JOSHUA GREEN ALLEN. (coughs horribly)

DON SWEZEY. Let me guess. It’s sickly Mr. Allen with polio in his uterus.

JGA. Boss, I— (coughing continues, followed by ghastly retching)

DS. Josh, you’re not getting out of the presentation.

JGA. Let’s say I just puked up something that could probably beat me at arm wrestling.

DS. Let’s say you’re not here in an hour wearing your one good shirt, with makeup covering up the trackmarks under your eyes, ready to tell our friends at ChemiMex why we’re the ones to help them sell their new conditioner to America. What do you think might happen?

JGA. Make Eleanor do it. The kid’s got moxie, I tellya!

DS. Actually, she’s got colorectal cancer, according to the voicemail she left about ten minutes ago.

JGA. Gah! She is so good. OK. But let’s say I got into an accident on the way in.

DS. You’re saying you will deliberately crash your car to get out of doing this presentation.

JGA. Alls I’m saying is it’s a dangerous world and I’m an extremely dangerous driver when I drink to numb the pain of my uterus polio.

DS. If you were in a serious enough accident to break your collarbone, or do something really scary to your pelvis, and if you could provide photographic evidence in the next 20 minutes or so, then I guess I’d have no choice but to show the pictures to ChemiMex and reschedule the presentation. The presentation that could make or break our company.

JGA. And what if—I’m saying if—what if the pictures didn’t clearly show my face. Or what if they did clearly show my face but it was pretty obvious that my face had been Photoshopped onto, say, a really—yeesh, a really gruesome picture from a coroner’s report that I just pulled up on the internet here. Oh boy, now I do feel sick, for reals.

DS. I could fire you but you’re just so damn good at whatever it is you do around here.

JGA. Don, seriously, that conditioner made my scalp turn black. They tested it on cute little puppies but not on John Q. Human.

DS. Josh, I did an ad for a tampon that would actually burst into flames if you put it in wrong. Let’s not go down that road.

JGA. Agreed. I’m feeling better already. See you tomorrow?

DS. Can’t wait.

—click—