You work for AIG and you play by the rules, and the rules are there aren’t any rules.

You slice and you dice and you make money, tons of money.

You know something isn’t right, but you don’t care what’s wrong.

You wake up one day to find things have gone bad, real bad.

You get called into the boss’s office.

You are told you have cost the company billions of dollars, trashed its reputation, contributed to the worldwide collapse of the financial system.

You figure you are toast, but instead you are toasted.

You are offered a multimillion-dollar bonus if you will please agree to stay on.

You do a reality check.

You don’t seem to be hallucinating.

So …

I think we can all agree that the sharks who created the mess at AIG shouldn’t be getting million-dollar bonuses.

The question then becomes, what should they get?

The chair comes to mind – but that might just be the anger talking.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, suggested the company’s top managers might consider apologizing, and then commit suicide. I don’t know, it’s a good idea and all, but I think it would be pretty hard to talk them into that.

Torture is another option, although I guess we’re not doing that sort of thing anymore. Too bad, because I had this idea about strapping some of these people down, covering their faces with clothes, and pouring expensive champagne over their nose and mouth.

I call this Dom Perignon boarding, a technique intended to create the sensation of going to bed with a severe case of the whirlies after a night on the town.

On his show one night, Steven Colbert advocated getting a group of people with pitchforks together and hunting the bonus babies down. He probably got this idea from an old Frankenstein movie, in which case we are going to need torches too.

A reader sent me an e-mail proposing we go back to tar-and-feathering. Hmmm. I have to admit the thought of suspending suspender-wearing AIG executives from poles and parading them through the streets is very appealing. However, it may not be practical.

For one thing, heating up a halfway decent vat of tar probably violates a bunch of clear-air laws, and then there is the matter of where you would get the feathers.

That said, the tar-and-feather folks may be on to something as far as public humiliation goes. Why don’t we out the major bonus perps, maybe put their photos up in post offices, or better still, on milk cartons?

Shame is powerful, unless you are shameless.