Is Worth One In Each Hand
Something like that. Or was it words? Perhaps birds? O it's not material to the case. What I wanted to recount were the hilarious consequences of a penny-pinching manager trying to cut financial corners, as entertainingly recounted on Youtube's Reddit 'Malicious Compliance' channel. We shall come back to spears, don't you worry. Art!
Sir Edward Spears
Okay, so the Original Poster on Reddit had a part-time job that required him to travel to patients who required oxygen, assessing their status and their gas equipment, which obviously took a long time and involved mileage payments. We are talking about South Canada here, folks, where a hundred miles is no great distance. Enter new manager, looking to lower overheads, increase profits and make himself look a shining star. Quality? Service? Mere words! Art!
The type of kit in use
Grasping Manager - for thus have I dubbed him - decided that the drivers who delivered resupply to the patients could check their machinery's status, and that OP would instead do a phone interview with said patients. This would cut out all those expensive mileage payments.
However - and you were expecting that, weren't you? - it wasn't quite that simple, because the phone calls and discussions had to be entered with a particular code on the database to 1) ensure they were processed properly and 2) ensure that OP got paid appropriately. Art!
This kind of breakdown*
"Use the code 'Phone Consultation' " ordered GM, opting for expediency as this seemed the closest equivalent code, which what happens when you don't follow through on your admin. OP nodded, went away and subsequently did 34 'Phone Consultations', then submitted this to payroll.
Shortly after getting paid, HR called him back and asked why a part-timer on an hourly rate was getting more than people at executive level? For the code 'Phone Consultation' was charged at £96.00 per call, and he'd thus clocked up £3,200 in fees for his phone work. He explained. As OP put it, he was there when a fleet of cars from Corporate came sweeping in, and GM was fired on the spot. If there were other people also doing OP's work, then their wage-bill can have been nothing less than eye-watering. So you might say GM grasped his spear firmly, took aim, let fly - and impaled himself in the foot. Less noisy than being shot, I suppose.
Still painful, though.
Right, time for a round of Javelin Catching. Motley, you're it!
Meanwhile, Back At The Mansion ...
It being Father's Day, Darling Daughter has arrived, bearing gifts as well as herself, and the pair of us had a good natter on the journey from deepest Northenden. Art!
Conrad approves of the short hair, and that it is mostly DD's natural colour. As for the present - it came with a wax seal, which of course - obviously! - I took a picture of, as you don't get many of those in the mail. Art!
And finally the present -
Note uppermost pair with a light-house in the design. How very apt! And no, I am not going to go back to Pictures and edit it so that it gets rotated through 90 degrees anti-clockwise. Too much work. Turn your head instead.
About Spears Again
Technically this concerns the South Canadian city of Gary, which festers in the state of Indiana. Why 'Spears'? Because the name 'Gary' means 'spear', and this is relevant because casual travellers through the city feel that, at any moment, feral locals will emerge from the shadows and attack with long pointy sticks**. Art!
Bustling downtown Gary
The thing about Gary was that it depended exclusively upon the steel industry, and when this got scuppered from the Sixties onward, people moved out, unemployment soared and businesses went bust. Thus you get a city with one-third of all properties abandoned. Art!
Not a lot going on 
A lot going on, just in the wrong way
Another Reddit moment for you. OP explained how he pulled off the motorway ('Freeway' for you South Canadians out there) to get petrol at a garage in Indiana. The manager came out and said: "Son, get back on the freeway, it's not safe here'. OP obliged and is still alive. Given that the city's population has fallen by over 50% and there appears to be no end in sight, we may yet see Gary becoming ghostly still more. Art!
Looks like a Damien Hirst
If I Were To Say 'Fire-bote'
Then 95% of you would suck your teeth, convinced that the senile old duffer had finally gone too far and - then you'd remember the Remote Nuclear Detonator and keep lips firmly shut. 3% would blurt out what they perceive, and mysteriously vanish, and 2% would guess that this is legal medieval, a term from "Sir Nigel".
"FIRE-BOTE": Nothing to do with fire-boats, with which Perfidious Albion used to harass hostile fleets in their home ports. Rather, it refers to the right of a tenant to take and use the wood present on his land for use as firewood in his home, as well as said wood itself. Art!
The less-destructive modern equivalent.
"HOUSE-BOTE": No, not those things that infest the urban canals of Amsterdam. No, this term is similar to that above, except it refers to wood and timber entitlement for repairs to houses and other properties. One supposes that the difference is that any old twig, leaf, branch or root can be used as firewood, whereas timber used in construction has to be a fair size and structurally sound.
Inevitably, all I could find. Sorry.
"HIDAGE": No! Not what women do with their makeup. Bad audience! Naughty audience! No biscuit for you! <sighs heavily in martyred fashion>. No, this is another variety of tax from the Dark Ages, where the taxation rate for a piece of land would depend on the number of hides that could be raised upon it. Thus, a piece of barren, swampy moorland would rate lower in hidage than the green and fertile fields of Sussex***.
And with that, we are done!Again, not a lot going on
* Purely notional. You can't copy these details and empty some unfortunate's bank account. And don't look so disappointed!
** Guns and bullets are expensive.
*** Probably. Who am I, the medieval tax expert?
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