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Publication Date 1-28-10
I'd be willing to quit work if someone would pay me $45 million. Did you hear about that? NBC fired Conan O'Brien and gave him a $45 million severance package. How do you get one of those? I know guys whose severance package was half a Twinkie. This is, once again, evidence that I have no idea how the world works. There was a further report that Conan had negotiated a payment of $30 million to his staff. I read that and thought, “Wow, that must be like a million bucks each.” Not even close. Conan had 200 people on his staff. Two hundred? The show consists of a guy sitting at his desk, talking to whoever comes and sits next to him. I figured he had a sidekick, the folks in the band, plus a guy to take tickets and hold up the applause sign. I guess I should have known it took more people than that – someone to run the cameras, someone to show the dancing squirrels to their dressing room. I suppose it all adds up, but still, 200? We put on a two hour pageant for our town's 125 th birthday party; about six people planned it and we all had regular jobs, too. We would have had to count everyone involved in the pageant and the front four rows of the audience to get to 200. Now, I have nothing against Conan O'Brien. He's a funny guy, seems like a decent human being and if he can get a large corporation to pay him $45 million to not work for seven months, along with a 150 grand each for his 200 closest friends, more power to him. I just want to know, where's mine? The official reason NBC gave for pushing him out was that there weren't enough people watching him. So what? Do you have any idea how many people don't read what I write? Millions. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm willing to bet that there are billions of people worldwide who've never heard of me. If the people I work for would be willing to drop a few million on me, I'd be perfectly happy to leave those billions of folks undisturbed. Even though my ratings are way worse than Conan's, I wouldn't need $45 million to go away, and since my entire staff is just my wife (for a couple of hours a week when she sorts my prose into something resembling proper grammar), I don't think she'd be very expensive to buy off either. I did some research. The median household income in the United States is $50,233.00. I could make about 2% in a savings account right now, so after taxes I'd just need about $2.5 million in my savings account to maintain me in a manner to which half the people in America would like to become accustomed. That's not much money, folks. Talk amongst yourselves, take up a collection, do whatever needs to be done, but as soon as $2.5 million, after taxes, shows up in my savings account, you'll never hear from me again. It might be worth it. Copyright 2010 Brent Olson Brent Olson |
