Lobby

The bottom of a hotel? Like...where you pay the cashier, interrupting her from updating her Facebook page?

Eh, okay. It's also about paying politicians' buds for getting their ears. Shaved. And all...listen-y. When you lobby a politician, you hang out in their lobby, and whisper little love-nothings in their ear about policies you want changed. Or rather, those policies that your clients have paid you to help change. That's how you...lobby.

Well, the term got its name from would be friends-of-congressmen and friends-of-senators and friends-of-other-politicos, who would stand around, literally in the lobby of the halls of government, waiting for a muckety-muck to come out and, for the 98 seconds while they were walking down the hall to take a much needed wiz, have their ear chewed off about money needed for a new tattoo removal program, or for a grant for the Montana Sheep Workaholics Anonymous Initiative. Or for a new motorized shoe rack for the First Lady, custom-designed by Tesla itself.

A tickle-weapon builder wants the government to buy a billion bucks worth of tickle bombs from them, to use as an epic April Fool's joke on our Canadian pals up north. Their cost to build? 500 mil. So they make half a billion dollars in operating profits from making this sale.

Question: How much can they afford to pay the lobbyist, a.k.a. the sales guy who will make that deal possible?

Answer: A lot. Like...maybe 499 million.

So it is massively worthwhile for the tickle weapon producer to pay a lobbyist (or 10) a million bucks a year so that they can buy the best lobbyists. And hopefully close that deal.

And it doesn’t just apply to weapons manufacturers. That old age home the congresswoman promised her village? Well, what’s to stop her leaning on the weapons producer to donate a bunch of money to building it…if they win the lucrative tickle bomb contract? Maybe call it Tickle Pines Geriatric Center, with a happy face painted on the Tickle Bomb. Something like that. And the politician muses..."Well, the bombs are going to get made anyway. The contract will happen anyway. At least this way, my grannies will have nice mahjong chairs and a place to die with dignity. And not from being tickled to death."