Up the Corporation! with Nfn Nmi Jones

Even before he’s born, Jones is a troublemaker. His mother’s labor pains keep interrupting her ad agency’s new business planning session. She’s conducting it in the bedroom of her home where ambulance drivers are waiting to rush her to a hospital delivery room. Every detail is timed to the minute. Linda’s husband is brokering a commercial real estate deal in another city. When he arrives home, he will find a note on the refrigerator door saying, “Had Priscilla Louise. Everything is fine.” But everything is not fine. Despite all of the powers of positive thinking, Jones has two birth defects. One he’s a boy. His parents will have to find a new name for her . . er . . him. Worse, Nfn Nmi Jones was born without an ego. With no sense of self, he always does the unexpected. Nursery school, grade school, high school, college. When the perpetual motion parents he never got to know are killed in an airplane crash, he inherits enough wealth to donate to his favorite charity– needy corporations. He does this by buying their stock as they’re about to go bankrupt and he winds up owning the most inept company conceivable. The story ends in a flurry of interoffice insulting memos that flow through the company’s mail room where Jones works incognito.