You're Not the Boss of Me!

Get out of my office, you're fired.Yesterday I had an epiphany. These sorts of things don't come too frequently to me so it's noteworthy. In fact when it was happening I thought maybe it was a heart attack or an aneurism or something. I started tingling all over and then I ran to my computer and looked up epiphany because I thought that might be my medical condition. It turns out I was right, but my hopes that I could sue the construction company across the street for getting concrete dust in my lungs and causing me to develop an epiphany were dashed as I realized that it was not a physiological condition and would not hold up in most courts.

My epiphany was this: for all of my life I have been a follower, an underling, a henchman, but within my breast beats the heart of an evil mastermind. Yes, it's true, I was born to be a boss, I was born to tell people what to do and when. I am a leader, a commander, a dictator, and this mighty ability has remained dormant inside of me all these years. I resolved to change my ways, to spread my proverbial wings and fly like Bette Midler attached to a Titan missile.

The key to being The Boss is to assert to everyone and everything you encounter that you are, in fact, The Boss. I wrote up a complete list of people I needed to inform that I was The Boss and set off on my course for letting the world know that Zack is running this show now. I figured the best place to start was with Rich, since until two days ago he was technically The Boss. I confronted him on ICQ to let him know about my transformation.

GeistEditor: I'm running this show now. I'm The Boss.

Lowtax: help me out of this mess I done got myself into

GeistEditor: The only thing I'm going to be helping is myself to running this pop stand.

Lowtax: Shut up

Fired. Fired. Pay cut. No, you're all fired. Get out.That made for one down with about fifty to go. My next target was my girlfriend since she often seems to think she's The Boss. I assumed it would be quite a rude awakening for her to discover that I am, without a doubt, The Boss. Our encounter took place on the veranda, it was sunset.

Michelle: Isn't the sunset beautiful my dear?

Zack: Whatever. I'm The Boss now.

Michelle: The what?

Zack: I rule this school. Whatever I say goes.

Michelle: Your wish is my command (or that's what I assume she muttered to me as she stormed back inside our plantation).

I went on to contact many friends and relatives about my recently upgraded status of The Boss and then finished out my round of announcements by informing my pets and several inanimate objects in my apartment. As mentioned before I just call it an apartment, it's actually a large Southern manse complete with wicker furniture and helpful negro servants. That's because The Boss don't live in no apartment. For posterity I wrote in my dream journal about telling my youngest of three cats about my new status, to boil it down to its essence I said "I'm The Boss of these parts now". My cat proceeded to roll onto its back clutching a stuffed Bill Clinton doll which it bit repeatedly on the face. This is a common form of acquiescence in cats and obviously that cat knew that I was The Boss.Weldbot you're just not a team player. You're fired.People think being The Boss is easy, but let me tell you brother it ain't. I have to spend all day sitting at my desk playing Minesweeper and surfing the web for pornography. Every ten fucking minutes I have to pick up the phone so that I can call someone and scream at them for not doing their job right. Do you know how much tax The Boss has to pay? A LOT. Do you know what kind of tax there is on buying a jet powered boat? More money than you make in a lifetime! All to do what, feed retarded kids? The Boss doesn't care about a bunch of droolcups wanting to learn the alphabet and eat crayons, throw them all in a wood chipper or put them to work in the salt mines. Hell, I don't even know if salt comes from mines, I don't have to know either, because I'm The Boss. When I want to know something I pay someone to ask someone else to look it up in a library.

I still don't think I'm getting through to you what a huge responsibility it is to be The Boss. Here are just a few of the tasks and duties I have to deal with on a daily basis.

Brushing my teeth: I could pay someone to brush their teeth and then put them in my mouth but that shit hurts. Until they have ghosts that haunt your mouth with freshness I have to repeatedly do this mundane task. And people say technology has come a long way, well you sure fooled me buster!

Talking to people: People are ugly, smelly, and disgusting. They are not anything like The Boss, and I sure would like to not have to talk to them ever again. Unfortunately a big part of being The Boss is telling people what to do. I tried hiring someone to tell them what to do for me but no matter how many pills I gave the guy he still couldn't read my mind. Worthless!

I don't even know your name or what you do, but clean out your desk. You're fired. Nature: What the fuck? Didn't we get rid of this crap twenty years ago? Where are my tax dollars going? I am so sick of those birds cussing up a storm outside my window. And the grass and trees…don't even get me started. I paid people to salt my lawn at least thirty times and every day there's another bird out there talking like a sailor and pulling up weeds. You'd think in this day and age we could just nuke the whole thing and live on a nice big plane of glass. Now that's living. I'll write up a memo on that.

Breathing: Seriously overrated. I see these filthy homeless people breathing through the armored glass on my custom SUV and I wonder to myself how far have we really come as a species if The Boss still has to do that. Can't science give me a shot or a pill or something that just makes me get that monkey of oxygen off of my back. You see, I didn't know what the air was but I had Delores call the library and she said "it's a mixture of oxygen and other gasses" and I said "that's too long, rephrase it for me and trim it down".

