Meredith C. Carroll: The 2017 ‘You Had One Job’ awards
Muck Off
Aspen’s got a lot going on. Yet despite being busy with Mariah Carey sightings upstairs at Carl’s Pharmacy and wondering time and again how not everyone grasps that Galena is a one-way street starting at Hopkins Avenue, there’s no excuse for failing to keep its eye on the prize. Following are the winners of the fourth annual “You Had One Job” awards:
The bicycle rack at City Market
A bicycle rack’s one job is to hold bicycles upright. However, the City Market bike rack doesn’t hold bikes, but rather stands there indifferently as bikes entrusted to its care fall unceremoniously to the ground. This is a textbook one-job fail.
Ivanka Trump
Your one job was to give hope to the country — the majority of whom voted against your father — that our current president’s turn in the Oval Office wouldn’t sentence humanity to the same fate of General Zod, Ursa and Non in Superman II, which is to say: trapped helplessly in the Phantom Zone for all of eternity. Like virtually everyone else who started working at the White House on Jan. 20, you’ve also failed hugely at your one job. Sad!
Certain inmates at the Pitkin County Jail
Your one new job is to act chastely while serving time for your wrongdoings. Your one job while locked up is not to get it on as if you’re Cinderella and Prince Charming and the time is 11:56 p.m. Doing the right thing when no one is watching is seemingly not your strong suit, hence your current address. But doing the wrong thing when no one is watching and you’re already in jail is utterly counterproductive to your aforementioned one new job.
Construction Fence Wrapping
Presumably your one job is to reduce noise and visual clutter. However, what appears to be a filthy blanket formerly abandoned in the back of a moving truck that’s now being used to try and disguise construction debris fools no one. And whatever that thing is wrapped around the Hotel Jerome construction belongs, in fact, on the underside of an abandoned bridge that’s remarkable only for the astonishing pile of trash accumulating near it. You’re not even remotely pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes with your one job.
Certain Aspen developers
“If you build it, they will come” was a line from a Kevin Costner movie. Unlike the movie magic that produced baseball players from Iowa cornfields, though, you are neither Kevin Costner nor magic and cannot sit around waiting for tenants to wondrously occupy your buildings. Just because you made your money by selling a single penthouse, your one job isn’t done if the ground-floor retail spaces remain vacant.
Starbucks Unicorn Frappucinos
Was the world clamoring for a vomitous mixture of mango creme, noxious sparkles, sour blue nuclear waste and mermaid sharts? No, it wasn’t. Had they been, they’d have finally unzipped the backpacks their children brought home on the last day of school before winter break. Your one job is to make coffee. Enough already with trying to groom tween girls into taking up residence in your crack den.
Lee Mulcahy
You had one job: to move out of your employee-housing unit, per, like, every rule, ruling, philosophical and moral perspective. You enjoy art. You volunteer. You antagonize. All of those are legitimate pursuits (although the particular way you do the last one is iffy at best), but none of them qualify you to remain in a couple thousand square feet of living space when you don’t generate a paycheck from within county lines. Local employees who win the right to purchase land and homes from the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority agree at the outset to contribute financially to the community, not be an ongoing and intentional thorn in its side. While counting other people’s money is a slippery slope, if you can afford to exist solely donating your time and spending untold sums mounting legal challenges against everything that moves, then you can afford a home on the free market.
Certain people who inhabit downtown penthouses
Sigh. Has our community learned nothing from the great Natalia Shvachko and Michael Sedoy debacle of the early to mid 2010s? If you choose to purchase a fancy-schmancy residence above an exercise studio and restaurant in the downtown core, both of which existed long before the ink dried on your deed, stop playing victim when you hear noises like people and music. Inability to revel in your multi-gazillion dollar pad just because people frequent the businesses underneath it that are, in fact, largely responsibly for making the neighborhood you settled on a desirable area in the first place, is a classic one-job fail.
Money Belts
Your one job is to hold money in a belt attached to a human. If you hold the money but allow the belt to separate from its human, then you have failed at your one job.
CC: the money belt containing $10,000 cash that fell off the 79-year-old man skiing Aspen Mountain earlier this month.
Bonus: the You Had One Job — That You Actually Did Really Well awards: The team of Aspen Skiing Co. employees who found the errant money belt containing $10,000 cash and ensured it’s safe return. And the Skico snowmaking folks who have dazzlingly salvaged the early season despite little cooperation from Mother Nature.
Follow Meredith Carroll on Twitter @MCCarroll. More at MeredithCarroll.com.
