A Guac to Remember

“So,” Thomas smiled as the waiter left. “Introductions are done, what’s next?”

Kasey contemplated her answer. Thomas was a decent-looking guy; early 30s, fashionable hair, clothes that were just this side of pretentious. He hadn’t tried too hard to make her laugh yet but he had energy when he talked. And he had flirted just enough with the waitress to ensure good service but not put a damper on the date. She figured her usual first date line would work. “Well, I guess we should tell each other what we like and don’t like.”

The way Thomas’ eyes bulged, one might have thought Kasey had suggested they get to baby-making then and there on the slightly sticky tabletop. He took a quick sip of his soda before responding. “No, we’re not gonna do that. You’re gonna tell me your craziest firing story.”

“My what?”

“Look, by our age, we’ve quit or been fired a couple of times, right? I want to know the craziest way you ever left a job. If you want, I can go first. It involves,” he added conspiratorially, “a toucan, two coconuts, and the most confused bartender you’ve ever seen.”

Kasey felt her stomach twist, and she took a long gulp of her wine to play for time. “A-are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about like…your cat or-”

“Firing story!” he cried and slapped his hand on the edge of the table. “Firing story! I know you’ve got a good one.”

She did have a good one. Or, rather, a bad one depending on the perspective. It wasn’t a story she relished telling, but Thomas was smiling at her and his eyes were twinkling with such innocent charm.

Ah damn, she thought. What’s the worst that could happen?

“Alright, so I used to be the director of social media outreach for a kind of large company a few years ago.”

“Ooh, fancy! So you made all the cool posts trying to relate to the youth of America?”

Kasey laughed and took another sip of wine. She could already feel her stomach unclenching. This story might be fun to tell to Thomas after all. “Mm, just that. And I’m not so old that it was, you know, hard to do. Just referencing the latest meme or putting a fun filter on or something like that.”

“Seems cushy. Hard to lose a job like that unless you post something you shouldn’t, I imagine?”

“You’re not wrong. As long as I stayed clear of the heavy topics, no one really even looked at what I posted other than to make sure it was ‘on-brand’ enough.”

Thomas paused stuffing his face with mozzarella sticks long enough to wave a greasy hand at her. “Oh, wait, hold on. You never even told me where you worked!”

“Er…you probably know it. Chips-Ole!, the Mexican place?”

“Only the bougiest burrito joint in this country, sure.”

“Sure. So yeah, them. Just post after post of ‘fresh chips this’ and ‘handmade salsas that’ and easy, easy work.”

“Of course…so how did you end up leaving this easy, lucrative, youthful profession?”

This was it. The moment of truth. He would either know immediately or she would have the dubious pleasure of recounting to Thomas one of the greatest blunders of modern marketing. She took a breath. “So it was three years ago. On April Fool’s Day.”

There it was. His mouth slacked open and a look of mingled horror and amusement crept into his eyes. A forgotten mozzarella stick hung limply from his fingers. “April Fool’s Day. No, I know about this.”

She tried to feign nonchalance. “Yeah, a lot of people do.”

“No, Kasey. Everyone knows about this. People who have never eaten a burrito in their entire lives know about this. People who have lived in tiny houses off the grid for the last ten years know about this.”

“Well it wasn’t exactly the high point of my career, was it? People like to talk when people screw up.”

Thomas leaned forward, face eager. “Kasey, I don’t think you understand. My firing story is like something my three-year-old nephew would make up to impress me compared to yours. You’re a legend.”

“Thanks,” Kasey said sarcastically. “I guess I don’t have to finish telling it now.”

“Nononono, you have to tell it!” he said, emphatically. “I only know what was in the news! You know everything.”

It was true, she did. She knew every sordid, unfortunate detail of the incident that would become known the country over as the day Chips-Ole broke April Fool’s Day.

“So my bosses wanted something fun for April 1st, right? You know, something just goofy enough that people will laugh but also something that would remind them of what Chips-Ole actually offers and makes them want to go out and buy some. Marketing 101, real basic stuff. Any intern could have made a prank social media post. But I thought I’d do something even worse than funny. I really thought I would prank these people. A funny ad might generate a small amount of revenue, but a hilarious prank would create buzz. And buzz would create a tidy little bonus for me. Besides…it’s April Fool’s! I love being funny.

“But anyway, what I come up with is - and mind you, this is something I’m coming up with like half an hour before midnight. I procrastinated on this one real bad - is a fake coupon.”

