How To Know When You’ve Made It, or The Royal Flush

As longtime contributors to Al Gore’s World-Wide Web, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” often ask ourselves a variation on the following query: How will we know when we have made the “weblogging” big time?

Will it be when Glenn Reynolds, the Internet’s famed Instapundit, is strong-armed into “linking” to you? Will it be when John Podhoretz, scion of neoconservative royalty and a brilliant political critic, speaks well of your “weblog”? Or, alternatively, will it be when you get thousands upon thousands of "hits" each day?

Well, dear reader, we’ve mastered the first two feats we mentioned. But, in regard to the third, we must say that—so far—we’ve come up a bit short. And this is the case even though the dutiful parents of the crack young staff—who number, of course, in the low thousands—inform us that they read our humble musings with regularity.

Frankly, however, a few recent conversations with confidantes of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” has led us to believe that our thus-far illusory hunt for manifold readers won’t actually lead us to the promise land of “webloggery.” In fact, we have a hunch that we’re going about our mad dash for e-fame all wrong.

We say this, dear reader, because an alternative approach to “making it big” was floated in our humble direction, and we must say that it makes a heck of a lot of sense. Further, it hasn’t got anything to do with “hits,” “links,” or—better still—Arianna Huffington.

Rather, the sure sign of having made it is this: Possessing your own private bathroom at work. Yeah, you read that right—having your own bathroom. Laugh all you want, dear reader, but we sincerely believe that this is the true test of a human being’s worth. And, of course, the only reason you’re guffawing at us is because you ain’t got your own private bathroom at the office. So there—loser.

Now, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” feel your pain, cramped as we are in lifeless cubicles. Sure, we can doll up our workspaces with fun little pictures of cats playing with yarn. But this doesn’t remedy the problem: We still inhabit a work environment that would make a monkey hurl feces.

Man, we would kill for a private bathroom at the office. In fact, we would gladly trade a private office for a private bathroom. We’d just work away on the computer whilst sitting on the john all day, happily typing in our very own water closet. No weird fellow employees who don’t flush. No strange guys checking themselves out in the mirror for hours on end. No, just us in our own lou.

Ah: Happiness is a private bathroom. Finally we have a goal in life.