(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell, RD: Rich Dworsky)
We'll be back right after a word from the Ketchup Advisory Board.
TR: It was an office like any other office, a place where people brought caramel rolls in the morning and stood around the coffee pot and talked about their kids' soccer teams and people tacked up pictures of their families in their work cubicles and cartoons and funny sayings like "Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either. " And people booted up their computers and played a few hands of solitaire and when Irv the mailboy came around he'd always kid you about your wild weekend and whenever somebody left for another job, everybody took her to lunch and on Friday everybody knocked off at three o'clock and the boss didn't say a word and then one day there was no coffee in the coffeemaker and no jellybeans in the bowl on the receptionist's desk and at 8 a.m. everybody was in their cubicles at their terminals working like crazy, and at the coffee break, nobody stood around telling jokes, they all called up their stockbrokers and when Friday rolled around, people stayed until late at night and came in for a full day on Saturday and when Irv the mailboy came around he didn't kid anymore because he wasn't Irv, he was Al, Irv had been fired for kidding around, and when Irv left nobody took him to lunch, they were too busy, nobody ate lunch anymore, everybody had a yoghurt or couscous at their desk and pretty soon people were coming in on Sunday afternoons and working Monday nights and Tuesdays and one day people looked at each other and said, "Hey, maybe we're not getting enough ketchup," so they passed out little plastic packets of ketchup and pretty soon, people started coming in late again. They stood around and told jokes about the boss. Guys threw paper clips at each other. They played solitaire on their computers and sent e-mail all over and visited unusual websites. And life was the way it was supposed to be again. All the best that a ketchup can be.
RD:
These are the good years, in the golden sun,
A new day is dawning, a new life has begun,
The river flowing like ketchup on a bun.
GK: Ketchup ... for the good times. A message from the Ketchup Advisory Board.
(c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor