Hi, Bill Corbett here. You know, friends and family congratulate me on having such a great job. And they are certainly right - to a point. What they don't understand is that I wasn't hired by Best Brains, Inc. to show up here everyday. No sir. I was hired by Crow himself - after an excruciating and sometimes physically painful screening process. (The cat'o'nine tails seemed a bit much to me.)

I am in fact on Crow's personal payroll. I am here to make life easier for Crow, as he has too many greater responsibilites to attend to. I think of myself as the Jeeves to his Wooster, even though Crow tells me "Don't dignify yourself with t he comparison!" He's only joking, of course. Then he yells and curses and spits on the floor in front of me, but he's still just kidding, I think.

It's a tough job, being a lowly mud-crawling lackey (his preferred term) to an ingenious but temperamental small gold robot. Let me share a sampling of the duties I have to Crow (or, as he instructs me to call him, Your Excellency) during the course of the week:

• Fix his favorite breakfast: Fruit Loops with Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee Beef Gravy.
• Drive him to the dog track.
• Help him with his times tables.
• Read the entire medical encyclopedia to him, just for kicks.
• Perform hand puppet shows that he can boo loudly and abusively.
• Oil his beak to keep him in fighting trim for his bouts with bad movies..
• Rent great classic movies so he can shout out highly complimentary remarks. ("Everyone needs to unwind", he says.)
• Be the designated driver when he goes out pub-crawling with Servo. (Yes, I have to wait in the car.)
• Fix his favorite lunch: cranberry cheese melt with Altoids.
• Drive him to the dog track again. Lend him lots of money.
• Ghost-write his scandal-soaked, tell-it-all, sex-filled autobiography.
• Maintain his Kim Catrall correspondence in good order (see item directly above).
• Call and try to get the Dalai Lama to endorse his new line of high-tech whoopee cushions.
• Help him put on his disguise to avoid celebrity gawkers in public. He puts on a Trent Lott mask, and does nothing to disguise his body, so people are generally just frightened.
• Fetch his spear gun and Bowie knife for him and then wait in the broom closet until he tells me I can come out. (I don't know what this is about, and I don't dare ask.)
• Dutifully try to finish off the fights he picks in bikers' bars, even though it means frequent hospitalization for me.
• Actively seek out and call foreign dignitaries who will have him as a pampered celebrity guest. ("Ruthless dictators are the funnest", says he.)
• Fix his favorite dinner: chateau briand, white asparagus, roasted new potatoes and caeser salad. And oh yeah, with Fluff all over everything.
• Review the day with him to see what I've done wrong, very wrong.
• Tuck him in to his waterbed with his Harold Robbins novels, a bottle of single malt scotch, and a big handful of Cuban cigars.

It is a good life indeed, if challenging and a bit unhealthy. But if I can be Holmes to his Watson, then... [Ooops. Sorry. Crow just saw me typing this, and finds this analogy a bit off. Correction:] If I can be a tubeworm to his Olympian God, the n I'm happy.

Gotta go. Time to polish his scrimshaw collection.