Who's Watching The Store?

Once there was a little boy who had a Meyer lemon tree in his back yard. Every fall the lemons would rain down and pile up on the grass, and since the little boy was kind of lazy

(he was really, really lazy)

he would usually step over them as he played and let other people eventually pick them up, like his mother or his neighbors, to make lemon bars or other delicious lemony things. One hot day he discovered that if he asked her nicely, his mother would make him lemonade from these fancy lemons, and this lemonade was so tasty that soon his friends began to flock to the house for it. So the little boy asked his father for a lemonade stand, and because his father was handy, he made the boy a sturdy wooden booth that had a counter and space for a sign at the top. The father wheeled the booth to the corner (because this was a time when a ten-year old boy could safely sell lemonade on the corner) and gave him coins to make change, and the little boy's mother began to pick lemons on the double.

After one week the lemonade stand became the talk of the neighborhood. Housewives (because they had those back then, real ones!) admired the unusual sweetness of the lemonade and construction workers began to make it a regular lunchtime stop, praising the little boy for his industriousness. "I pick them all myself," the boy would say. "It's a lot of work, picking all of these lemons, but it's worth it because the lemonade is so good and everyone is so happy." At the end of the day, the little boy would trot home, pockets jingling, to find baskets of mama's freshly-picked lemons waiting for him.

Soon the little boy became bored with tending his booth all day. (He had become a lemonade entrepreneur quite by accident.) So he asked his friend to sit at the lemonade stand while he went off to play baseball in the empty corner lot, promising to give the friend a whole dollar at the end of the day. The friend, wanting to be a part of the boy's glamourous enterprise, agreed, and sat down in the hot sun. This arrangement continued for several weeks, with the friend happily pocketing a dollar at the end of each day and the little boy making quite a good deal more while he was, in effect, off playing ball and having a good old time.

And then one day the lemonade wasn't very good. No one was really sure what the problem was, but suddenly the lemonade stand had fewer customers and by the end of the week, there were hardly any people buying lemonade at all. The boy began to complain each day about having to give his friend a dollar for tending the stand, even though the boy's friend was a very hard worker. Indeed, the friend was a very good person all around. He always kept the lemonade fresh, was polite to customers and never took more than a few sips for himself in the course of a day. And the little boy (who remember, was lazy from the beginning) liked having his friend tend the stand while he was off playing. He just wanted to keep a good thing going.

And so the little boy began to blame his friend. "It's your fault we're not selling any lemonade," he'd say. "Work harder. Make bigger and better signs. Get out there and sell yourself," he'd admonish, as he trotted off with his mitt to play ball.

Now do you see where I am going with this?

(The little boy grows up and somehow finds himself in charge of an advertising agency. But he still hasn't learned how to take responsibility for anything, really. He hires a friend to run things for him and goes off to play baseball, or the grown-up version of it, while the friend holding the bag gets ulcers and high blood pressure and has to deal with the crybaby prima donna Creative Director. Some things never change.)