"The guy is an idiot....Let's make him V.P.

Maybe you've seen the ads for the latest e-reader device being promoted by the venerable Barnes & Noble bookseller. It's called...the Nook-e.

Like the Kindle from the folks at Amazon it is an electronic nightmare designed to make reading a book more like watching TV.

This is obviously an idea hatched by some imbecilic vice president with plenty of time on his or her hands. Why in the name of Ernest Hemingway and all that's holy would anyone want to read a book that requires batteries and can't be underlined or dog-eared????

And, while we're at it, why would you name such an invention the "NOOKIE"?! (Unless, of course, your plan is to market this moronic device exclusively to teenage boys.)

For years vice presidents of all sorts of corporations have been producing crap like this because, well, that's what they do. Vice presidents are nitwits who couldn't quite make president (see Biden, Joe) and have been around long enough to have either incriminating photos of the REALLY big bosses or have married into the family.

It's the American way. "This guy is a useless dope let's make him a V.P. just to get him out of the way."

In the 1960's Western Airlines launched a V.P. inspired ad campaign called "Western pays a buck a flub". The advertising featured a big time TV ad where a heavenly chorus jingled that the airline would pay each and every passenger a dollar every time the company made a mistake. If the flight attendant, then called a stewardess, failed to say "please" or "thank you" you could hit them up for a dollar. It seemed such a good idea.

Western pulled the commercials after a couple of weeks to prevent the company from going under. It's a really bad idea to pay for mistakes when your company is a world class airborne misfortune.

Another vice president of yet another really horrible airline, rumored to be United, is said to have run a promotion called "Take Me Along" in the late 1950's. The idea, no doubt hatched after many cocktails, was to encourage the wives of executives to accompany their husband on his next business trip. After the first wave of commercials ran business was up substantially and the V.P.'s were all patting themselves on the back when one of them decided that it would be a fine idea to follow up the campaign with a letter to the spouses who had "been taken along".

Shortly after the first few hundred responses asking "What trip?" the program was abruptly abandoned.

In the broadcasting business the program director who has destroyed the ratings at the most number of stations in a corporation usually gets the nod to be the Programming Vice President. These guys specialize in producing a ton of fatuous memos regarding how to introduce the traffic or what inflection to use when saying station call letters.

The famous drop of live turkeys from a helicopter as a Thanksgiving promotion was most certainly the work of a vice president. .

John Nance Garner is remembered for saying "The vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of spit." (For the record: I don't think he said "spit".)

Here is my theory: A vice president is someone who wears his hat to the bathroom so that he'll know which end to wipe.