When Agent
54 was in high school my best buddy was Bob.
Bob was smarter than me, funnier than me, more devious and a better
street Hockey player. He could make me
laugh so hard that I’d go home feeling like I had been beaten up because my
ribs were so sore.
After high school he went to work at Keystone
Lighting (yes the same place where Snyderman worked) in the shipping warehouse
as a fork truck operator. I had another
job but, things didn’t work out there, so I joined Keystone Lighting about a
year and a half after Bob.
The warehouse had many official policy signs
that were white ovals with red letters and a red stripe around the edge of the
oval. They said things like: No Smoking Please mgmt. and Use Handbrakes
Please mgmt. or Safety Glasses Required Please mgmt.. These signs were always posted on the steel
beams that went from the floor to the ceiling and always at eye level.


A little while later I joined the Marine
Corps for 4 years. When I came back I
went back to work at Keystone Lighting (yes, in Snyderman’s department). Bob had been fired at least 3 different
times by then and had given up on the place.
I had to walk through the warehouse one day for whatever reason and to
my surprise, there it was: No Hard-ons
Please mgmt.. Yup, right where Bob first
put it. This was 7 or 8 years after he
first installed it.
I had to wonder how many people had seen that
sign over the years and thought “No Hard-ons Please” was official policy of
Keystone Lighting? I wondered if maybe
it had become official policy of Keystone Lighting because some middle
management idiot saw it and wrote it into policy? I wondered if there was someone who was in
charge of enforcing the “No Hard-ons Please” policy? Were there written instructions as to exactly
how to enforce that policy?
I had to wonder how many new employees saw
that sign and it became a straw, maybe the last straw, that broke the camel’s
back and caused them to quit? People
quit Keystone Lightning constantly. “No
Hard-ons Please” could have been just enough to push some guys over the edge.
Finally I had to wonder how many vendors and
customers saw that sign and thought “gee, if “No Hard-ons Please” is official
policy at Keystone Lighting, maybe it should be official policy where I
work? Did this bogus policy spread?
To this day whenever I’m in a warehouse
anywhere I always find myself looking for that devious little sign: No Hard-ons Please mgmt.. I hope I never find it but, you never know.