Darkside of the Sun: Mike Inc.

Mike CorriganBy Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

People often wonder why I don’t just incorporate and get it over with. After all, I have my “brand” and I produce a ton of “product,” most of it horse manure and some of it my own manure. In short, I already fit the profile of most international corporations. All I really lack is an attorney and several billion dollars. And you know if I get the several billion dollars, the attorneys will follow.

My Initial Public Offering will ask about $24 a share. With only a million shares available the first day, the price can only go up from there, so I advise everyone to get in on the ground floor. While $24 a share may seem a bit pricy considering my recent output of manure, you must remember I will be listed under “tech stocks” on the NASDAQ — and you don’t even need to produce any “product” at all to rate a tech stock IPO of even several million shares! I can claim I have an idea for a start-up and then change it and people will still buy; in fact, the price will likely rise, seeing how anything new must be an improvement, by law, in America. Madison Avenue and the developers of shopping malls have traded on this axiom over time, so I don’t know why I can’t.

Maybe I’ll develop an auction site on the Internet, kind of like eBay, only selling manure to the highest bidder; this will be good for organic farmers, who are tech-savvy. My business plan also looks down the road (to, say, Day 2). When I run out of manure, I will also put up for auction some of my used paper clips. Man, I have a lot of used paper clips, all colors and sizes. And sheets of paper! There’s the mother lode. Lots of used sheets of paper here, all of them with words on them! So I hire about 600 excellent typists to convert these sheets of paper into digital files. This means, if you act now, you can get a rough facsimile of, for example, the words on this random sheet of notes I made sometime in the past few months, shown here:

“ALA 3

ARIZ 4

ARK 3

CALIF 17

Del 1

FLA-4…”

Well, I don’t want to give away the whole thing, but you get the idea. It’s a list of some sort. Prices for these verbal artifacts may vary. Part of the excitement will be figuring out what these snippets of prose and poetry and shopping lists are supposed to mean. (“N. Dak. 6”? How does North Dakota have two more of anything than Florida? Really, I have no idea…) I mean, what better use of your time than to go through my wastebaskets? Consider it your new hobby. Every hobby should be fun, and you're not a real American if you don’t collect something nobody else understands, or even cares about. I’ll call my company Ecclectiana, Inc., or, in the corporate spirit of making up names for products that only sound cool, I could go under Engenica, or Procelex, or even NDak6. Whatever I come up with, people will invest, because that's what investors do. It’s practically a law of modern business that the more useless your product is the more valuable your company is. I mean, look at Facebook.

Now, if I could only develop a 3-D printer to post cow flaps online. Hotcakes, baby, they’d sell like hotcakes! My board of directors will be getting plenty of stock options, too, so send in your resumes now. Maybe I’ll put the rejected resumes up on Engenica. Together, we will make our fortunes!

In his spare time, Mike Corrigan collects dust.