Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 24
July 28, 2017
July 22, 2017
Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School
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Crazy the shit that can happen to a human being. Case in point, right above there. Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School in Houston Texas. Did anyone else go there in the 1970’s? Reason I ask is because I’m curious if your life turned out as weird as mine.
Who named that school? What kind of superfreak Texan lunatic took a look in the mirror after a long night of cocaine and hookers and a rayon fire with a bowling bag full of mushrooms involved and said to himself “Lord help me, I’m the Mayor of Houston. How the hell did I forget something that big? Better do something super bizzaro today, deflect scrutiny.”
That has to be what happened. Now, I’m not saying that school is a flat-out pigsty of a mess run by cretins and witches, but it was when I was there. My teacher that year was named Mrs. House. She smelled like glue and bag milk and she had one of those light but very noticeable moustaches, and maybe that was why she was so pissed every day. First grade kids were in trailers out behind that impressive brick building. We would occasionally flip out and jump out the window and run through the giant field, and why? Because we could hide out in the haunted house some enterprising psycho had built for the Halloween festivities.
True story.
Summer time, early evening, its fun to look back at the good old days. Strangest thing of all though? Those were good days. No video games, no commercial Fear on every channel, not even sunscreen. Anyway, if you went there during the Carter Administration, drop me a line.
July 12, 2017
July 7, 2017
April 9, 2017
April 5, 2017
Lucky Supreme Tattoo – The Business Survival Guide, or 13 Raw Smacks!
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Gold bars! No way! I’m a tacky Republican dipshit! Kidding. Don’t puke in your keyboard. No no, here is something actually valuable. The Thirteen Raw Smacks Handbook/Pamphlet that should appear in the back of Lucky Supreme, A Novel Of Many Crimes. Its not the secret to success! Its the secret to survival!
THIRTEEN RAW SMACKS
Here are thirteen tips from the apocryphal LUCKY SUPREME shop administration handbook that business people everywhere can take to the bank.
Take one crappy task for yourself, like cleaning the toilets. This will keep your employees on their toes for three reasons. One: it indicates that while you rule the roost, you’re not a dick about it. Two: everyone works, even the boss. A comforting thought. Three: if you want something nasty done, they’ll always say, “Well, he does clean the toilets.” You can’t boss someone around unless you’re in the trenches with them. If I was, say, drafted into a war and some officer yelled, “Johnson, explore that muddy, mine-filled, plague rat infested tunnel!” I would regretfully shoot him and claim it was an accident. But, if said officer wanted me to follow him in, I’d at least consider it, albeit with a patronizing smile.
The lean vs. the chubby. Keep your rodeo lean. Over expansion is dangerous, as well as unseemly. There are signs of this everywhere. Big, omen-encrusted, gore-splattered billboards with sirens on top jutting from mountains of the broken skulls of CEOs and overzealous entrepreneurs. The summer is traditionally our busy season at the tattoo shop, but I never hire extra people, because I don’t want to fire them come January. This is more than just tasteful. It keeps employees from getting paranoid at every blip, and that helps everyone get along and prevents mutiny and mass defection. You may lose a little revenue in the good times, but you’ll do well when times are tough, because your infrastructure is stable, tested, and as emotionally well adjusted as your input can make it. Which is more important? Do the math. The objective is to stay prosperously in the game, not world domination. You won’t do well if good people keep leaving. You won’t make a penny if the doors close.
Ups and downs. Only an insane business person whips out every card in the deck. Keep something up your sleeve at all times. A crisis is no time for elaborate planning. Every good plan has a detailed backup plan that’s just as good, with an escape hatch leading to another good plan, all carefully thought out in advance. Just caught wind that another tattoo shop is going to open across the street? Deploy Operation Gamma 119 and stand back. If you’ve done your job well, it’s going to be a spectacular extravaganza!
The best way to spy on your employees is to be friends with them. Why? Because if you’re buddies, then you don’t need to spy on them. A no-brainer. They’ll tell you every detail of their lives, from the hilarious to the alarming, and you can impart whatever wisdom you have in a genuine way. These are people, after all, not bricks in a condo. Plus, what they withhold, you can easily guess. It’s more fun to work with your friends, isn’t it?
