Damage Control: How to Tiptoe Away from the Smoking Wreckage of Your Latest Screw-Up With a Minimum of Harm to Your Reputation - Hardcover
Inhaltsangabe
A straight-shooting, hilarious and off-beat guide from the author of the Globe's most highly trafficked column in the Life section. This is Ann Landers with tattoos, beer shooters, and just a bit of swearing.
David Eddie is so infamous for sticking his foot in his mouth that he's dubbed himself "Faux Pas-Varotti". Every social outing seems to result in some form of mortification for all concerned. Having screwed up countless times and come through it all with dignity intact, a loving family, a lovely wife, and an excellent career, he's the perfect guy to give advice on learning from, and making the best of, a seemingly devastating screw-up. Building on his enormously popular advice column in the Globe and Mail's Life section, Eddie provides simple rules for recovery, applicable to your latest office gaffe or party blunder. Reading Damage Control is like meeting a good, old friend for a drink when you have a problem — a friend you sought out because in all likelihood he has screwed up worse than you and has a great story about it, and because he'll give you honest feedback and practical suggestions. And because he makes you laugh harder than anyone else you know.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
David Eddie has written two previous books: Chump Change, a novel, and Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at- Home Dad. He co-authors with Pat Lynch the advice column, also called Damage Control, in the Globe and Mail's Life Section.
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INTRODUCTION
ORIGINS, AND A FEW GENERAL PRINCIPLES, OF DAMAGE CONTROL
“People don’t seem to understand it’s a damn war out there.” – Jimmy Connors
“All warfare is based on deception.” – Sun Tzu
THE DRIPPING FACE OF DOOM
Okay, so you screwed up.
Again. You’re as surprised as anyone. You can’t believe what a mutt, what a mook, what a plum duff you are.
“Oh, my God,” you might find yourself thinking. “I’m a freak! A fool! I’m screwed!”
You may begin to hyperventilate, to start to schvitz from fear, your hyperactive hypothalamus douching your entire bodybag in a fine, sour-scented mist of flop-sweats.
Your heart might start fibrillating wildly, like a broken metronome.
To try to keep cool, you may go into the washroom to splash some cold water on your frazzled face. But when you look up from the basin at the mug in the mirror, it’s not your face you see.
It’s . . . the Dripping Face of Doom!
But take it easy. Relax, son. Sister, ease your foot off the panic pedal.
Team Damage Control, aka the cavalry, is here.
And we think we can help you. We’re going to talk you through this, show you how to shake it off, and come out stronger, faster, smarter, and swinging harder than ever.
Take a deep breath. Inhale and exhale. Where’s that famous smile?
There it is! Why, look at you: you’re beautiful!
You may lose the odd battle here and there. But we want to show you how to win the war. We’re going to absorb the details of your latest debacle, then talk you through the aftermath and beyond; show you how you can come out of a variety of fiascos smiling and snapping your fingers and humming a little tune and smelling – well, if not like a rose, then at least not like someone who was making a shit-shake and forgot to put the top on the blender.
The sun will shine again, sunshine.
Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to work out for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.
But before we go any further, we realize you may have a couple of questions.
Like, first: who are these guys, Pat Lynch and David Eddie?
And second: who do they think they are, calling themselves “the cavalry” and talking trash like “We’re here, we think we can help you” and la la la and promising – what? To turn back time and undo our mistakes?
But no: we never said undo.
In fact, that is Damage Control Rule No. 1: You can’t undo. There is no undoing. Trying to undo could be your undoing.
As Omar Khayyam (Persian poet, ad 1048–1122) put it: “The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Or, to put it another way – and this is in fact one of Damage Control’s corporate mottos, which we sometimes shout out on the dance floor at company parties:
“What’s done is done and can’t be undone/The bell that’s rung, it can’t be un-rung/The sands of time, they can’t un-run/You did the deed, now it’s gotta be spun!”
Then we all blow our little whistles and wave our glowsticks in the air.
Or, perhaps, to put it in even simpler, almost cowpoketype language (and if it helps, you may imagine us removing our ten-gallon hats, scratching our sweaty melons, squinting across a dusty prairie-patch, and spitting a brown stream of tobacco-laced saliva into a nearby spittoon as we say): “Son, you doggone gone and done what you doggone gone and done. And sister: ain’t nothin’ under the blazing sun gonna change that. The $64,000,000* question is: what’re yew gonna do now?”
(* All figures adjusted for inflation. Also, Damage Control International was recently the beneficiary of a targeted governmental bailout, so we’ve got quite a bit of cheddar to throw around.)
And that’s where – con permiso, certamente: gracias! – Pat and I and the rest of the Damage Control team come in: on the what-you-should-do-now part.
But what we should probably do now, and without further ado, is introduce ourselves.
I, David Eddie, am CEO (Chief Error-rectification Ombudsperson), and Pat Lynch is COE (Chief Operating Editor), of Damage Control International, a vast, intercontinental aggregation of ameliorization artisans, smooth-over specialists, and turnaround technicians headquartered in a fortified underground bunker located somewhere deep in the Ozark Mountains.
Travelling by company helicopter (black, with Damage Control’s logo tastefully emblazoned in gold letters on the door), and landing on a secret helipad, I, David Eddie, divide my time between the bunker and my fabulous mansion in downtown Toronto, where I am most likely to be found either (1) in conversational intercourse and spiritual communion with my wife, Pam; (2) tousling the hair of, or playing catch, or Frisbee, with, one of my three male offspring, saying stuff like “Attaboy!” or “Nice throw, kiddo!” or “You’re really improving!”; (3) engaged in the neverending, disgusting, Sisyphean task of walking my dog, Murphy, around and around the park across the street; watching him squat, knees trembling, a faraway look on his shaggy mug; then picking up his stinking, still-steaming “offerings” with a plastic bag from my pocket. . . .
And, sometimes, all of the above, all in the same afternoon.
Pat, meanwhile, is still single, still “out there,” which, if memory serves, means saying “Dude!” a lot while “highfiving” his “bros”; drinking shots of Jägermeister in loud, crowded, crepuscular bars; grabbing some “dinner” on the fly by sticking a quarter* in a peanut-dispensing machine at the pool hall and twirling the knobs; holding up lighters at concerts;† jumping off the speakers and onto the heads of the terrified-looking crowd;** all the while keeping an eye peeled for the twitching, elusive miniskirt of Ms. Right as it disappears around the corner of the various lofts, watering holes, and brunch spots of the city. . . .
And, sometimes, all of the above, all in a single evening.
Lynch and I have been working together for some time now, just a couple of cogs in the advice-dispensing machine known as Damage Control.
(* I may be dating myself here. It’s probably more than a quarter, at this point.
† Oh, wait, I read somewhere recently they don’t do that any more: it’s illegal because it’s a fire hazard – so they hold up their cellphones now, which is so sick and wrong, for so many reasons, I don’t even want to talk about it.
** Well, they always looked terrified when I did it in my long-ago twenties: of course, it could be because I’m 6-foot-5 and weigh 240 pounds.)
As The Dogfather™ aka “Dapper” Derek Finkle mentioned in his excellent Preface (thanks, Dog!), we honed our chops and made our bones cranking out advice for the late, lamented men’s magazine Toro, which, unfortunately, floated belly-up to the top of the tank after four years (it was an intelligent men’s...
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Damage Control: How to Tiptoe Away from the Smoking Wreckage of your Latest Screw-Up with a Minimum of Harm to Your Reputation
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Hardcover. Zustand: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Artikel-Nr. G077103041XI3N10
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