Doing the Business – Volume 1
A Blazing Saddles v The Godfather Mash-up….on Steroids!
Business isn’t all about bottom lines, P/E ratios, gross margins, office affairs and IPO’s. No, sometimes it involves avarice, absurdity, paraphilia and an oddly distinctive Prince Albert. So it proves to be the case in this comic tale about the clash between two competing business models, one a Texan telecommunications company (a gung-ho bastion of capitalist gunocracy) the other La Cosa Nostra (a deeply conservative citadel of crime and corruption).
The bullets fly, as do pigs. The shit hits the fan and the fan fights back. The Indians are relaxed because the cowboys are preoccupied looking for an Italian take-out in the ultimate spaghetti western. But events do not begin deep in the heart of Dixie nor in Sicilia, that partially deflated football being kicked by Italia’s boot out of the Tyrrhenian Sea toward the Western Mediterranean, but in the decrepit post-industrial town of Middlehampton in the English Midlands.
After surviving the week from hell it was early Friday evening when Memphis Bell, the European CEO of Texan American Telecom (TAT), received an unexpected phone call from an unknown Sicilian. The caller conveyed a business proposition that he simply couldn’t refuse…..but then again Memphis didn’t want to.
Forget all those “phony” telco wars where companies “surfed” and “slammed” in order to steal customers from one another in this battle of the businesses the stakes are actually higher than some of the participants.
Along with their boss Silas Marshall TAT’s cowboys from the companies ‘Aching Butt Ranch’ ponied up, mounted up and moved on out across the pond to tackle the Mob. They were not intending to see Naples and die but they were going to Sicily to PROSPER! They were hot on the trail of George Custer, the company spy and his mysterious buddy Mister Smith both of whom had gone missing after leaving a trail of wreckage in their wake the scale of which inspired the Cosa Nostra to create their first reality TV show.
Meet the show’s stars as the Mafia get medieval on their ass. The get-rich-quick delegates of PROSPER! (TAT’s multi-level marketing subsidiary) wreak their good-natured havoc in Catania. The cowboys bring the Wild, Wild West to Italy’s deep South as they mingle and fraternise with the locals. Meanwhile TAT’s Executives scheme, plot and plan the weirdest anti-Mafia strategy yet conceived by man. Of course, not everything goes according to plan. In fact very little of it does….
