The Best Response

At the end of Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman, there is a Book Club section that invites readers to come up with the best responses to some embarrassing, illegal, or career-ending crises. So here are my best responses.

The best response to being caught shoplifting

"No, I did not pay for these and I don't plan to. I suppose that makes me a bad person in this modern society that everyone lives in, but I disagree. I mean take a look around, we're living in a completely mediated world that is entirely removed from any type of natural process. Coupled with this fake world is the pressure to buy stuff. Copious amounts of stuff, most of which we don't need. Like what I stole. I mean think about what makes someone successful; it's all material possessions. A house, money, a BMW, sharp suits, watches, jewelry, hard-wood floors, brass cufflinks, 3D HDTVs the size of a wall, ivory elephant tusks, Brinks Home Security, private security, six airbags, first-class tickets, Apple devices, filet mignon, Criterion collection DVDs, and you know stuff like that. It's all bullshit. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of living in this kind of world with these values. So yeah, I took it. But I did it as a form of nonviolent protest against a world that is actively trying to oppress me and I don't think, you know, you should report this."

The best response to forgetting your best friend's birthday

"First off, I understand if you're upset. I'm your best friend; I know you. And it was a pretty crappy thing to do, to forget your day of birth. But I think we have a great opportunity. We have the opportunity to take this unpleasant moment and turn it into a moment of growth. A moment of growth for our relationship. You know, you tie a rope around a tree and, you know, it becomes a part of the tree, er...Okay, I'm not sure if that really applies to this but I think that analogy kind of works. Anyway, listen, you can get mad that I forgot or we can both concede to being human and grow. I think that would be the best thing in the world for both of us right now."

The best response to hidden video footage featuring employees of an independent franchise of your restaurant chain spitting and defiling food for customers. 

"It's appalling. It's a shame. I mean, honestly, this is a perfect example of just one of the pitfalls of capitalism. It's in a kind of a roundabout way but this is what happens when we just try to make as much money as possible. I mean, it's their store, for all intents and purposes, not ours. But because our name's on the front and on the menus, we now have to defend an entire corporation because some knuckleheads want to spit in people's food for kicks. Although, I can't complain because if these kinds of things didn't happen, we wouldn't need a PR department and I'd be out of a job. But again, it's just capitalism gone wrong. Since they are their own enterprise that uses our products and signage, we have to clean up the messes. But we can't monitor them, so we just have to hope that they care as much as we do about the service, the product, and the customers. And by "we" I mean corporate."