Petroleum Man by Stanley Crawford

Author:Stanley Crawford [Crawford, Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781468307979
Google: Nc9gAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00ED279VO
Barnesnoble: B00ED279VO
Goodreads: 999113
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

21. 1:18 SCALE 1988 LEARJET TWIN

THE 1988 LEARJET TWIN WAS A CONSIDERABLE improvement in terms of speed and general capaciousness over what it replaced, the Aero Commander, which was necessary for me to keep up with our rapidly expanding business—though I was to continue to use seat 18A in commercial flights abroad for another three years. Much of the last part of the decade and through much of the nineties I was constantly in the air giving talks, shaking up new acquisitions, opening new distribution centers and the like. As a result I was lucky to spend two or three nights a week at home in the Manor and often Deirdre was gone during at least one of them, away on her charity work for the usual lost causes.

Be that as it may, if you flick the switch on the underside of the Learjet fuselage it will turn on the battery-powered light inside, illuminating an excellent scale model of me sitting in a padded, swivel armchair, with my seat belt on, and a telephone receiver pressed to my right ear, in front of my flight desk. Your grandmother Deirdre, I regret to report, was hardly an enthusiastic partner in the explosive growth of Thingie® Corporation International. Why do you keep wanting more? she nagged me repeatedly, especially during our late night phone calls when I was in the air. Why do things have to keep getting more and more complicated? A little grass hut on a deserted island somewhere, that is all I long for. I had stopped bothering to point out that we already had several of those reserved for our exclusive use on our development at Tiki-Tango Atoll, but she was never satisfied. With servants hiding in the bushes, she quickly objected, waiting to rush out with cold drinks or hot towels or ringing telephones? Failing to understand as usual that if you don’t employ the natives they’ll resume their former lives of raping and pillaging.

I cannot count the times I have explained to her the difference between men and women, which I will pass on to you two young ones now in order to save you the trouble of trying to discover it later all on your own, with the usual disastrous results—except in the Tuggs family, which has been divorce-free for more than 150 years. And will stay that way.

Men, you see, love complexity in things but prefer simplicity in people, while women prefer simplicity in things but love complexity in people. This also accounts for the difference between manly Conservative Republicans and effeminate liberal democrats.

Things, my little ones: we live in the great crowning age of things, in which each year our national industrial genius picks up some hitherto simple object and makes it far better and more complex. The piece of chalk broken off from a cliff becomes the pencil cut from the forest and mined from the earth, in turn becoming the typewriter requiring iron mines and steel mills, in turn becoming the

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