C'mon World! Home Alone Edition

Happy Friday all! Well, some. You know who you are.

Today's edition takes us traveling across space and time, to an alternate universe called, "Home Alone", where we catch up with a cast of characters who endured Christmas-time escapades so extreme they'd have the rest of us on Zoloft for the remainder of our days.

Their trials and travails were the absolute stuff of legend.

They may not have been the heroes we deserved, but they certainly were the ones we needed.

And, today, they're here to tell us their tales. About life. Love. Christmas. HR. And childhood incontinence.

We begin with...

1) The Ballad of Old Man Marley

"Hey you. Yeah, you. The one staring at me from your bedroom window. The one spreading rumors about me. The one striking fear into the hearts of the townspeople by telling tall tales about how I murdered my family and half the people on the block back in '58 and have been hiding out in this neighborhood ever since.

I only have one question for you...how did you figure it out?

I planned that murder meticulously. Spent months devising a plan to get rid of them with a shovel while masking their bodies in rock salt. Countless hours were spent hatching this plot in the back room of Murphy's Pub, aided by the guys I served with in Korea. We had it worked out beautifully - take out the old lady, take out the kid, take out the witnesses, and collect on the insurance. And on that cold, grisly December night in '58, that's exactly how it went down. The shovel was so effective, I remember thinking, "If I only had this baby during the Han River offensive, we wouldn't have lost so many good men."

The alibi of us at the bowling alley that night was air-tight. The lane manager was always susceptible to a little grease here and there, and lord knows, he's covered up worse. The detectives did their due diligence, asked their questions, and came up cold. Within a month, the investigation was closed. I figured - off the hook, right? Little did I know you snot-nosed little bastards would get the drop on me three decades later.

Did you find a survivor? An archive? DNA evidence from my shovel that you sent to your contacts downtown? I need to know. When a man meets his match, even if it's a kid with a terrible buzzcut and net worth of $20, he needs to understand the nature of he who bested him. You sir, are the Batman to my Joker. The Patton to my Rommel. And I bestow the respect of a worthy adversary upon you. Now start talking, or this shovel will make sure your brother is?really?Home Alone for Christmas."

2) We move on next to the forgotten cousin, Fuller McCallister, who is nonetheless here to raise awareness for an important cause...

"Hey everyone, Fuller McAllister here. Many of you know me from my family's well-documented exploits in the "Home Alone" series, but I'm here today to talk to you about a serious issue that I'm out raising money for - childhood incontinence.

Plenty of diseases get attention and funding these days. ALS, brain cancer, diabetes, MS, restless leg syndrome, you name it. But when an 8-year-old is sleeping in a puddle of his own urine - who heeds his call? Who mans the phones in a fundraising telethon? Who has an ice bucket challenge? No, my friends. We're underfunded. Alone. And suffering. And we need your help.

The pain of this disease goes well beyond the practical matters of bleaching the sheets while wafting through a smell that reminds most of Penn Station. It's deeply psychological. When my cousin Kevin takes cheap shots such as "Don't put me in the attic with Fuller, he wets the bed!", my callous family gets a good laugh at my expense. And while I take another swig of Pepsi and give him a menacing look that re-affirms his fears, I die a little on the inside.

This humiliation only adds to the existing struggle of being the smallest member of the family, one who gets his face shoved into walls by table chairs on the regular. And don't get me started on my father Frank, a man who has the bedside manner of a recently laid-off alcoholic pipe fitter.

But this is not meant to be a pity party. These tales are simply illustrative, and meant to raise awareness for an affliction suffered by millions of well-to-do suburban children who are irresponsibly given caffeinated beverages after 7pm. So please, I implore you, on behalf of myself and others who are fighting every day to conquer this menace, give all you can.

Merry Christmas ya filthy animals."

3) From Fuller, we move onto Mr. Duncan, proprietor of Duncan's Toy Chest in New York City...

"Well hey there, little fella! Kevin, right? I remember you! You're the one who smashed my window with a brick back in Christmas of '92. Which my insurance still hasn't paid for. And which you never appeared in court for after my civil action against you.

