D.F.

Krause

Read D.F.'s bio and previous columns

September 11, 2009

Sanity Killed the CEO Star

It’s hard to believe I paid good money for all this furniture. Actually, I didn’t pay good money to buy it. I paid good money because my employees talked me into leasing it. It’s darn nice furniture, but it’s cost me my shirt (and I don’t have that many shirts), so now I’m sitting on it realizing that they’re probably going to take it around the same time they take me.

“Mr. Krause! Open the door! You can’t barricade yourself in there forever!”

“I’m perfectly sane, I tell you. Perfectly.”

The next voice I hear is Lacey’s familiar soprano. She tries to be as soothing as possible.

“D.F., it’s OK. Really. No one’s going to think you’re crazy.”

“What? You tell me I’m crazy six or seven times a day! They probably heard you.”

More knocking. I suppose I can’t sit here forever, but I’ve got one last play. And from the corner of my office, opposite the locked door, I’m not thinking about opening the door and going with them. I’m thinking about a song that’s been rolling around in my head for the past week or so. “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. You remember that one, right?

But in my mind today, the lyrics are a little different:

I’ve seen you stealing wireless ever since ‘02

I warned you at the time it would come back on you

And now you sit in there and don’t know what to do

Oh-uh-oh!

They took the credit for your business victories

And then they ripped you when you had calamity

And now a way out of this mess is not to be

Oh-uh-oh

I saw your workers

Oh-uh-oh

They think you’re bonkers

Sanity killed the CEO star

Sanity killed the CEO star

In your big stuffed boss’s chair

Oh-oh-uh-uh-oh-oh

And now we meet in some abandoned parking garage

You hand me documents and strangely a corsage

And then you disappear, and I need a massage

Oh-uh-oh

How did you get away?

Oh-uh-oh

Where will you go today?

Sanity killed the CEO star

Sanity killed the CEO star

In your big stuffed boss’s chair

No one’s weirder anywhere

They’ll wonder how you got out of there

But you’ve fled, and you don’t care . . .

You are . . . a CEO star

You are . . . a CEO star

Down comes the door with a thud.

“Where did he go?” says the heavy. “How did he get away?”

Lacey peers out the window, and a slight grin curls her lips.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Vaya con dios, D.F.”

Sanity killed the CEO star . . .

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