Hackley-Smoot Act: The Bestselling Suspense Thriller

September 7th, 2004 Posted in 2004

“I have a problem,” I said, closing the door to my boss’s office behind me.

“Oh?” my boss asked. He stopped typing and looked up from his monitor.

“Yeah,” I said, pointing at him like I was Vince Neil and he was a Motley Crue audience. “I’m worried I might be kicking TOO MUCH FUCKING ASS! Anything I can help you with?”

And it’s true. For some reason—possibly the three-day weekend battery recharge—I was just getting a ton of shit done today. Enough so that I walked into my boss’s office to request more work, knowing full well that this was the only circumstance in which I’d be able to use the words “fuck” and “ass” in a sentence while pointing at him and not get fired.

I ended up being such a high-octane work machine today, in fact, that my immense speed became intimidating to others and started to slip me up. Case in point: I was going over some revisions with a woman for a work titled “State-to-State Transportation Liability Insurance: Statute 594, The Hackley-Smoot Act of 1984 and its Repurcussions to Mythical Elves”, or something similarly coma-inducing. It’s usually an enormous test of mental endurance for me to have to read through one of these phone book-sized things looking for grammatical flaws. But I was kicking, as mentioned, so much goddamn fucking ass today, and taking so many names, that I’d managed to get through the entire thing. I was now on the phone with the author, confirming my revisions and in good spirits about the ass-kickingness I believe I already mentioned.

After we’d agreed to make the changes, she asked me: “So, do you think I should give this another readthrough then, or what?”

The work had already been reviewed by six separate bodies by that point, so it would have been wholly unnecessary. Nonetheless, given that most people I talk to couldn’t give a shit where they put their commas and usually associate a call from me with a tax audit, I applauded her commitment to prosiac excellence. “By all means!” I said. “If you’re willing, it of course couldn’t hurt. It’s a bit dry, obviously, but if you’re willing to go through it again…”

A pause on the other line. Then:

“I WROTE that, you know,” she said in a betrayed tone, which totally floored me. Not that she’d written it—I’d sort of assumed—but that she actually seemed defensive that I’d found a piece of work the thickness of a cheese wedge and devoted entirely to liability insurance and the Hackley-Smoot Act less than a wholly engrossing read.

I hadn’t been trying to be mean, mind you. I’d honestly just had no idea documents of this nature could even be judged on their inability to keep a reader on the edge of his or her seat with suspense. I’d sort of assumed that, by their very subject matter, books about arcane insurance policy amendments are expected and even encouraged to be as numbingly exhaustive about the subject matter as possible. So I found myself uncertain how to defend myself against her obviously injured tone. It’s not like she’d given me a novel to read or anything. If it’d been a period fiction of a Prairie girl unable to contain her passions for a smouldering-eyed farmhand, then I would have cushioned any criticism with a “first off, this is a fantastic read and you should be very proud of yourself.”

“Well,” I said, trying to backpedal but uncertain how I might believably tell this woman her 500-page dissection of the Hackley-Smoot Act was a Crichton-esque page-turner. “I just meant that… you know… I thought it was… supposed to be.”

Silence on the other line.

“Anyway, gotta go.”