But it's good to see you, old friend! You were so generous that Christmas, donating the cash you stole from your old man to my annual toys for tots racket. Remember that? When I warmed the hearts of families all across America by saying that all my Christmas Eve toy sales would go to the Children's Hospital? Well let me tell ya, your $20 put me over the write-off threshold, knocked me down an income bracket and saved me a fortune!

Let's not kid ourselves, my young friend. Who, for the purposes of this monologue, is still somehow a child 26 years later.

I rather like my money and go to great lengths to protect it. I mean, didn't it strike you as odd that me, the proprietor of the largest toy empire this side of Amarillo, would man one of the registers during the Christmas rush? Could I really not afford any seasonal help, especially during the height of the early 90s recession? Of course I could. Hell, your pigeon-feeding friend certainly could have used the paycheck. But you decided to give her my hand-me-down Turtle Doves instead.

Kid - what's an indigent woman who lives in Central Park gonna do with Turtle Doves? She couldn't even trade them in for a Corned Beef on Rye at Katz's. But enough about her.

I really wanted to say - in the future, stay off my path and leave your vigilantism at the door. I already have a deal with the Sticky Bandits to hit me again when they get out of the can in 2022, so I can collect on a generous loss policy and finally get that yacht I've been promising Mrs. Duncan and my French mistress.

Merry Christmas!"

4) Coming back to the McCallister family, we put the spotlight on Buzz, who has grown up to become a Director of HR, and has something important to share with his team:

"Dear Omnitechtron Team,

This is Buzz McCallister, your Director of Human Resources. There are a few issues that have come up recently, and with the holidays upon us, it's important to address them head-on.

First - common courtesy. Many of you have been barging into offices unannounced, which begs the question,?"Don't you know how to knock, phlegm-wads?"

Food theft from the kitchen.?Last week, my brother Kevin came to visit our HQ, and ordered a whole cheese pizza, just for him. After giving him a tour, we returned and the pizza was nowhere to be found. I said,?"If you want any, someone's gonna have to barf it up cuz it's all gone."

Respect and recognition.?Yes, the conference department had a miscommunication with the Marriott Marquis during our annual event in New York last month.?However, if Walt hadn't screwed up in the first place, we wouldn't have been in those most perfect hotel rooms with a truck load of free stuff.

Security.?There seems to be a paranoia and over-emphasis on security given recent episodes of workplace violence. But let's keep some perspective.?Are we a target? No, for three reasons: A, I'm not that lucky. Two, we use smoke detectors and D, we're located in the most boring office park in the whole United States of America, where nothing even remotely dangerous will ever happen. Period.

Workplace bullying.?To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying that feigning drums on the head of a fellow co-worker, causing a chain reaction that leads to a lot of people falling down and a makeshift tree smashing a pianist in the head during a Christmas pageant isn't hilarious - it is. Quite so. But it must be followed by a formal apology in front of your department. If the apology is disingenuous, that's perfectly fine. You can feel free to challenge the other party with a charge of,?"Beat that, you little trout sniffer."

Let's try to make Omnitechtron the great place we all know it has the potential to be. It starts with us all making the right decisions every day and choosing goodness, compassion and professionalism above all. Okay, enough of this gooey sh... show of emotion. Happy Holidays!"

5) Finally, we have the defender of the family, the vanquisher of incompetent thieves, and the legend himself, Kevin McCallister, who, as an adult, has now put the lessons of his alternate universe in motion to protect life and limb for the rest of us...

"Hi everyone, good to be here this evening. Thank you to the airport Marriott for hosting this event, and to the Kansas City Rotary Club for having me as this month's speaker. I'm Kevin McAllister, Founder and President of McAllister Home Security Services. We're based in Chicago but now serve over 40 markets across America, giving you and your family the peace of mind you need.

I was asked to give a talk today about leadership, and that's a tricky subject. Leadership isn't something you're born with - it's something you develop out of necessity when you're a negligently discarded 8-year-old in 1990. You reach deep down and say, "Ok, my family has violated several state and federal child abandonment laws, so it's time to take the bull by the horn and master my own destiny."

