No! That Is NOT A Typo
What, you think keyboards stutter? Nope. Your Humble Scribe was reading a Malicious Compliance story on Youtube and came across the term 'Bus factor', which was a new one to me. It's nothing to do with -
Perhaps it would be better to go over the MalCom story first to establish the background. Reading between the lines, the Original Poster works at a South Canadian university, where he had been a supervisor over three technical specialists in a very, very niche position. Art!
Pshaw. As if that looks as impressive as the universities in This Sceptred Isle!
ANYWAY OP's boss came from the school of manglement, and thanks to his cutting budgets and not delivering on pay raises, all 3 of OP's staff quit, one after the other. Boss then decides OP can't be a supervisor any longer, demotes him and rolls his job and department into another, where he has two supervisors who had absolutely 0% knowledge of what his work entailed. Boss also said OP had to revert to his old contract.
Cue MalCom. OP is by technical qualification no dummy, and checks over his 7-year old contract. He finds Interesting Clauses.
1) He is officially permitted to take private mandated work outside the university.
2) As a retained firefighter, who gives training lessons, he is regarded as holding public office.
3) He gets an extra 15 days holiday. This is big news in South Canada, employers HATE granting leave to employees.
4) His demotion and drop in pay grade needs to be reviewed by a state HR board to determine his appropriate level of pay. Art!
(We don't have sound so just imagine him cackling in glee)
As he typed on-screen: The fallout. Those extra 15 days of leave? He used them for his firefighter training sessions. He took on private work that earned him 5 times his normal salary. The state HR board's pay review put his salary back to almost that of his supervisory position. Remember when I said this was a very, very niche position? It remained so, and his new managers couldn't fill any of the 3 empty positions.
This is where the 'Bus factor' comes in. OP states that this is "One". When he fell ill there was nobody else to do his work so the university lost out on an opportunity to obtain £23,000 in funding. Truly, manglement at it's most shining and MalCom of the very highest order.
Technically the Bus Factor is the number of critical employees who would have to be absent from work for that business to fail, because employees have not been cross-trained. If it is One then your business model has failed, because (this is how the term got created) what if that person is hit by a bus on the way to work*? Art!
Then there's these pikers ...
Conrad can pretty confidently assert that the Bus Factor for First Bus stands at Two. These are their headquarters admin staff. One is the official Haruspex, who inspects the entrails of goats in order to arrange budgets, projections, investment and the like. The other is the Jaculum Ludio, who throws darts at a board in order to work out timetables. If either of these two were hit by a meteorite (First Bus aren't reliable enough) then the whole organisation would grind to a halt. Well, more of a halt than usual. Art!
"Right, we need to cancel the 83 service"
Now, Motley, I've been disassembling that Minuteman III we - er - 'borrowed' and the manual says that this is a 'Bus'. Not sure if that's a typo or not. Art
Passenger capacity: questionable
Conrad: Still Frothing With Rancour
It is my default state, after all. Those Codeword compilers have been getting rather above their station, as you will surely see.
"PANEGYRIC": YOU WHAT! For those amongst you who are unaware, no this is nothing to do with cooking or gyroscopes. Conrad already knows what it means because I am well-read** with a retentive memory. My Collins Concise defines it as either an eulogy or a public commendation. It went out of use in the nineteenth century. Art!
Zeuglodon. Close enough to eulogy.
"CYST": O great, a four-letter word with no vowels. How is that fair? "Any abnormal membranous sac containing fluid". It sounds far too disgusting to have an illustration of same. Art!
Moschops. Why not?
"MAGI": I suppose we should be grateful they didn't use the singular MAGUS as that would have been even harder to solve. Sorcerers or magicians from ancient times, derived - hurray! - from the Persian 'Magus' meaning 'magician'. Come on, a four-letter word that ends in "I"? <mutters, grumbles and hits the Remote Nuclear Detonator>
More Of Our Thrilling Fan-Fic
"The Sea Of Sand" in case you'd forgotten. When we left, an Italian raiding party had stormed the British Forward Supply depot at Mersa Martuba.
Sarah winced in alarm as the machine-gun mounted behind her began to fire, lighting up the car with each shot. Dominione fired another flare, shouting in Italian at the radio operator.
Please let it stop! prayed Sarah, her stomach clenched in anxiety.
Silently, and stealthily, helpfully concealed by the darkness that came early to the sand basin, the Doctor slid down the great stone steps of The Temple. He aimed for the canvas shelter that Albert and the Professor had sought refuge, dropping to the sand and crawling beneath it undetected.
Having seen the aliens sweep the trans-mat platform clear, he knew there was little time until they began to use it. One transmission from this station to the receiving one, a debrief of the new arrival and then within hours there'd be two-way traffic in operation.
Using his sonic screwdriver to light up the dank hiding-place, he sought and found what he was looking for - the tin of sugar used to make tea. The kettle still held a little water, too.
"Excellent!" he beamed to himself. The sugar went into water and he gently began to agitate it with the sonic screwdriver, on a low-frequency infrasonic setting. In less than a minute the mixture resembled glue.
Hmmm not making a brew, wonder what he's up to?
Remember "The Cracks Are Showing"?
You should do, I only posted it yesteryon. I didn't put down all the metrics that Joe expounded on, as an Intro isn't supposed to take up the whole of BOOJUM! but I thought I'd add them in here. Joe's 'Summary And Conclusion' made the point that Western sanctions are hitting hard across the whole of the Ruffian economy, not merely one or two sectors. Art!
Ruffian economy clucked
99% of Ruffian poultry and 30% of cattle relied on imported foodstuffs. Also the Ruffians were dependent on Western-supplied seeds and fish-foods. Now they'll have to scale back.
Another unpleasant metric for Bloaty Gas Tout is that 70% of all machine-tools were imported. You need these in order to make machinery. Art!
Russian precision machine-tool
Drugs (legal ones that is) - Conrad unsure how to spell 'Pharm etc' - another big fail as 80% of this market relied on imported materials to create a finished pharma-product. We've already looked at how badly the aviation sector is affected; 95% of all passengers were carried on Airbus or Boeing airframes, that can no longer be maintained or repaired. It's going to get to the point where flying on a Ruffian airliner is dicing with death.
Finally -
I am currently reading 'Consider Phlebas', a space-opera by Iain M. Banks and a plot point is niggling at me. One of the protagonists has had a finger bitten off, and after a few more events nothing more has been mentioned about this missing finger. Conrad needs to know if this character got medical treatment, or even a replacement finger? Nobody else has mentioned this debatable dactyl. It's going to bother me until I finish the novel. Art!
* Or a meteorite, or a swarm of weaselnanas; any random event.
** Murder-mysteries and sci-fi count as 'well-read'. right?
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