If you are looking for a relief from reality, a rose-colored view of the world, blithe inspiration, and sappy-happy endings, Shafted, Cautionary Tales In Business does not fall into this genre. Shafted tales will not lift your spirits, put a tear on your cheek, restore your faith in human nature, or give you goose-bumps of sweetness and light. They will, more likely, piss you off and make you angry and irritable for the rest of the day, if not the week. Shafted offers you the other side of the coin; un-sweetened, dismayingly true, unleavened stories from real life. Shafted unapologetically takes off your rose-colored glasses and exposes the egregious behavior generated by the mean-spirited, pernicious, selfish, arrogant, insidious and greedy side of human behavior. Shafted is the antidote to Chicken Soup.Shafted tales are not framed in a judgmental, didactic, lecture-like mode that bemoans the loss of high moral standards and Golden Rule ethics of yesteryear. Shafted just tells the stories straight up and true, and lets you come to your own conclusions. Shafted does not make excuses for, or try to defend the behavior and motivations of black hats, villains, liars and crooks, or regular folk who just occasionally misbehave. Neither does it discuss ways and means to avoid being shafted, which has already been covered, and continues to be covered, by a slew of other vehicles and media.The premise of Shafted was first recorded in the Ancient Greek and Roman Empires as the proverb, Praemonitus, praemunitus, or Forewarned is forearmed. But it probably goes back even further, to the earliest clans and communities of Neanderthal and other archaic homo sapiens of Eurasia, who were, no doubt, subject to the earliest iterations of human nature, which even then must have enabled those who were forewarned and forearmed to anticipate, survive, and ultimately - prevail!