The process of digging deep and finding that spark within you is a difficult one, but can be mastered by looking at something as benign as a growling furnace and saying, "I'm not afraid of you anymore! You hear me? I'm not afraid of you!" Moments like that - of true self-discovery - are the moments that will propel you into that leader you were meant to become.

It continues when you're faced with the roving menace of Old Man Marley, a neighborhood fixture and presumed murderer who killed and buried his family with a pick-axe. The daunting image of such a man...grizzled, haggard and in constant possession of a shovel, makes you wonder....'Do I have what it takes to overcome my fear and lead?"

But you most certainly do. And conquering this frightening image can be done by sitting next to him and confiding stories about the time you were physically assaulted for wearing a sweater with a big bird on it. This type of disarming behavior may not have been enough to save his murdered family, God rest their souls, but it was enough to propel me past the fears that were holding back my potential. And each of you has an Old Man Marley in your life you can disarm as well.

Leadership also emerges when under acute threat. For instance, I simply could have called the police when local bandits made plain their intention to burglarize my house at a specific date and time. That would have been the obvious thing to do and it's quite preposterous that I didn't just do exactly that. But the leader in me said, "No, Kevin, we're going to expose ourselves to great and unnecessary risk by concocting a series of elaborate booby traps within our own home."

And it was in those moments, when I had those men stabbed, burned, frozen, bludgeoned, punctured, immolated and scarred, that my calling became clear to me. I was to become a leader in the field of home security. Never mind that my plan viciously backfired, and despite the sustained assault, the burglars were inexplicably walking and talking at full capacity...I knew then that I was on to something.

And the fact that my own untimely end was thwarted by none other than old man Marley himself, shovel and all, told me that things have a way of coming full circle in the quest for leadership.

This journey of self-discovery continued into the next year, when my parents, whose negligence should have frankly landed them in prison after the original episode, once again left me to my own devices as they were off galivanting in Miami. Only this time, I was on my own in New York.

Thinking fast, I embarked on a campaign of credit card fraud to not only sustain me, but to ensure that this minor inconvenience would be wrapped in a blanket of luxury and gluttony. I also capitalized on the incompetence of the Plaza Hotel staff, proving that their organization's own lack of leadership would be their undoing.

In New York, I discovered that leadership isn't just about action, it's also about guidance. For instance, I befriended a homeless woman at the park and proceeded to sanctimoniously lecture her about where she went wrong in life, and how it was her fault that she didn't immediately fix her predicament.

Now, you'd think an embittered middle-aged women wouldn't generally appreciate such advice from a sheltered suburban child, but she was surprisingly receptive. And to cement our relationship, I even gave her a parting hug. Something that would certainly serve her better moving forward than say, some seed money from my father so she could seek shelter and basic medical attention.

New York also taught me that leadership is about tying up loose ends. I once again crossed paths with the aforementioned bandits, and again engaged them in guerilla warfare, only this time at my aunt and uncle's hollowed-out home that was in likely violation of at least 30-40 articles of New York building and health codes.

After another round of assault, this time incorporating bricks, paint, rope, tool chests and kerosene, I again found myself at a disadvantage before being bailed out by my homeless friend. But it taught me that persistence is the true price of greatness.

These experiences forged me as a leader, and led to the creation of McAllister Home Security Services. So, you see, true leadership is about making poor decisions when confronting criminals, befriending axe murderers, credit card fraud and patronizing attitudes towards the downtrodden. Thank you, Rotary Club. It's been my honor."

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And with that, until next week, friends.

Love you wonderful misfits.

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Geoff Woliner, CEO of Winning Wit, is a?speaker?&?author?who helps organizations?de-stress through comedy.

If your colleagues have been super-stressed over the past few years and need a few laughs at your next conference, holiday party, team-building pow-wow or trip to Mickey D's...

...go to a medium and channel the spirit of Rodney Dangerfield.

But if he's busy, let's chat.

[email protected]