Dear Elon,
I’m not certain you’ll be sending Fix St Louis that request for 5 things we did last week, but I thought it would be safer to get ahead of this one.
You may not like this, but last week ALL of our technicians spent just about ALL of their time working from home. Well, not at their OWN homes, but at those of customers. You can blame me for that one, because I don’t even want to SEE them at the office, except once a week for our half-hour staff meeting.
And personally, I didn’t do any better. In fact, I spent less time at the office than I did at various locations of The St Louis Panera Company (or whatever it’s called this week), living large off my Sip Club membership, consuming prodigious quantities of Hazelnut coffee, while tapping away at my laptop between customer home visits.
I will also concede up-front that you were likely more productive than we were. You may or may not know this, but Fix St Louis specializes in SMALL home repair jobs that others don’t do. So you can’t expect us to accomplish bigger things like – oh, I dunno – catching rockets falling out of the sky using chopsticks, building cars that make dinner reservations and drive themselves to the restaurant, or scolding European nations for abandoning the principles of Western civilization. That kinda big stuff is outside our scope.
So without further apologies, your humble correspondent not-so-humbly submits this list of 6 (out of dozens) Fix St Louis accomplishments last week:
— Scraped popcorn texture off a ceiling
— Fixed a door that didn’t completely shut with that final “click” sound.
— Mounted a guitar on a wall
— Re-caulked a bathtub
— Installed a ceiling light on an empty ceiling
— Fixed a drain leak inside a kitchen sink cabinet
Something else that may be of interest. Not only was all of our work performed WITHOUT taxpayer funding, we actually made CONTRIBUTIONS to the government-related kitty (whether cheerfully or reluctantly) toward payroll taxes, social security, health coverage, ira’s, all kinds of insurance, and who knows what else.
We even gave money to something called “workers comp” that we’ve never used and, for all we know, is being used to fund a musical about toilets in Myanmar or Burma (or whatever it’s called this week).
Let me also give you advance warning that we refuse to comply with this new spirit of shrinking our operations and number of employees. Hopefully, you’ll see us grow bigger. In the last month we’ve begun investments to try to turn Fix St Louis into a franchise throughout the midwest (e.g. Fix Kansas City, Fix Peoria). If you’re interested, the “Fix DC” franchise is still available, though you may be one of the few who can say that without laughing.
I also promise that if our attempt at becoming a franchise fails, unlike traditional federal practice you may hold me personally accountable for doing something stupid. And unlike any failed federal agency ever, I will immediately shut down the franchising operation, and not keep the useless entity going as if it had eternal life.
Well Elon, it’s been fun, but I gotta go. There’s now a line forming of customers who also gotta go, but have toilets that don’t work. If any of them are reading this now, don’t despair. Call Fix St Louis at 314-434-4100.
Dr Steve
Fix St Louis