“The Snood Proposition” by Sergey Bolmat

Privileged and confidential. 

Mark, we discussed this thing with our legal department and this is what we think. This squalid piece of human waste does have a case and this case is fairly strong. 

We all certainly know and agree that our product has absolutely been the best and most successful on the market for generations and, according to any data available, always by considerable margin but who could have ever imagined anyone eating it — and nothing else at all whatsoever — for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any other meal for five years every day? And not only has this stupid sod been doing that, he also has his every meal documented on video as part of our promotional campaign, The Healthy Challenge, which he had unsuccessfully tried to enter for five years as an official representative of our brand! Turns out, we have literally thousands of applications from this over-inflated little egomaniac turd unearthed in the darkest customer input recess of our marketing department, the most unwelcoming place manned entirely by unpaid interns on a three-months-rotation basis. It looks like this gasbag has been doing nothing else for the past five years but sending those applications to us in the hope of becoming our brand ambassador. Every single one of those applications was, of course, turned down because, as you may well know, our “outside participants” were and are all industry insiders and professional thespians but now this pitiful knob has outstanding evidence of his continuous consumption of our product for all these years! Also, as we encouraged everyone to demonstrate “family values” in any material we asked people to provide, he has many witnesses too — his endless bloody family members, uncles, grannies, parents, siblings, all unspeakably gross — in every single frame of those dreadful videos. I saw some of them. They are utterly nauseous, to say the least, but they all look like indisputably strong backup in support of his case. Everyone agreed on that. 

John suggested that we could categorize this unhealthy devotion to our brand as an undue misuse of our product but we hardly could pursue this avenue, could we? We produce food, kind of, and the use for food is eating it, full stop. No matter how much you eat it, or how often, if you eat the food we produce we can hardly claim that you misuse it, can we? Or can we? 

For the time being, we all came to the conclusion that we must concentrate on the main problem, which is the snood. Michael argued that we must shift the focus to the health problems of that little degenerate. He does seem to have several allergies; one of them — to the festering honeysuckle pollen — could be of particular relevance to us. He is also known to have some other health issues like angst, dry skin, and myopia but I don’t think it would be productive to press on with these matters. The man lived twenty years without any snood and certainly without any wattles. There are plenty of pictures of this moron without them. The evidence is overwhelming. Then he ate our product for five years and all of a sudden lo and behold — he has the snood and the wattles. We all decided that we must start developing a strategy of owning up to it, if only in part. 

Such strategy could be to show how we are trying to minimize the cost of our product in order to feed the poor. We could show that by admitting that we had no time to conclude significant long-term tests. (We must also show that long-term is a relative term). We must show that for the hard-core science no term is a term long enough but that we live in a real world and we must feed billions of people with our product, many of them living on the brink of starvation. This is why we must limit ourselves to practical timelines. Without disclosing what those timelines could be. The situation is desperate. This must be our basic line of defense. We have multitudes of poor people to feed even here, in our own country — and this is our primary responsibility. No one cares about them but us. This could be our motto. We care. We must feed them. We do conduct long-term tests but meanwhile we must feed all the poor. Because people die from hunger all around. Meanwhile we should really start doing something about those long-term tests. Maybe fund a lab or something. Maybe donate a couple of billions to a university so that they create such a lab for us. To show that we really care. 

At the same time, we could propose some money as an undisclosed settlement out of court for this snake. John said a million would do but I don’t really think it could be enough. The man has a massive purple snood over his nose like a giant turkey, and wattles like that of a giant cock, reaching down to his chest. You seen it? It’s quite a sight. Like two giant purple balls hanging from his jowls all the way down to his sternum. I know that some people up there still refuse to look at it but they really should. The man is decorated for life and, as far as I understand the medical part of the situation, no one knows what to do with it. One million is nothing for such thing, it’s trifles. It will only create negative publicity for us. I would suggest at least ten to settle this matter once and for all. 

And we must investigate. Our security team must do their job. What if all this is not a genuine innocent affliction but a hoax, a viral campaign aimed at undermining our market superiority? What if it all originates with the competition? What if they hired this little jerk, and made him eat our product for five year? What if they secretly injected him with some snood-growing hormone? We must dig deeper in this particular direction. 

We should also coordinate our efforts with the milk industry because that pigmy ate our product with milk and this is well documented too. They could also be responsible for this mess. Perhaps not entirely but they could certainly share the blame. Perhaps we could manoeuvre them somehow into becoming liable for the snood while we keep the wattles because the snood has far greater damaging potential in the press. We need some real strategist for that though and I can’t even start to imagine who that person might be. 

Also, we can’t pull the product off the shelves right now; it’s far too popular. But we must do something about it. Another snood and wattles would be disastrous. People also could do this on purpose, to squeeze money from us. It could be a field day for all those deadbeats out there in the streets. It could be a new fad. We must nip this snood thing in the bud. Perhaps rebrand, I don’t know. Or diversify. To look like we caved, on the outside. Re-design this brand in several more iterations. To puzzle all those cretins with their little shopping lists. The opinion up there is that we also should seriously increase our promotional budget. It is not up to date. To compensate for all our expenses we must really increase the demand. 

This way or another but we must stop this craze without much loss on our part. This is the unanimous decision up there. No more snoods. Or wattles. 

Take care, 

Les.

________________________________________