Business - A Short Story

With a business running smoothly, its financials strong, executives must dream up other ways to spend capital.

The businessmen sat around the table conducting business, this being the biweekly get-together for general business development, initiatives to drive new business into the business, and a forum to comment on business done since the last meeting.

They all wore suits, the businessmen, but the brand, cut and craftsmanship varied greatly based on each businessman's personality and stature.

The most important businessman was the President—he owned the business and made all the key decisions for the business to adopt—and he was wearing a custom-tailored suit from the most highly touted (and expensive) suit business in Saville Row, London. Sitting next to him was his second-in-command and recent father, a businessman whose newly appointed daddy duties were displayed throughout his attire: a creased, dishevelled shirt and tie strangulated underneath a collar discoloured with baby-spittle. The youngest of the assembled businessmen wore an eclectic tweed ensemble, tailored, and though neither the same expense nor provenance as the President's, came from a hip new startup, making proverbial waves in the suit scene. The rest donned suits presumably pulled straight from racks at the business suit aisles of megastores and mid-tier clothing establishments.

These were not the most comfortable of clothing to wear. Throughout a long day, the starchy material chaffed at the inside of the thigh and the top buttons were always too tight and uncomfortable, restricting air in the inadequately conditioned rooms. But, alas, it was the only appropriate clothing to do business in.

One businessman, let's call him Buster, had trouble focussing on the meeting at hand. Before entering the room, Buster had been in the men's room taking care of another kind of business and, in his haste to arrive on time, had inadvertently left a small scrap of toilet tissue—no more than you'd tear off to apply to a shaving cut—stuck to his posterior. It was opaquely there and felt like a finger's constant prodding.

He'd estimate that around sixty-eight per cent of discussed business was lost to thoughts of his buttocks. All Buster could do was listen for audible rises in the room and ape his colleagues' responses while covertly clenching each cheek, in turn, to try and unhitch the paper that clung there.

But Buster was accustomed to tuning in and out of these meetings. The discourse was often so dry and repetitive that, for sanity's sake, his mind was forced to wander and invent its own agenda.

Buster knew that business talk was cyclical and that the finer points of this meeting would be all but forgotten by lunchtime and considered anew at the next one. In his four years with the business, he had not seen any new business discussed at these meetings come to fruition. The inner workings of the business have effectively remained unchanged despite many hours spent debating novel new ventures, campaigns, mergers and rebrands.

It could be said (though not aloud for risk of breaking the spell) that the costs incurred in the twice-weekly business meetings, between the portentous salaries of each businessman and the exquisite fine dining provided to them, weren't exactly good for their business's bottom line.

Lobster bisque, steak tartare, grilled calamari, souffle, confits, and other gastronomic delights were lavished upon the businessmen. Buster hadn't known food like this before in his humbler, working-class beginnings. He'd often jest with the missus that the less work they seemed to do, the more generously they rewarded themselves.

Soon, Buster thought, they ought to stop showing up to the offices at all. Why continue with the endless rigmarole of business talk when they could instead frequent illicit bathhouses and massage parlours together? Why blather on with marketing campaigns that would never be seen when they could partake in the finest spa appointments, pedicures and espresso enemas? Why scrutinise the same unchanging financials when they could slacken their ties and smoke cigars that have been dipped in angel dust? Why analyse the business's competitors when they could be dining at exclusive underground restaurants that serve pan-fried foie gras and endangered animals? And why worry about the business's health when they should be prioritising their own, each treating themselves to their very own slave child whose organs they could harvest when the richness of living had finally caught up to them and effectively live forever like parasites off the lowly workers who manufactured the business's products.

When he got home that night, Buster's missus asked again what his business actually did. But for his life, he couldn't remember.

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