'Best before...'

Wives tend to be extra sensitive about germs and bacteria and any unseen microorganisms that can hurt their family members. If a perfectly good T-bone steak gets a little paint on it, or a handful of mashed potatoes drops onto a gravel driveway, they quickly scoop them up and throw them into the trash. Men are much more resilient. If food is relatively chewable and more or less in the same range of color it started out in, they'll eat it. And they'll eat it quickly, before their wives confiscate it. Many wives are food police. Many husbands are repeat offenders. And the biggest law that separates the two sides is the "Best Before" date. How many tons of perfectly good food have been thrown out by a food cop just because it reached an arbitrary date, stuck on there by some marketing genius who realizes that once it expires, you'll need to buy more. Whenever you see a man in the middle of the night, sitting alone in a chair with the fridge door open eating everything in sight, you know that tomorrow is "Best Before" day.

Delegating decisions

Many people have difficulty making decisions. They find they have too many choices in life and aren't able to compare one to the other, because they can't foresee all of the outcomes at once, or they're deathly afraid of making a mistake, or even worse, they don't even care enough to think about the decision. Well, what you need to do is to force other people to make the decision for you. The simplest way to do that is by making outrageous demands. There is no quicker way to find out how much a person, or a company, cares for you than to ask them to do things they don't want to do. If you have a $50,000-a-year job and another company is trying to lure you away from it, tell them you want $300,000 a year plus a $100,000 signing bonus. It may seem a little over the top, but at this point in your career you have nothing to lose. Those kinds of demands send a message to the new company that you have a lot of confidence and feel you are worth a lot of money. They don't need to know the truth -- the truth that every company you've ever worked for thought a lot more of you at hiring time than they did once you started working there. You have to take advantage of that. You're like the bride at a Baptist wedding -- you hold all the cards. If the new company says "no," you're no worse off than you were. If the new company says "yes," you're in great shape. And most importantly, the decision was made for you. Give it a try. If it works well for you, who knows, maybe you could become a professional athlete.

Midlife temptations

As we go through puberty and reach adulthood, we are faced with many temptations. But when we hit midlife, they change. Here are a few temptations that are particularly intoxicating to the middle-aged man:

• Sofas;
• Slippers;
• Dogs or people who don't speak;
• Escalators;
• Medicine cabinets;
• Nothing to do.

Setting the bar

Children have been rebelling against their parents since the beginning of time. In order to establish their own identity in the family, they feel they have to indulge in behaviors and attitudes that are not enjoyed by their parents. So if you have teen-agers that you care about, I recommend that you have your entire back tattooed, get some jewelry riveted to your face, wear your pants around the knees and never use a sentence that doesn't feature the f-word. Sure it may upset the other executives who work at your office, but you'll be forcing your kids to choose normalcy as their declaration of independence.

Quote of the day

"If it weren't for stress, I'd have no energy at all." -- Red Green