Yesterday while waiting on hold for a customer service rep to take my call I heard the following message: "All of our operators are currently busy at this time due to heavier than normal call volume. If you would like to leave your phone number and have a customer service representative call you back, press four now. Otherwise, stay on the line. There are currently 451 callers in the cue."
That is not verbatim, but it's the gist of it. 451 callers ahead of me. Holy Baloney!
You may ask yourself, why oh why would anyone make a pit stop in such a tiny little hamlet such as Carnarvon, Iowa? Well, the answer is fairly simple: Hunger.
Hunger is a helluva motivator - if I get hungry enough I'll stop at the first place I see that serves food and is open, and the Trailside Roadhouse in Carnarvon, Iowa meet both criteria.
Carnarvon is small - as in, there are probably fewer than forty structures in the town, and I'm including grain silos and storage sheds in that count.
The road I was driving, Iowa highway 175, runs from the Nebraska border to an intersection with US 63 just south of Hudson, Iowa, which is a little more than 220 miles. However, it's only a two lane blacktop the entire way and passes through a lot of very small towns (the largest of these small towns is Onawa, with a pop. of less than 3,000), so pretty much anywhere I stopped was going to be small (pop. wise).
Carnarvon had a few interesting sights, such as what looked to be a classic car graveyard across the street from the Trailside Roadhouse. The township is also along one of Iowa's designated bike paths and according to the two women who were working at the roadhouse, quite a few bike riders stop in for a bite as they make their way around Iowa via bicycle.
The roadhouse did serve up an excellent burger and fries, which refueled me as needed. I got back on the road within thirty minutes and continued my journey to Farnhamville.
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When he wasn't speaking in cliches he was speaking in movie quotes, and God love him, it did make for entertaining business meetings.
Primarily because of the unintentional amusement that the cliches and movies quotes provided the staff that were required to attend the meetings he scheduled at least three times every week.
It was Ruby Thayer who came up with the idea for the cliche/movie quote Bingo Cards. She created 50 completely different Bingo cards over a rainy weekend last July, and handed them out to a few select, sworn-to-secrecy individuals.
The cards had 25 squares just like standard, ordinary Bingo cards, but instead of numbers in the squares that were arranged in horizontal rows under the letters B,I,N,G,O, the squares were filled with movie quotes and cliches. If Mr. Greenberg quipped "You're going to need a bigger boat" to emphasize a need for more of an item, or stated "low hanging fruit" in reference to an easy sale, and those were on your card, you marked them with an X.
After the meeting the participants gathered in one of the breakroom's and checked cards for any Bingo's. Any card that had a verified Bingo was awarded a prize from Granderson's supply closet, usually extra pens for a single Bingo, but a blackout Bingo could earn one a new PC.
An unintended consequence of the surreptitious game was that it caused the participants to pay extremely focused attention to Mr Greenberg as he made his presentations, which had given him the false impression that what he was presenting was not only interesting and of use, but was invaluable.
Which encouraged him to add a few extra meetings every other week or two.
Needless to mention, productivity in the office fell off a little...which led to even more meetings. It was a vicious loop.
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