FROM: Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—Washington
RE: Your request
You have placed your faith in the incorrect receptacle. Please remove your faith and place it in the designated Faith Bin at your nearest participating retailer. You can also place your faith in the Online Faith Bin at www.onlinefaithbin.com (a brief registration process will be necessary). If you have neither a nearby participating retailer nor Internet access, or if you live in Goldfield, Nevada, but would like to have lived in Paris, if only things with Luc had worked out better, you can write to us at:
Nearest Participating Retailer
ATTN: Faith-placing dept.
Puyallup, WA. 98371
Please include, on a 3x5 ruled note-card, your name, age, address, medical condition (including but not restricted to "Perfectly fine, but feeling a bit blue all the same"), the nature of your request and, if you have an ambiguous name, such as "Tracy," your gender. In addition, the Agency asks that you include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Your faith is important to us. If you have lost your faith, please alert our customer service department. If Luc promised you better than this, and you are still waiting for Luc to make good on his promises, we will not be able to help you. Your faith in Luc was clearly misplaced. We can help you redirect your faith, but only if you are willing to have it redirected. Let's face it: Luc was clearly out of your league.
One note: We have received, of late, numerous requests from correspondents who would like to place their faith in themselves. Please be advised that we do not process such requests, because we find such requests essentially meaningless. If faith is belief, then such requests amount to a plea for us to help you believe in yourself. If we take "believe" to mean "accept the existence of," it is quite clear that you should already believe in yourself. If you do not accept the existence of yourself, we recommend that you touch a hot stove with your extended index finger. See! You exist! Believe in yourself! If, however, you find that the contact between the hot stove and your extended index finger was not painful, we concede the point: You do not exist, and therefore your lack of faith in yourself is well- founded.
We have been flooded with correspondence regarding situations in which individuals, having been dismissed from their places of work, claim to have lost their faith in themselves. These claims have not been properly filed. If you are among these petitioners, be advised that you have not lost faith in yourself; your supervisor has lost faith in you. As a result, you may have lost faith in your supervisor. This is an entirely different matter than losing faith in yourself, since you still have yourself, plain as day, sitting there in your pajamas on your sofa in your twice-mortgaged town home. What you do not have is your job. We suggest you first ask your former employer to look around your old cubicle for your faith. If your former employer finds your faith, we further suggest that you have him or her to forward it to a new place of employment, together with a well-written letter of recommendation, so that you and your faith can be reunited.
Again, we can take no responsibility if, in some way, Luc comes into the picture. If Luc was your supervisor, you should never have gotten involved with him in the first place.
And, as always, we advise a healthy skepticism when dealing with the French.