What do you mean, Bruck, "my hotel-manager era?" I'm still in it!
Not to mention lousy teeth, a crapped-out computer system at work, unrequited love, and even the goddamned coffee machine doesn't work.
Sounds not unlike one of my former places of employment (from which I was relieved by a change of owner last spring).
Ah, the VW. One of Hitler's continuing legacies. That, and the one-class inclusive cruise ship, a fact I'm inordinately fond of quoting.
So remember, a Carnival Cruise is inspired by Nazis!
"Oh, you're the Germans! ha ha ha, fancy that, I thought there was something wrong with you!"
If we keep this stuff up, this is going to turn into a John Cleese-Python-Fawlty Towers site instead of a Stooges site!
I've never taken a Carnival Cruise, but I can only imagine... they're probably modeled after the 100,000-ton Mouse (Disneycorp) which
is run by Nazis. I've worked for one major "hospitality" outfit that's exactly like they must be. Boot camp at Parris Island is a walk in the park, compared to
those lousy rotten bastards, and I won't say who they are for fear of a libel suit— but probably about 3/4 of living Americans and 3/4 of living Europeans have stayed in one of their hotels.
You don't even get the unrequited love, unless you agree to have it deducted from your paycheck— but why bother? Inevitably, you're bound to get some of that anyway, free, gratis, and for nothing. And of course the coffee machine doesn't work, that's
standard. Even if it does, your coffee will probably have some green mold floating in it, since no one's cleaned the lousy thing since October 1952, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower inspected it, tried a cup, and promptly did a spit-take.
VW's (the old 60's-70's-80's beetles) really weren't so bad. Once, I drove one all the way from S.F. to Lake Tahoe and back, and it didn't break down even once. But the things did rattle like hell, being made out of the thinnest steel this side of a soup can. There was no point in turning the radio on at 50 or 60 m.p.h., because you couldn't even
hear it over the rattling.
The strangest thing about the VW is that it's the only artifact from that ridiculous and thoroughly evil "Thousand-Year Reich" that actually
did happen to last for a while.
I'm sure that many of the hippies who drove "bugs" and VW vans back in the 60's and 70's didn't even know what the origins of the Volkswagen were!
But what the hey, they did
sip gas, and they got you around... Not bad for a cheapo-deluxe car. Besides, if Ernie Kovacs had bought a cheap beetle instead of a cheap Corvair, he might have lived longer.