Rick P.
(Alias “Toy-Truck”)

According the Legendary Mr. Christopherson, Creative Expressions teacher and expert at virtually everything, Ricky P. always did seem to have a problem with size. That is, he had trouble judging the appropriate size of things. This difficulty was to become both his curse and his later salvation.

After graduation from the world famous University of the Back‑Woods in Buckley, Washington, where he majored in industrial manage­ment, Rick got his first job as manager of the Procurement of Resources Department for the Boeing Aircraft Company. His unfortunate problem with size showed up quickly in his very first order on be­half of Boeing. The order was supposed to be for three hun­dred fifty 5' x 5' x 5' shipping crates to contain small spare parts for 747 airplanes. What actually arrived three months later were five huge crates, each large enough to actually contain an entire 747 aircraft. Boeing was not amused.

Mr. P.'s next job was Procurement Manager for Waverly Construction Company. Again there seemed to be some sort of size oriented slip‑up on his very first order for the company. Instead of 17 large, heavy‑duty dump trucks, Ricky managed to buy 17 toy dump trucks. The company’s main gripe with this, as it turned out, was that Rick had already authorized the payment of $135,000 for each of these tiny toy trucks.

After this incident, his co‑workers affectionately gave him the nickname "Toy-Truck."

They often say that the third time is the charm, and for Rick it cer­tainly was. He was hired by a coal burning electrical power substation as a smoke detector (a job everyone agreed he would be more suited to than his former managerial efforts). It was his job to stand all day down‑wind from the factory stacks and test for excessive pollution.

It was at this point that Ricky's incredible genius finally surfaced. He developed a way to make the smoke coming from a factory smoke‑stack travel horizontally through the air, rather than heading upward. He was actually able to gain a US patent for this fantastic process. Scientists were totally amazed throughout the world. They were at a loss to explain how Rick had done it, coming from a managerial background as he had. Though the scientists of the world have hailed Mr. P. as the discoverer of "flat smoke," unfortunately, none has been able to find the process the least bit useful, with some jealous competitors even claiming that flat smoke is more harmful than stand-up smoke. Spoil-Sports!