Reading The Industrial Cues

Life's a stage and each must play his part. I stand in the wings until it's my moment to shine, then I step forth, utter my profundities, and wait for my curtain call. I have big thoughts about my prowess at knowing my cues and reading them.

In the theater, of course your cues are all set. You're spitting out someone else's lines; you may as well be a robot. But in real life, it's a matter of doing it yourself, reading the cues, those moments as they come. My biggest concern personally has to do with industry, how to run factories, manufacture things, and keep it all profitable. But I'm also concerned with the other opportunities of my life.

If you think about it, just about everything we do is a matter of reading the cues, verbal, auditory, sensual, etc. You're sniffing the air like a camel, sniffing for musk, pheromones. You see dogs sniffing each other, checking the cues. You're looking for a barely perceptible nod of ascent from a pawnbroker. Is he going up or down? It's all important. If you're late to the show, you may as well go home. And if you're early, the set-up isn't good and you look like an idiot.

When I was reading the cues -- or the signs of the time -- in the early days, leading up to the establishment of the Residential Industrial Movement (RIM), I confess I wasn't reading them with any thoroughness. Actually, I was just trying to get by, to elude the major industrialists, and it was more or less an unconscious inspiration, my earliest question: If they can have a factory, why can't every man? But the time happened to be right, the moment propitious for that cue, and as it turned out, I read it in a thrilling way. Judge it by the outcome!

There are certain cues I haven't read in their time. Such as the cues that would've led to romance. That's been my biggest disappointment in my life. Love, marriage, baby carriage. To see some woman decked out in velvet, laying across the divan, let's say, maybe throw in a leopardskin patterned negligee, very sexy, a skimpy bra barely concealing her impressive cleavage, eating a popsicle ... that's a great fantasy. It seems like the days for that are passed, since most of the women my age now are grandmothers with living wills, but who knows, I might find someone in the RIM who makes cheap divans and just the right girl.

I comfort myself knowing I'm still a very successful guy. I have my own tire plant. I generate my own electricity. I've got my own runoff ditch next to the road. And my success is indeed a matter of reading the cues, knowing the upticks of demand and the downticks of supply. I'm the guy who likes to overwhelm demand with a massive supply, keeping our warehouses full at all times.

I hope everyone in the RIM will always be working on his ability to read the industrial cues. These are things to keep track of, all the interpersonal stuff as well as the opportunities for success that residential industrialism provide. If we're watching and waiting, listening for our cues, it'll always be our moment to shine!