Safeco Sale

I promised that I’d pass along the crazy speech from our behated (I just coined that term, it's the opposite of beloved and I demand royalties when it is used) CEO when the sale to Liberty Mutual was announced. I’ve been waiting for them to post the audio or a transcript of the speech like they claimed they were going to, but I think they must have reconsidered after hearing what she actually had to say. I wanted the actual transcript because it was way more bizarre than I can actually retell. Not only that, but I fear that without a transcript, it is going to come across as embellishment. Anyway, here we go.

To the best of my recollection, this is how the story went: she received an email from a friend of hers who is an Orthodox Jew, and he washes dead bodies for a living. His job is to clean the bodies and prepare them for burial in accordance with the Orthodox guidelines. And these guidelines forbid defiling you body in any way, whether that be tattoos, piercings, or other scarification. Well, this guy decided it would be funny if he got a tattoo. Because it is his job to prepare the corpses, he thought it would be a great practical joke so that whoever is washing his body after his death would discover the tattoo and be shocked.

This is when Paula began to get choked up and said that even though she is not courageous enough to get a tattoo herself, she will always have Safeco tattooed on her heart. That even though she has only been with Safeco for 2 years, the company is so important to her that she will always have it tattooed on her heart.

Well, this is the short version of the story. She actually elaborated enough that the whole thing dragged on for at least 5 minutes. And as I was in a conference room listening in on a conference call with 12 other people, the confused looks and gestures in that conference room continued to grow as the story progressed. I believe there were a few comments like,”what is she talking about” and I personally asked at one point, “is this story going somewhere?”

Of course there was a great deal of conjecture afterward as to the meaning of the story. Did Safeco represent the corpse? Now that she had successfully killed the company, she had defiled it with a tattoo before it was to be prepared for burial? Or, like her friend, was this her practical joke on the way out?

The point of the story was never quite determined. I assume she had one when she started talking but it somehow got lost along the way. The point I got out of the story, however is that I need to find another job.