“The infamous coupon.”

“The infamous coupon. It’s got a goofy little cartoon avocado on it holding a little soda cup, and he’s going to say ‘Thirsty AF?’ or some nonsense like that. And then, underneath, the best part: a fake deal where you buy a small soda and get a pound of guac for free. Goofy, right? Because normally the deal goes the other way. Hi-larious. People would come in and try to get the deal, and we’d point out how it’s April Fool’s, and they’d have a good laugh and already be in the store and would probably buy something. Literally the best idea I’d ever had.

“And I draw it up. And I post it.”

“Just like that?” Thomas was nearly leaning across the entire table at this point, his tie dangerously close to drooping into his pasta. “You didn’t need to get it approved by anybody?”

“It was a social media post. And don’t forget, I’m the director of social media. I was the ‘the buck stops here’ person. And I just posted it right at midnight and didn’t even think about it for about half an hour. At that point, I figured I’d see if anybody in the UK or something had started sharing it around. Honestly? I was actually looking forward to seeing how many people I had fooled with it. Like I was going to read their comments and laugh at how silly they were for falling for such an obvious prank.”

“Oh my God.”

“Correct. So I only see a few things talking about how they can’t believe we’re doing this and they can’t wait to go to Chips-Ole the next day, and all was well with the world. And I stop checking it for another few hours.

“I stay up pretty late. Next time I check is 3 in the morning - Pacific time, by the way. That’s important, because when I check, the East coast is waking up. And they’re sharing the coupon. When I check again, the thing has absolutely exploded in popularity, and at first, I am loving it. I mean, I’m already counting my bonus and thinking about what I’m going to say when my boss starts praising me.

“So I pull up some of the comments to give me a quick laugh before bed. And nearly ever single one of them is some variant of ‘is this real?’ Of course not, you fools! You absolute buffoons! Do you even look at a calendar? But oh, no. Scattered in there, I start to see other comments. These ones say things like ‘it doesn’t say it’s not a valid offer’ and ‘it doesn’t say limited to one per customer’ and ‘guys, I think this is really real.’

“I was one of those people.”

“Two-thirds of the country beat you to it. Like legitimately, I think two hundred million people got there before you did. And the more I read the comments, the more it sank in that they were, you know, right. The coupon had the official Chips-Ole logo and absolutely no disclaimer saying it was fake or even anything about redemption beyond the words written on it.

“So now I’m freaking out, because this has the potential to be really bad, and I don’t know how to fix it. So what do I do? I call my boss, because this is what he wants to wake up to at 3am is his social media director giving away the entire company’s store of guacamole.”

“And what did he say?”

“Very little, actually. He started a conference call with a few other people, and they settled on a game plan pretty quick. I was there, but I wasn’t gonna say anything, are you kidding me? But do you wanna know what their plan was? Literally call the distribution warehouses across the country and beg for the rest of the avocados at a premium. They were going to pay double just to avoid the bad press. Bad press nearly killed this company once, they weren’t going to let it happen again.”

“But how many avocados could the warehouses even have?”

“Oh, not nearly enough. That’s why one of the VPs said he was going to loop the heads of all our avocado farms into the call. It was so surreal, like they were setting up a meeting of mafia dons or some nonsense like that. This guy actually tries calling like the Google phone number for these South American avocado plantations to get the farmers to fly extra shipments out to the stores or something.”

“Did any of them pick up?”

“Of course not! Because it was insane! I don’t know if anyone was thinking straight at this point, it was like a fever dream. I wanted to just hang up when they suggested that the company jet could be used as a makeshift cargo plane.”

“No they didn’t.”

“Well, they didn’t actually go with that plan, but they gave it very serious consideration. The most realistic thing was buying out our distributors and stealing all our competitors avocados. But that would take time, and we didn’t have time. It was nearly 7am on the East coast, and the poor people working in the stores were about to start preparing their salsas not knowing the hell that was going to be unleashed on them.

“Everyone knew we had to do something, but no one knew what. Eventually, someone told the communications director to let the individual store teams know what was going on, and they started calling area managers to coordinate a plan of attack. Now,” Kasey pulled her phone out before continuing. Show and tell made things so much more fun. “I actually have the email that was sent to the stores. Do you want to see it?”

