We have written several stories about an obnoxious manager I used to have. But one popped up the other day that I had completely forgotten about! So I wanted to write it down before it was gone. It was pretty near the time when he finally got mad because the boss wouldn't fire me, and walked out. He came up to me one day and said "Gerald, I want you to take the ceiling tiles down, and run them through the dishwasher, let them dry and then put them back up."
"You can't do that!" I told him, "They're made out of fibrous material. You try to wash them and they'll melt!"
"Oh!" he went, "Really?"
"Yes," I told him, "you even have to be careful wiping them off, that you don't get too much water on them or the surface dissolves!"
"O.k! O.k!" the manager answered. "If you say so!"
No sooner did I leave than he had the night dishwasher take the ceiling tiles down and run them through the machine! I came in the next morning and they were all stacked up on the counter by the dish machine! The ceiling was completely empty! The cook came over rather irritated because dust was blowing down from the open space above and getting in the food! "Can you put them back up, Gerald?" he asked.
"Sure!" I answered. I got a ladder, went to the tiles to try to pull the first one off the top, but as I did so it broke up, and, the two or three under it broke up, and I was holding a large chunk of several tiles. Once they had gotten wet and dried the surfaces had stuck together. We tried carefully prying them apart with knives, to no avail. The minute you tried to pull on them to separate them they simply disintigrated! When the boss came in he was irate. When the manager showed up he asked him why in the hell he had done it, when I had told him what would happen.
The manager looked at me and said, "I don't think Gerald knows anything! What he thinks doesn't matter to me."
"Well, he sure knew about this, didn't he?" the boss screamed. "I'm going to have to send Gerald down to the hardware store to get new ceiling tiles. And it's probably going to take him all day to cut them and put them back up! So get one of your drunk buddies in here to do the dishes, seems you've made it necessary for him to do something else!"
"Why can't I call in one of the other people and have them do it?" the manager barked.
"Because I want it done right!" the boss answered.
It did take me most of the day. It was a half an hour before quitting time when I finally got done. The boss told me not to bother to try to start anything else and just go on home. He'd mark my time card that I'd left the usual time.
"That's not right!" the manager screamed, "Why should he get an extra half hour for nothing?"
"Because with the job he did today," the boss screamed back, "I think he deserves it! The ceiling installer would've cost us three times as much! I think we got a bargain!"
I happily headed home, much to the manager's chagrin. As I have said before, everybody in that restaurant was so happy when this guy finally took a hike and got out of our lives! And most of his buddies soon followed him. It made for a much better workplace!

THE END

At the end of this magazine are the first seven pages of "The Unified Book Of The General Statutes Of The Spiritist Republic." They're kind of haphazard. This Work is going to take quite a bit of effort to get it laid out as it should be. We still hope to get a legal professional to help us. But some people think the statutes are rather cold, lack sympathy and understanding. Unfortunately that comes from the way that Spiritists think differently than others. Spiritists believe that when a person is born they're born knowing the difference between right and wrong, and are completely responsible for their actions. Others do not believe in this. But Spiritist Laws always respect this principle.