Corporate Citizenship

Physical Plant Himself: I've noticed that Harpers magazine is the Professor's preferred reading material when traveling by public transport. He probably thinks it gives him an air of sophistication, impressing the teenage Russian girls from Brighton Beach. I can see him now, turning the pages every now and again with a concerned expression, making quiet grunting noises like “good point, Harpers.” Dickhead. Hmm… what you theenk is more heep to Russian teen? Creepy bourgeois intellectual or boyfriend with five machine gun and suitcase full of Ecstacy?

I can’t read Harpers, of course (I’m not convinced that the Professor can either) but I took a gander at the back cover the other day and saw this ad:




The ad is supposed to be about how Toyota is a good “corporate citizen,” but it took me a while to figure this out because I was distracted by the pink-shirted eunuch in the foreground of the "factory team," which, apart from the eunuch, consists of three geeky male humans in safety goggles, nearly identical except for their varying coloration and height.




Here, this might help:

Eunuch

















Then I got stuck on the photo on the right-hand side, which apparently depicts a Toyota employee raking leaves in the woods.

Human Raking Woods

What are we supposed to make of these photos? Since Toyota puts a lot of thought and money a large ad campaign of this sort, we can only assume that their PR team has decided that staffing their factories with eunuchs and raking up the woods are the very definition of "corporate citizenship." I don’t want to come across as hostile to plants or humans of ambiguous organs – some of my best friends are monoecious.

But what exactly do the eunuchs do in the factories? Do they have a special skill that aids in production? I asked the Professor and he pulled the usual irrelevant, pretentious fact out of his ass: “In the Middle Ages, Physical Plant, young men in monasteries were castrated so that they would retain angelic high singing voices throughout adulthood.”

Do Toyota eunuchs sing inspiring hymns of productivity to the other factory workers? And why is it necessary to rake leaves in the woods? Rotting leaves are future delicious food for nutrient-hungry saplings. That's like me raking all the potatoes out of Idaho; the muffins out of Connecticut; or the disco fries out of New Jersey. Where do Toyota employees rake the leaves to? Are they converted into a high-nutrient mulch which is fed to the factory eunuchs? Good thing Toyota isn't marketing its cars to house plants because I don't fucking get it. The best I can figure is that Toyota has engineered a crazy telepathic robot which will forecast consumer trends and handle marketing and PR from now on. They asked the robot for "two messages that will connect with today's liberal community" and it came up with "save the eunuchs" and "rake the woods."