wrinkled up into a ball and tossed at a trash can a few feet away,
with highly indifferent accuracy. A few of the sheets had been
written on with multicolored felt-tip pens and placed carelessly in
several piles.
"What's going on here?" demanded the Vice President.
"We work here," said the young man.
"Not any more you don't," said the Vice President sternly. "Just
what do you think you're doing, anyway?"
"We're working on the new Blister DLX," said the young woman.
"I don't see any work being done here," the Vice President
shot back.
"We're thinking," the young woman said.
"This doesn't look like thinking to me."
"Oh? And what does thinking look like to you?" asked the young man.
"Well, it certainly doesn't look like this. This is goofing
off--and stop wasting that paper. Who are you, anyway?"
"I'm Scott and this is Tina," the young man said. "We're creative
analysts. We're working on cost-cutting ideas."
"Cost cutting?" sneered the Vice President. "You don't even have a
calculator. And besides, we've got engineers and accountants to cut
costs, so even if you were doing that, you'd be either superfluous
or redundant. I want you out of the plant by this afternoon."
That afternoon Scott and Tina went to the Vice President's office.
As Scott stretched out on the floor and began to spread out a few
papers, Tina pushed aside many feet of adding machine tape and sat
in the Lotus position on one end of the Vice President's desk. The
Vice President was not quite so upset that he did not notice that
Tina was wearing earrings made from crumpled balls of paper hanging
from bent paper clips. "We'd like to ask you to reconsider your
firing us," said Tina. "We have some good ideas for the Blister."
"Get out," said the Vice President.
The next day all the executives met at a regularly scheduled
administrative meeting, where there seemed to be some confusion and
delay in getting started. Finally, the President of the company
spoke up. "I'm sorry for the delay," he said, "but we had scheduled
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