When I worked in western Wisconsin, I was a member of the Management Club, a rag-tag group of foremen and supervisors. They let me join the club because I was a salaried employee who supervised the maintenance employees once or twice a year when the maintenance foreman went on vacation. I really shouldn’t have been a member of the club because I wasn’t a day-to-day manager. But they let me join anyhow.
A co-worker named Mikkelson tried to sign me up for the club. I wasn’t attracted to a club like that because it seemed to offer nothing that interested me. I mean, think about it: you have to work with those guys every day. Why would you go out and socialize with them at night after you’ve been fighting with them all day long? But Mikkelson said you got your $10 annual dues back two or three times in benefits.
The club had four “outings” each year. There was something called a “Couples Steak-Fry,” where, as Mikkelson explained, “You could bring your old lady and get a steak dinner for $5.00. Not a bad deal, right? You’d get your dues money back right there with that one event.” Then there was “The Golf Outing,” where everybody pretended to golf while attempting to drain the quarter-barrel of beer they were hauling around on their golf carts. Things could get kind of ugly with the deadly combination of Budweiser and Nine-Irons. Then there was the “Christmas Party,” where, Mikkelson explained again, “You could bring your old lady and your kids.” He didn’t seem at all attracted to the Christmas Party himself because “They ain’t got no beer at that affair. Just Santa Claus and shit.” But the outing you really wanted to attend, he said, was the Smelt Fry. Yessir!
The Smelt Fry was your basic guy-affair: deep-fried smelts, french fries, beer (lots of beer) and euchre card games. Mikkelson said that after everybody ate and started drinking that “they would be flopping around like fish on land.” And he wasn’t lying about that one bit. I had a plate of smelts and some fries, drank a beer or two, and then I went home. I was the sensible one. I could see all that spilled beer on the floor and a general rowdiness beginning to settle in among the men. So I left. Most of the other men, however, stayed at the clubhouse and drank until they ran out of beer at about 11:00 pm. Then they went bar-hopping. When the final count was tallied, the club lost three members who were fired from their jobs because they were in jail and couldn’t report for work. One man was up on a felony count: something about discussing the issues of the day with a police officer while waving a pistol in his face. Three or four were out on bail, awaiting trial, for public drunkenness and property damage. They had remodeled buildings with their automobiles, you see. We had half a dozen DUIs (Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol) and multiple cases of beer-induced adultery that led to divorces later on. All in all, a pretty productive night. And they managed to do all that with only 125 members. Just think what that Management Club could do with 32,000 members: why, the USA prison population would double.
We moved to Appalachia shortly after the Smelt Fry. So I never got to see the antics at the Golf Outing. But I would guess that giving every golf cart its own personal quarter-barrel of beer was a recipe for membership reduction of a rather large magnitude. As a comedian said, when commenting about how fast you could make mistakes with a computer, “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.” I would add the Management Club outings to that list, too.
A co-worker named Mikkelson tried to sign me up for the club. I wasn’t attracted to a club like that because it seemed to offer nothing that interested me. I mean, think about it: you have to work with those guys every day. Why would you go out and socialize with them at night after you’ve been fighting with them all day long? But Mikkelson said you got your $10 annual dues back two or three times in benefits.
The club had four “outings” each year. There was something called a “Couples Steak-Fry,” where, as Mikkelson explained, “You could bring your old lady and get a steak dinner for $5.00. Not a bad deal, right? You’d get your dues money back right there with that one event.” Then there was “The Golf Outing,” where everybody pretended to golf while attempting to drain the quarter-barrel of beer they were hauling around on their golf carts. Things could get kind of ugly with the deadly combination of Budweiser and Nine-Irons. Then there was the “Christmas Party,” where, Mikkelson explained again, “You could bring your old lady and your kids.” He didn’t seem at all attracted to the Christmas Party himself because “They ain’t got no beer at that affair. Just Santa Claus and shit.” But the outing you really wanted to attend, he said, was the Smelt Fry. Yessir!
The Smelt Fry was your basic guy-affair: deep-fried smelts, french fries, beer (lots of beer) and euchre card games. Mikkelson said that after everybody ate and started drinking that “they would be flopping around like fish on land.” And he wasn’t lying about that one bit. I had a plate of smelts and some fries, drank a beer or two, and then I went home. I was the sensible one. I could see all that spilled beer on the floor and a general rowdiness beginning to settle in among the men. So I left. Most of the other men, however, stayed at the clubhouse and drank until they ran out of beer at about 11:00 pm. Then they went bar-hopping. When the final count was tallied, the club lost three members who were fired from their jobs because they were in jail and couldn’t report for work. One man was up on a felony count: something about discussing the issues of the day with a police officer while waving a pistol in his face. Three or four were out on bail, awaiting trial, for public drunkenness and property damage. They had remodeled buildings with their automobiles, you see. We had half a dozen DUIs (Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol) and multiple cases of beer-induced adultery that led to divorces later on. All in all, a pretty productive night. And they managed to do all that with only 125 members. Just think what that Management Club could do with 32,000 members: why, the USA prison population would double.
We moved to Appalachia shortly after the Smelt Fry. So I never got to see the antics at the Golf Outing. But I would guess that giving every golf cart its own personal quarter-barrel of beer was a recipe for membership reduction of a rather large magnitude. As a comedian said, when commenting about how fast you could make mistakes with a computer, “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.” I would add the Management Club outings to that list, too.
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