I hadn't seen my cousin Corbett in months, so when he dropped by one afternoon last October, I wondered what he had been up to.
"You are looking," he told me as he poured himself a glass of lemonade, "at the president and chief executive officer of Yellow Dog Enterprises."
I tried to be polite. "Well, the 'Enterprises' part sounds impressive."
"It's accurate, too," he said. He'd managed to find the cornbread I'd hidden when I saw him drive up, and was pouring honey on a large slab of it. "Yellow Dog Enterprises is a conglomerate of a growing number of companies. I'm the president of each one of them."
"Yellow dog, yellow dog. Doesn't that have something to do with labor unions?"
"Got any cheese? Oh, here it is, behind the spice rack. Yeah, yellow-dog contracts were employment contracts in which the prospective employee agreed not to join a union. They're illegal now."
As we walked out onto the deck I asked him why on earth he'd chosen that name. He sat down next to the grinning butternut squash I'd carved into a jack-o'-lantern and gave me a toothy grin. "In a one-person shop," he said, "you can work your employees till they drop, pay them peanuts, and give them zero benefits, since they are all actually you. You can, in effect, enforce a yellow-dog contract on your work force. Do you see what an enormous advantage this gives the one-person shop? It's golden. And Yellow Dog Enterprises is a one-person shop. I'm it."
A passing breeze shook an ecru flurry of leaves down on us and reminded me how I'd tried to get Corbett to help me rake leaves last fall. "But Corbett," I said, perhaps somewhat tactlessly, "you hate to work. How can you possibly be the entire work force for several companies?"
He dodged. "Oh, I've got a trick or two." He was willing, though, to talk about the enterprises that made up Yellow Dog.
"My company Stochastic Astrologer runs a web site that generates random horoscopes--a cross between astrology and the I Ching. The word 'stochastic' is hot right now. And PAMCO produces PAM, a personal-activity manager. It's designed to organize the most common daily activities, based on my research on what people really do during the course of a week. You'd be surprised."
"So, surprise me."
"Better yet, why don't you write down your activities for a week and we'll check how well PAM matches them. Oh, then there's the Yellow Dog Pages web site. It's a bunch of e-mail addresses I lifted from discussion groups. The 'dog' part is so we don't get in trouble about Yellow Pages, but you can also "dog-ear" any page you want to come back to. Cute, huh?"
"You're going to get into a heap of trouble posting people's e-mail addresses. Anything else?"
"Just the Yellow Dog Holding Company."
"Let me guess: a kennel?"
"No, it's a dog-walking service. I've found it an excellent business strategy to offer superfluous services that people could obviously provide for themselves. That way you know that your customers are all people with way too much disposable income."
"I suppose so, but how much of it are they going to spend on dog walking, Corbett?"
"No, no. You don't get it. The dog-walking service is just to flush the pigeons. Once I've walked their Weimaraners, I start pitching my PAM. If these poor Yups and Dinks don't even have the time to walk their own dogs, their ears are bound to perk up when I tell them about my magic program to organize their lives."
I flicked a banana slug off the deck railing and mused.
I didn't muse enough, though, because it didn't cross my mind until later that his PAM program wasn't going to have any list of daily activities until I finished my list. He had bamboozled me into doing his research for him. I was beginning to see how you could run a company with no paid staff.
You can usually find Mike hiding from Corbett at Stately Swaine Manor (mswaine@cruzio.com) or at his home page, Swaine's World, at http://www2.cruzio.com/personal/mswaine.html.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large