Polo: Watching polo games is one of the best aspects of being The Boss, but even those get boring because the horses just move too damn slow and the grass, always with the fucking grass. I tell you what, I'll write a check and you make sure the next time I go out there with lemonade those cocksuckers are on hoverjets or what have you and playing on a basketball court. Make sure you scare off the negroes first, they're as bad as the birds.

The Stock Market: I bought a computer so that this shit would stop losing me money. I mean I have a billion times more money than I could spend if I just wrote a check and kept adding zeroes until the day I keel over, but that doesn't mean I like to see any of it go away. The computer just sits there doing nothing, in fact it's probably the most insubordinate thing I own and that includes those orphans I bought to pave my driveway with the tombstones of Korean War veterans. So I scream at the computer and it does nothing, but what's worse is I scream at my broker and then he tells me I lost five kajillion dollars from my money market account! Newsflash Hercules, I'll just save my money by yelling at the computer!

The Sales Department: Hey you jackass ingrates, we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is I send cannibals to your house to eat your family. Fourth prize is this fruit basket and fifth prize is a one way ticket to the sun. They call it cold calling because if you don't do it your body will be room temperature inside the hour so get to it you fucking slack-jawed morons.

Holy God! You're fired, and send in the HR manager that hired you on your way out.Life isn't all hard knocks for The Boss, I get a chance to unwind after a hard day at the office screaming at people, firing people, and paying people to figure out ways that I can get people to work without having to pay them. My leisure activities include watching polo matches, screaming at people, firing people, cursing nature, paying people to disrupt the pagan ceremonies of druids and wiccans, and my personal favorite is of course eating Veal Turducken, a little recipe I cooked up. Have a look for yourself, my personal trainers said that if I keep eating it I'm going to have so many abs busting out of my shit that they're going to have to call me "The Centipede". I fired them all for even hinting that I could be called anything other than The Boss.

The Boss's Veal Turducken

Step One: Pick up the phone and scream at your servants. Do this drunkenly if you have to but continue on for at least five minutes before you get so frustrated at their incompetence that your fire them all and go to the grocery store yourself.

Step Two: My grocery store is a special one run by some sort of sultan or sheik or something. He comes out in his crazy hat and gives me a list of exotic meats that I can buy and they all have pictures of the animal next to them. For Veal Turducken you need a white rhinoceros, a female tiger that is pregnant, a cloned stegosaurus that has been hobbled so it can't escape and fed on cream so that it's fat and juicy, and at least one centaur arm. You're thinking that centaurs are made up, but I'm so rich that they aren't made up for me, I can buy them. I could pick up my phone right now and inside ten minutes there would be a refrigerator truck full of those bitches sitting outside my apartment. Plantation.

Step Three: Drive home drunk on that crazy wine the grocery store guy keeps giving you, wreck your Excursion into a tree and stagger out clutching your cellphone. Get really maudlin and call Delores sobbing and explaining how you fired the housekeepers because they're idiots. Half way through your rant start yelling and get angry and hang up. When you get back to the house all of the housekeepers should have come back or grown up out of those peapods that the poor people grow in or whatever, it doesn't matter how or why. Throw the meat you bought onto the counter and collapse exhausted onto your bed.

Step Four: Bon appetite! I've never actually tasted it because I never want it by the time I wake up and I just feed it to the robot that lives in my sink and then we share some laughs and then I scream at it because it could be better.

In the end of this epic journey from zero to hero I think it can be said that being The Boss is hard work worth doing. It's a struggle to achieve the excellence that is required to be The Boss, but the rewards can almost compensate you for the sacrifices you have to make. Naturally since I'm The Boss you can't be, because we can't have two of them at the same time, that would just be crazy.

Get back to work, I'm not paying you to read this shit. No, forget it, on second thought you're fired. Pack it up and get out asshole.

One ROM Enters, One Man Leaves.

I am pleased to introduce a scathing new ROM pit review from rookie ROM pit reviewer Andy "I Have No Nickname" Nishida. Man his nickname is hilarious, but not as hilarious as "Wally Bear and the No! Gang". Everyone loves bear-themed anti-drug videogames right? Right?! Hello, is this thing on?

Wally's adventure takes him through various cityscapes in efforts to educate and save his friends, various members of the NO! gang, from the dangers of peer pressure and debauchery. But while the game may be padded with a soft aura of good intentions, this 8-bit horror of entertainment's message fails to articulate anything other than saying, "NO!" to things and the only way the game's message could frighten me more would be if the entire NO! gang turned vegan and tattooed X's on the backs of their hands. Corny theme aside, the game comes with the normal fixings including: dull gameplay, monotonous audio, and curiously eerie, brain thrashing graphics that simulate me with a strange sexual arousal towards fetishes that I never knew or wish I had.

If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, then head on over to Andy's ROM review and let it free you from this world. DON'T DO DRUGS.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)