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I took my son to work today and they gave him my job. He looked so executive-ready in his Rocky and Bullwinkle tie, so stakeholder-inspiring, so regional vice-presidential, in fact, that he apparently defined a paradigm shift in leaderliness. As for me, I’ve been remaindered for sixty days to transition him, at partial pay, beneath a crap-colored parachute. From the first day of his pregnancy (yes she called it his pregnancy, not hers) his mother coddled him. Survival of the Fittest does not apply in the New World Order, she told me, so now he’s fit for nothing at all, but I’m the odd man out. He’s nine! What does he know about differentiating brand attributes? Nothing, the bosses tell me, but brands are passe. Concentrate his training instead on making him less derivative, by which they mean: Less. Like. Me. He sees me as one of those cavemen in the diorama at the Museum of Natural History, where, by the way, he peed his pants riding my shoulders and I changed him and bought him an ice cream cone and a second when he dropped it and he looked at me with admiration. I would kill the District Vice President of Corporate Indiscretion to see that look again, but he’s had no use for me since Bring Your Child To Work Day, when he shook the hand of the Chairman of the Board, who cannot remember my name, and cast his indifferent gaze on office items of fleeting interest and asked the Chairman, in a voice as cool as water, How much do you make? while simultaneously, with the back of his free hand, fondling the curvy bottom of the woman who will be his right-hand man. I was lying. I never changed his pants, or anything else.

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