“But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the Argument may offend, to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practis’d even by great Authors….” – Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
“One thing only is needed for the pictorial narrator—a knowledge of physiognomies and human expression.” – E. H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion
Author’s Note: What follows is a work of fiction. More precisely, it is a satire, a form of comic exaggeration, a caricature. It will not please everyone. It may offend some. The question is: Do you recognize what you see in it?
Bob was a self-made man. Having spent his youth around the casinos in Old Vegas, Bob knew certain types of people would spend inordinate amounts of time in front of the same slot machine hoping to hit it big. To such people, trips to the bathroom and movements of the bowels could only be one thing—a costly inconvenience.
You see, in the end, Bob simply wanted what all successful entrepreneurs want.
He wanted to provide Value.
“What difference does it make whether you sell toothbrushes, machine guns, or diapers?” he would say.
“They are all, strictly speaking, tools. They can all be used for good or for ill.”
Bob had contemplated getting the following Dale Carnegie quote tattooed on his forearm: “There is no indignity in selling adult diapers.”
Things didn’t go smoothly at first. If I’m being honest, they never went smoothly.
The barrier to entry for the adult diaper market was (and still is) quite steep. At first, he tried wholesaling. He found a seller in South Argentina. He paid $10,000 for 20,000 diapers. Imagine his face when upon receiving the product he realized the diapers were more than 30 years old. The seller, a Mr. Jorge Bonaparte, disappeared without a trace.
Many years later, Bob would tell this story to a group of high schoolers at an assembly.
“I thought to myself,” he said, “if I ever found Bonaparte, I would flay him alive.”
One student raised his hand and asked what he did with the diapers.
The diapers worked well enough, but they had yellowed over the years. He sold a handful. His Amazon reviews suffered badly. He had to rebrand.
He vowed never to do business with a South American ever again.
Bob went to many workshops and seminars in those early years. Many of these events had little to do with the nuances of running a business and more to do with working up the self-esteem to run one. He ate canned tuna and lived off government aid, something which in later years he would come to criticize (the government aid, not the tuna; he loved tuna until the very end, eating a can a day on top of his vinegar salad).
Once, he attended a Tony Robbins seminar.
He met a beautiful woman there named Picaponte. She read him some poetry she’d written. She played a song for him on the piano about a woman named Peg and all her troubles. She tried to explain the importance of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric—especially the importance of reading each in light of the other. She kept using the words “modernity” and “postmodernity.”
He said he didn’t know what those words meant.
Picaponte said, “Let’s get out of here. We can run away together, get married, and start a family.”
Bob was checking his email and didn’t hear.
Picaponte got up and left.
He never saw Picaponte again.
Some say she went to Argentina.