The Hand Job

by Rip Peterson

Table of Contents

After he was rejuvenated, they talked about needing to cover it up. The crowd, press and the world saw blood. There would be questions.

The solution was just to tape a bunch of gauze over his ear.

It was a little drama queen-ish, I’ll admit.

He only wore it for a week, rightly predicting that people would forget.

After that incident, they decided it was best to keep me with the former president. Which was understandable. But they needed me to look the part of an aide so I got a new wardrobe and got my hair done up.

I think I had a glow up.

I even got to carry a briefcase. It was empty but it made me feel important. Briefcases do that. I don’t know why but they do. You can’t be unimportant when holding one.

While on a plane ride to God knows where, they were having a discussion about how to appeal to the common folk. The former president said that to most people he was godlike. A mythical figure.

I really needed to watch more than Turner Classic Movies. I figured that he was just stroking his ego but I never actually heard what people were saying about him by that point. I was pretty secluded.

Then it came up that the new person the former president was running against worked at McDonald’s. Which for some reason pissed him off.

He seemed kind of offended that they might have made his meal.

It was decided.

He would spend twenty minutes working a shift at McDonald’s to prove how much better he was than whoever he was running against.

It didn’t take long for them to find an owner who was willing to shut down to have him pretend to work there for a little bit.

The former president was insistent that he actually do some work. Not much. He was much too important to assemble a Big Mac. But he reasoned,