Thomas couldn’t even speak; he simply nodded his head like a dog presented with a rawhide bone. Kasey slid the phone over to him, and he picked it up with trembling hands. He read the email aloud: “‘Teams, make more guac. All the guac. This is not a drill. More instructions to follow.’ This reads like a World War I telegram.”

Kasey took her phone back with a deadpan face. “The communications director resigned immediately after sending that. Meanwhile, the area managers were given the following instructions. They were to drive to every grocery store within a ten mile radius of any of their stores and buy every avocado they had in stock using their company pay card. Like no joke, buy every avocado. Buying every avocado in the country is something a child says they would do if they won the lottery, but no. That was the official solution a multi-billion dollar company came up with for a major PR disaster.

“At some point during all this, someone - I don’t even remember who - mentioned that even if we got all the avocados in the country, our current level of staffing wouldn’t be enough to even make enough guacamole to provide for the amount of people that would redeem the coupon which was, we figured, every person in America.”

“You’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds of guac.”

“Oh, easily. So what was the solution? Do you remember?”

Thomas licked his dry lips and tried to speak. “You…er…you asked-”

Kasey couldn’t wait. “That’s right. We asked the customers to do it. I think I blocked out the creation of the post itself, but I remember that same dopey cartoon avocado holding up a black hat and an apron and saying ‘Got Guac?’ and underneath, an actual offer to anybody who wanted it to come and work at Chips-Ole for a day. No money or anything, but they would get a free pound of guac for every hour they worked.

“That was really the beginning of the end right there. As soon as that post went live, the internet ran away with it. People started debating the merits of being one-pounders versus eight-pounders. They created groups specifically with the purpose of rotating through a line to accumulate hundreds of pounds of guac for a party or a banquet or literally just to have. The savvy news outlets started with headlines about ‘Chips-Oh No!’ or ‘A Burritoful Prank Backfired.’ My boss, I remember, sent me one particular one that just said ‘Is This The End?’ in these doomsday letters.”

“And…and it all really happened.”

“Of course it happened. What, did you think I was making all this behind-the-scenes stuff up? The area managers actually went out and bought every avocado they could find. There was a shortage for a week until the grocery stores could re-up. Honest-to-God citizens of this great country came out in the dozens to each store to be put into an apron and spend eight hours making guac in a professional working kitchen. It was a meme. The whole company was a meme.”

“I actually went and bought the soda.”

“I would’ve too, it was a great deal.”

“But what about the…uh…the.” Thomas actually had the decency to look embarrassed. “Drones?”

Kasey was too riled up about the story to back down now. A fiery passion entered her words. “Well, Tom, how else do you think the distributors were supposed to get all those avocados to these densely-packed inner city stores? Obviously, once the deal was struck - and it was - they tried to use the entire fleet of trucks to get the avocados out, but those were really only useful for the suburban and rural areas spiraling out from the warehouses. To get these prime avocado specimens into the city, it was simply necessary to lease every drone from every source imaginable and fly them to each store. Air-dropping avocados. That was definitely a high point of that day.

“But we did it, you know. At the end of the day, we fulfilled all the coupons and generated so much ridiculous press that the company was in a phenomenal position. Still is. But they had to fire me. Like, they had to. Almost everyone got fired, actually. Corporate was a ghost town for a few months after that.”

The entrees had gone completely cold by the time the story was finished, but Thomas was sated enough by the juicy tale he had just heard. It was truly the best, craziest firing story ever told. There was just one nagging question left on his mind. “I have to ask, though. Why didn’t you just delete the original post?”

The one question she hoped he wouldn’t have. But it was so obvious in hindsight. So obvious, even, to virtually everyone who liked, shared, and commented on the posts on that fateful day. If anyone in corporate had bothered to keep checking the posts after the conference call, they probably could have stopped it. But no, that would have been too obvious.

“We didn’t think about it,” she finally said. “We were so caught up in how to fix the disaster that it never even occurred that there didn’t have to be a disaster in the first place.”

“Well…I guess that makes sense. But damn, Kasey! I don’t even feel like telling my story now.”

“Aww, but it sounded like so much fun! Toucans are so cute, too.”

“They are. This one was named Pablo.”

“Adorable. I would honestly love to hear it.”

“That can be arranged, I expect. But unless you want dessert, it looks like our date is just about over. Unless you want to hear the story back at one of our places?”

He looked so innocent, so eager, so…still present after hearing the most embarrassing moment of Kasey’s life. Maybe, Kasey thought to herself as she asked for the check, something good was going to come from getting fired after all.