It was a grim New Year's Eve in the offices of Phutatorius & Co., as word got round quickly that I had fired my longtime food taster earlier in the afternoon. Even now the coffee room and cubicles are bustling with rumors that I canned Malachi because of his reluctance to work the holiday, or that the firing was about downsizing, part of some grand layoff scheme to send a leaner, meaner operation into the New Year. The truth is that these stressful times drove a wedge between Malachi and me, and we just could not go on this way.
But before I get into those gory details, I would like to say that I owe Malachi Redmond my life, several times over. Malachi joined my security staff in December 1985. For eighteen years he put himself on the line tasting my food — every meal, every snack, every new tube of toothpaste. I cannot count the number of times Malachi took a hit for me — I can say that he took in enough trace amounts of poison to warrant four liver transplants. He may not have the most sensitive tongue in the business, but he never turned away a plate untested, even when Le Cirque's pastry chef wrote DIE PHUTATORIUS DIE on my soufflé in strawberry sauce.
Our mutually rewarding relationship took a turn for the worse with this latest Orange Alert: last week the government forwarded intelligence to us suggesting that Islamic fundamentalist terror groups might target Internet personalities for assassination. The forwarded "chatter" had Malachi — God bless him! — overly concerned. His usual practice was simply to spot-check my food intake: take one bite of steak, one spooled fork of pasta, one green bean.
But now that we have credible threats, he said,
that's not good enough. What's to stop them from poisoning just one of the French fries, croutons, or broccoli florets on your plate? He demanded that I submit every self-contained food unit to him for pre-tasting until Homeland Security scaled the threat level back to yellow. Before I knew it he was in the cupboards, sampling each of the stacked Pringles, taking rabbit bites out of every Frosted Mini-Wheat in the box.
Malachi's obsessive micro-level food testing made the holidays very difficult for me. I was left with three alternatives: (1) adopt a strict quasi-liquid diet of chicken broth, creamed corn, and puddings; (2) fire Malachi; or (3) sit and wait through an excruciating process by which an increasingly paranoid employee painstakingly disentangled and tried every strand of fettucini in my mother's alfredo dinner before passing off the plate to me. I know he was proceeding on the best of intentions, but as our Great and Wise Government Officials so often tell us from their underground bunkers,
You have to live your life. It was clear that the pressure was getting to Malachi, and he had to go. I have awarded his long term of service with a $50,000 contract buyout and six-week Club Med vacation package. Here's hoping he comes back to town refreshed and ready to make a new start.
