Midlife crisis line

Welcome, New Employee

Welcome to the Midlife Crisis Line. As an employee of the call-center at MCL you'll be expected to help folks make bad decisions when they panic upon the realization that their life is half over and they have still not achieved their childhood goal of becoming an astronaut or ballerina.

Before we begin, it should be noted that this is Form 229a, the manual for male employees. For the female version, ask your supervisor for Form 229b, toots.

Help Phone

When you get this birthday card, give the "Midlife Crisis Line" a call

When the phone in your cubicle rings your job is to try to lead the caller away from the abyss of despair, far from a void so vast that only a sports car or sailboat can plug it. The void, we mean ^[1].

Simple!

Focus on the Customer

Here at MCL we focus on the five major factors of the midlife crisis:

1. work/career
2. marriage/spousal relationships
3. adult children
4. aging parents/death of parents
5. physical changes associated with aging

Listen to the customer and try to find out which factors are leading the caller into crisis. After diagnosis of a specific factor, diagnoses of multiple factors, or (in rare cases) diagnoseses' of multiple-multiple factors, use the following outline to help them avert ^[2] their midlife crisis.

Factors and Solutions

Each factor has its own specific set of solutions. These solutions will invariably cost the caller a lot of money. They should not, however, cost you any money whatsoever.

Do not, under any circumstances, help them to spend your money. You are not middle aged ^[3].

Note that the pictures in this manual are reprints from our various glossy four-color bulk-mailed brochures; so when someone calls in and mentions "...the Gandhi picture...", for example, just scroll to that section and you'll know immediately how to help them.

Remember, until the check clears, the customer is your best friend.

It's time to quit your job and run off to join the circus!

Work/Career

If the caller is unsatisfied with the direction that his or her career has taken you should recommend one of more of the following:

• Quit their job. This it what you should always recommend. Work is called work because if it wasn't work they would have called it fun. Fun, not surprisingly, pays squat.
  • Tell them that after they quit their job they should to go back to college and get that B.A. that they wanted but never got because they had to get a job. A B.A. in Art History, or indeed any of the many other expensive but uneconomical and useless variations of the B.A., will fill the dual roles of helping them to appreciate Chaucer and of giving them something to talk about to the other employees at their next job as a barista at Starbuck's ^[4].
• Buy a sports car ^[5]

Once you start to look alike it's time to trade up.

Marriage/Spousal Relationships

If the caller is unsatisfied with the same-old/same-old of being with someone that knows everything there is to know about them, and who is willing to put up with the caller's myriad of irritating and disgusting quirks you should recommend one or more of the following:

• If the caller is male tell him to dump the broad. After all, since she's forty-plus, her best years are behind her, and childbirth and breastfeeding have ravaged her once perfect figure.
  • Push him to trade up. Neve Campbell is single again. So is Carmen Electra. After the divorce the caller might have enough money to take the trophy girlfriend out to dinner. Once.
• If the customer proves unwilling to file for divorce, recommend adultery. Point out to the customer that there is a twenty-something with perky bosom living just down the block from them, and that she'd probably be willing to give a little sumpin' sumpin' to them on the side, in exchange for fur coats and trips to Aruba.
• If the caller is female always go with adultery. Give her your number. Remember, she won't be spending your money: she'll be spending her husband's. Heck, encourage her to get her husband to spend more time at work. Just remember to tithe to the church because you'll have some wicked bad karma to burn off by the time she realizes her mistake and goes back to her family.
• Buy a sports car.

Your daughter is off to college. Don't you feel old?

Adult Children

If the customer was pushed into a midlife crisis because Rusty or Susan is off to college you should recommend:

• Tell the caller to go back to College. As with the school solution for Work/Career this will help to burn off some of the customer's cash without providing any tangible benefits. The 'College' solution for the 'Adult Children' factor varies in one major respect: the customer isn't going to school for him/herself: they're doing it to reconnect to their kids. Tell the customer to:
  • Join a frat or sorority (which ever is most appropriate)
  • Get piercings ^[6].
  • Take their adult children out to concerts.
  • Learn to mosh.
• Buy a sports car.

Aging Parents/Death of Parents

If the customer's midlife crisis was precipitated by the excessive shrinking and wrinkling of mom and/or the massive coronary and death of dad, try to sound as though you care. If necessary fake empathy really hard. Also, recommend the following:

• Buy a sports car.

Before and after of another unsatisfied customer

Physical Changes Associated with Aging

Thanks to a combination of the general level of vanity in modern society and a couple of decades of flush-with-cash boomers who are scared to death of aging, technology provides several solutions to the dilemma of aging ^[7]. For midlifers with this factor:

• If the customer is female recommend yoga. While a yoga class itself is inexpensive, and therefore of questionably value, it is also a good place for her to find a young, flexible young man. With this young, flexible young man she can commit adultery. By committing adultery with this young, flexible young ^[8] man she will feel younger.
  • Also, tell her to get a boob job. Young flexible young men like cougars with new boobs. Then you should sign up for a yoga class and, while yogaing, keep an eye out for a forty-something cougar with high, firm breasts.

Midlife Crisis Line even helps celebrities

• If the customer is male recommend a toupee, plugs or, if money is tight, a combover. Help pump up the customer's ego by pointing out how much his neighbor's adult daughter would like to run her hands through a rich, thick, manly head of hair. You should also buy stock in Toupees, toupees, toupees, LLC ^[9]
• Buy a sports car.

Success!

If you follow the preceding outline you are virtually guaranteed to help forty-somethings quickly make rash, horrible decisions that will haunt both them and their families until the sweet, sweet eternity of the grave embraces them.

Congratulations! You are both helping people and pocketing a tidy sum in the process. Everyone wins! ^[10]

Footnotes

1. ^  Not the abyss. Only booze can fill that. Booze and strippers.
2. ^  Or gloss over, at least.
3. ^  Not yet, anyway.
4. ^  Starbuck's motto, "We're smarter than you, did you want skim milk in that?"
5. ^  Acceptable sports cars include MGs, Alfa Romeo Spyders or, if the customer is female, the Mazda Miata.
6. ^  Piercings are like earrings, but in places that inevitably get hooked on zippers.
7. ^  Aging, while a perfectly natural result of getting old is blech, icky and gross.
8. ^  Did we mention young?
9. ^  A subsidiary of MCL inc.
10. ^  By everyone we mean you and MCL