Meet Dr. Porker

Installment from "The Bowling Ball in the Freezer and Other Secrets of a Highly Efficient You." Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.

Hi, I’m Dr. Peter Porker! Welcome to my book! You may be resenting that $13.99 you paid for it. But you know what? Surprisingly little of it gets to me. You wouldn’t believe how many people take their cut along the way. And then there’s the garnishment order for the punitive damages from my book on do-it-yourself surgery.

But who am I, really?

My grandfather was Frederick Winslow Porker, a lesser known late 19th century proponent of scientific management, and practitioner of time-and-motion studies. He married this discipline to his interest in cultural anthropology. He attempted to apply efficiency theory to the development of the Gshwindi, a primitive nomadic people living in what is now Uganda. His goal was to create a race of hyperproductive supermen from the basically contented but embarrassingly backward Gshwindi. Unfortunately, this project resulted in the eventual enslavement and extermination of the Gshwindi by what is now the government of Uganda. Most of them were corralled, range-fed, and eaten by Idi Amin.

An amusing family story about F.W. Porker – a friend’s prank resulted in a brief commitment to a hospital for the criminally insane. Before the mistake was realized and his release effectuated, he narrowly escaped a lobotomy. Actually, the lobotomy was conducted, but it was botched.

As my own father’s profession consisted chiefly of periods of incarceration, I chose rather to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps when I began my career in executive consultancy. For a time, I attempted to revive and further my grandfather’s studies by measuring and evaluating human bathroom procedures. My research focused on methods to speed up human excretory and elimination activities: If humankind could save even a tiny fraction of the time we spend on the crapper and apply it instead to solving today’s pressing problems, think of what we could do for humanity! Unfortunately, the necessary observational studies have made me unwelcome at the community recreation center where I pursued my research. I now write, teach, consult, and stay out of the cold at the public library several blocks away.

In addition to efficiency studies, I have tried to apply behavioral psychology, especially the precepts of operant conditioning, to my work with clients. Borrowing from the psychologist B.F. Skinner, I invented the “Porker Box” in which business executives might be trained in appropriate workplace responses by providing pleasant and painful stimuli in response to choices they made while locked inside the enclosure. Before I tried using Porker Boxes on paying clients, I first experimented on infant orphans I obtained from Tijuana, whom I subsequently raised entirely in Porker Boxes. While to my mind it is still an open question whether the results have really contributed all that much to the increasing savagery of the Mexican drug cartels to whom many of my grown test subjects now belong, this claim has been fodder for various international extradition demands, and – you guessed it – more punitive damages.

Perhaps the challenges and setbacks in my professional life may themselves be instructive to you. When you happen to be incarcerated, and when the incarcerated life gives you lemons, what would you do? Do you simply throw the lemons at other inmates who are trying to rape you, or are you the kind of person who makes a mildly corrosive liquid from the juice, which might eventually eat through prison bars, allowing you to escape.

Next, let’s take a closer look at some of life’s lemons.