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Neither Bob nor I could tolerate the idea of Mike Breslin getting himself promoted into the V.P. slot. Mike was one of the most conceited, vain, obnoxious people you'd ever meet. Although he fancied himself a great ladies' man, women shunned him, openly. With little wonder. His idea of "conversation" with a woman was to corner her somewhere, literally, and bellow into her face a nonstop litany of self-congratulatory crap. He particularly tried to impress them by regaling them with oft repeated anecdotes about all the famous people he'd supposedly met and whom he knew "personally."

"And so I says to the governor, Bob, you gotta stop smoking them cigars," he'd be droning into some unfortunate girl's face as I'd walk into the kitchen at someone's Christmas party. As though the governor, or anyone else really important, would even give Mike second notice. He was a crashing bore.

Mike Breslin just had to be taken down a peg or two, and Bob and I figured we were just the guys to do it. The inspiration came to me one day as I sat in Mike's office, suffering one of his monologues. Behind him, strategically placed on the wall so that anyone entering the office would immediately spot it, was a large mounted salmon that Mike claimed he had caught on a fishing expedition to Alaska one summer. The thing had to be fully two feet long. It even had a little brass plaque affixed to it telling anyone who got close enough to read it that the man who'd landed this whopper was none other than Mike Breslin, scourge of the world's spawning grounds.

As I sat there, not really listening to a thing Mike was saying, I imagined the fish getting smaller and smaller. And then I thought, "Why not?"

When I told Bob my idea over lunch at Red Lobster, he grinned.

"I know this taxidermist," he snickered. "He'd do it for us. You gotta get a good set of photos of the fish, along with some measurements. We'll take them to Harvey. It'll cost us a little money, but it's worth it." We sealed the deal with a handshake.

And the very next day, while Bob detained Mike in the conference room after our morning meeting, I sneaked quickly into Mike's office with a camera and a tape measure.

Plan "A" was implemented that weekend when Bob delivered the goods to his taxidermist buddy, Harvey. All that Harvey required was that we deliver the original fish to him, and keep returning the replacement fish as we cycled through them. That and a hundred and fifty bucks, which Bob and I happily forked over. The next Tuesday,

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