How to Consider New Ideas

A long, long time ago I worked at a juice bar in the lobby of a health club. Our most popular item was Snickers, but that’s not my point.

One of the salesmen was a guy who was not a good-looking man. His girlfriend was a model, in that she was paying for a service that provided modeling classes and would act as your “agent” if you paid them a fee, which is not how agents work.

Anyway, her modeling coach/agent convinced this poor dumpy salesman that he could be a male model too. The first thing they did, after cashing his check, was put him on a strict diet. Because I worked at a juice bar, he believed I had some nutritional expertise, which I emphatically did not. He kept at it and would constantly come up to the juice bar to ask me how many calories were in various things he wanted to eat. First it was just stuff at the juice bar, then it was things he wanted to buy elsewhere. Finally, one day, he called me from home to ask me how many calories there were in a teaspoon of mustard.

I told him that this was madness. That he was starving himself for no good reason, and that some day he was going to pass out while he was at work or possibly even while he was driving his car, and that if he was lucky he would wake up in the hospital with an IV of glucose solution stuck in his arm, and then he would call me to ask me how many calories there are in glucose solution.

He laughed and told me I was right, and he would stop. Calling me, that is. He didn’t stop the modeling classes with the pre-paid agent. He just gave up on coming to me for help, which I took as a victory.

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