Nnnnooooooo!! Say it ain't so, Fred; say it ain't so!

In case you haven't figured it out yet, we're still mired firmly in the Denial stage of grief regarding Apple's announcement that Fred "Fists of Fiscal Rage" Anderson is slated to retire from his long-held post as the company's Chief Financial Officer effective June 1st. When faithful viewer mrmgraphics first broke the news to us, we darn near choked to death on a Pop-Tart. (Yes, all three of us. On one Pop-Tart. That's how shocked we were.) That was roughly eighteen hours ago, but it's been a really busy day, so we're a little behind and still slogging through Denial; we're hoping that we ought to be able to catch up by powering through Anger, Bargaining, and Depression over the weekend to arrive fully at Acceptance by Monday. Provided there isn't much good on TV, of course.

That said, it's sort of hard to say anything about Fred's departure when we're still in Denial over the fact that he's leaving in the first place, which puts us in a bit of a pickle. We can say, however, that if Fred were ever to leave (as if), we'd be really sorry to see him go-- because even though he's "just the money guy," by virtue of his analyst conference calls every quarter, he's sneakily managed to become the Public Voice of Apple more than anyone in the company aside from Steve Himself. In such an unlikely scenario, we'd seriously miss his take on Apple's numbers every three months, and especially the way he manages to repeat the phrase "we don't comment on unannounced products" in response to dumb analyst questions about forty times in the space of half an hour while always remaining technically polite by just barely masking his contempt for the irretrievably stupid. Ah, good times.

Moreover, if Anderson were seriously going to retire on June 1st (yeah, right), we suppose we'd count our blessings and be thankful that at least we'd have one more Fredular conference call before he hypothetically left his post; maybe he'd go out with a bang during the Q&A and finally call some of those analysts by certain names Apple would have to bleep out in the QuickTime rebroadcast. And we'd also try to be optimistic about Fred's alleged replacement, Peter Oppenheimer, whom Apple has been "grooming" for the job for four years, now-- if it were true, which it's not, because nobody really plans things four years in advance. If they did, the fact that we can't schedule anything further out than dinnertime would imply that there's something wrong with us, which is, of course, utterly preposterous. Case closed.

But then again, if he were leaving (which he isn't), we could at least take solace in Apple's stated intention to stick Fred on the company's board of directors, where he could still do some good. We'll try to keep that in mind when we punch through Denial into Anger-- which would, of course, only occur if Fred were retiring in June, which he isn't, so we won't.

Sheesh, Denial is exhausting. We should have stretched first.