccer leagues and always being the kids who did their homework? Anybody?" Topper was met with a blank stare. "Ah, c'mon, you know, those long afternoons spent hitting things with a stick and lighting stuff on fire cause your buddy stole a pack of matches? Breaking things just to hear the sound that they made?"
Sensing weakness, the consultant tried to seize control of the meeting again, "I have found that a SWOT analysis can be quite fun when—"
Topper whirled on him again. "What? What did you say?"
"I said a SWOT analysis be quite a lot of fun when —"
"Yeah. Right there. Fun. Tell me some other things that you think are 'fun.' And don't bullshit me. I'm the King of the Bullshitters and, believe me, I'll know if ya bullshitting me."
"Well, uh, getting together once a month to celebrate coworkers birthdays is fffffff—" He trailed off as Topper swaggered up the table and stood mere inches from his face. The consultant thought to himself, he's just like a charging dog. Just hold your ground, Thaddeus, hold your ground.
"Birthdays?" Topper asked in a soft whisper.
"W-w-w-well, yes, birthdays," said Thaddeus, "A special time to show your appreciation for—"
"Do you have AAAAAAANY idea what we do here?" Topper asked him.
"Well, I've found that all businesses have the same basic —"
Topper held one finger to the man's lips "Shhh shhh shhh shhh shhhhhhhhhhhut the fuck up." He turned on his heel and paced back down the length of the table as he explained. "We're not the kind of company that celebrates birthdays. We don't have birthdays here. And if we decided that we were the kind of company that needed birthdays, we wouldn't celebrate our own. We would go out and steal other people's birthdays and drink scotch and laugh while we imagined those poor bastards trying to get a driver's license renewed without a birthday. We would drink scotch neat like it was their salty tears, and laugh when we imagined those poor, cake-starved bastards going through the rest of their lives, getting weaker and weaker, grayer and grayer, but never EVER getting old enough to legally drink. And do you know why?"
"I, uh—"
Topper spun around and shot the consultant such a look from the other end of the table that the words he was going to say crawled back into his throat. "For you, that was a rhetorical question. I'm gonna try that again, and this time, dipshit, you don't answer. And do you know why?" Topper held his arms up in the air and waited.
After a minute, Timothy mumbled, "Because we're bad men," with no conviction whatsoever.
"And do you know WHY!" Topper said, even louder.
A few more chimed in, "Because we're bad men."
"AND DO YOU KNOW WHY!" Topper screamed, gesticulating like James Brown with Tourette's syndrome.
'BECAUSE WE'RE BAD MEN!" most of them yelled.
"That's right!" Topper said, as he resumed his swagger. "I should have been a goddamned motivational speaker. That's what I should have been. Now you," he pointed at the consultant. "I'm not gonna ask who, in a moment of ill-advised weakness, saw fit to bring you into the finely tuned machine of my organization. I'm just going to ask you to —"
The consultant made a grave error in judgment and decided to interrupt Topper. "Mr. Haggleblat, I understand you have concerns. I think if we map them out," he revealed a fresh sheet of paper on the pad and waggled a marker hopefully.
"Exactly what kind of consultant are you?"
"I help organizations with process improvement and process management.”
Topper reached inside his suit and pulled out a gigantic revolver. He scratched the side of his head with the front sight. "Uh, come again?"
"Process improvement and—"
Topper pointed the gun at the consultant. "Do you mean efficiency? Are you an efficiency consultant."
He nodded fiercely, "Why, yes, I—"
Topper's first shot missed wide right. Into the silence that followed the deafening report of the pistol, Topper said, "You're no Edwin Windsor."
The consultant stood stock still like a frightened rabbit as the marker fell from his hand. "B-b-b-b-b-b-b-but I don't understand!"
The click of the hammer, as Topper pulled it back, got through to the man and he took off running. Topper blasted a hole in the door right behind his head. Topper holstered the weapon and shouted after the man, "I better not get an invoice for this! You hear me?" Then he assumed the consultant's position at the head of the table. "Okay, you, Timmy, tear that shit off the walls. Now, where were we? Whattsa caper?"