Customers are not kings or queens. They’re second cousins. Dry hump them, slap them on the back, ask about their work. Just listen to them! Placing them on a pedestal or in a box is always a bad idea. It inhibits quality communication. Finding out what people really want often means you have to be ready to help them discover it, and that means honest dialogue. This is as true in the art world as it is anywhere else. Ignoring this will imperil your ability to make boat payments.
If you don’t like people, they won’t like you. There are plenty of jobs for misanthropes out there. Drill Sergeant, border cop, parking ticket person, etcetera. Choose wisely for yourself, and choose employees wisely along these same lines. A blind sniper is a character in a kung fu movie, not in real life. In the same way, people who genuinely dislike everyone around them will never be good with the customers. Your customers.
The landlord should always be in your thoughts. Fix your own stuff, help him or her evict troublesome tenants, and generally make their life easy. So easy that they never notice what you’re doing. But enough about that.
Read about business, but be a cautious, even paranoid voyeur in this respect. No education is wasted, as they say, but consider this: in biological terms modern economics, to me at least, resembles a form of hyperparasitism sorely bereft of any noble evolution, much like a bloated virus that lives on a scavenging bacteria that breeds in a sickly mite that lives on a skinny orange roach in a nearly obsolete coal factory outside of an ugly little town with no library. The structure is just that metaphorically flimsy, hence many of our current economic woes. Try a non-classical approach. My business model finds its biological parallel in that of the mockingbird, a capricious creature known to eat roaches, among other things, with no unsavory preamble. Be ready to mimic a fine idea, but also be ready to change your tune as fast as you can change your pants.
9. The cutting edge in advertising is always formed by cheapskates. Small businesses can never compete with huge corporate dollars. Fortunately, however, these hydras rarely use their funds wisely, which leaves the nimble, little guy more than enough room to maneuver. The price of advertising is always passed on to the consumer. Celebrity ads mean low returns. Look for hot ad ideas in other small businesses rather than in books, or worse yet, agencies or big business. The next great breakthrough in advertising will not come from MIT or the RAND Corporation. It will come from a fourteen-year-old Lebanese pizza delivery kid, and will go largely unnoticed by everyone but the soon-to-be-wealthy uncle he works for. And, of course, a few crafty mockingbirds.
10. Every business must evolve, the smaller, the faster. But do it cleverly. Never throw away a healthy working horse for a shiny new tractor until you’re sure the time is right. Think about this: NASA built a runway on Easter Island. Why? Because their ungainly space bird, the shuttle, doesn’t really fly. It glides at a downward angle, much like a pterodactyl. Once NASA could predict with fair accuracy where a Mercury or Apollo capsule would touch down, using computers as sophisticated as a modern Dollar Store calculator. Then with the next phase, the shuttle, they couldn’t, hence the hideously expensive world runways. The shuttle was a bad idea, but they kept with it because they’d spent so much money on it. Remind you of anything in the news? At a certain point they couldn’t turn back. The shuttles are worn out now, and it looks like the next generation will be rocket-oriented again, their landing sites easily formulated. Future generations will find yet another inexplicable artifact on Easter Island: a runway made for techno-dinosaurs. Along with Coke cans, derelict SUV’s and abandoned condo projects. Small businesses never make this mistake if they are to survive. They leave no trail of artifacts. Plasticity + Planning = The Rule.
11. Yelling can be very spooky, as long as you do it rarely and do it well. But never raise your voice to an employee, or you will forever be suspected of inelegance at the very least. When I verbally disembowel a supplier over the phone, or a nosy cop in the lobby, my people glow with pride for two reasons. One: that I’m on their side, and most importantly, two: that they’re on mine.
12. Make your people feel safe enough to be brave. Take the bullet yourself, even if the gun isn’t pointed at you. People make mistakes, especially when they’re extending themselves and trying to grow. You’ll never get any good work out of anyone if you don’t give them enough rope to hang themselves. And if they do, (and they will), cut them down, dust them off, and help them get moving again with as much grace as you can muster. I’m sure an equation could be made out of this.
13. Save half of what you make. If you can’t, you’re either living too high on the hog or you’re not trying hard enough, quite possibly both. Do good work every day and enjoy the rewards, eat fine things out of exquisite eco-friendly vessels if it pleases you, but never forget that saving is important in any business climate, because the frothy chaos of the future, filled with things unimaginable, is as close as the end of this sentence.
April 2, 2017
March 30, 2017
Will Fight Evil 4 Food
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