Food For Thought

Yes, Literally

This is another cautionary tale of managers who get promoted above their competence level, from Youtube and South Canada.

     Original Poster was a kitchen manager at a very popular restaurant, which meant they were always busy and thus had lots of admin to do.  You have to keep track of stock levels, rate of usage, deadlines for orders, how long deliveries take, that sort of thing, and they ordered food in twice a week.  Art!

     Here an aside.  I've worked with someone who had worked with Gordon, and his Evil Chef persona is just that, a persona; in real life he's a good-natured softy.

     ANYWAY OP had developed a spreadsheet system to keep track of food orders and make his job easier, which ran efficiently and effectively for years.

     You can guess where this is going.  Enter a new District Manager, who is insufferably rigid in how he wants things to run.  He sees OP using his spreadsheet and forbids it's use because it's not 'company sanctioned'.  OP argues that it saves him 2 hours in the ordering process - DM not persuaded.  It has to go.  Not only that, DM leaned on the restaurant's General Manager (i.e. one management level lower than the DM), who threw OP under the bus and blurted out all the other short cuts they had.   Also forbidden.  Art!

"Work, slaves, work!"

     OP, being sly and vindictive, saved all his spreadsheets and not only did he password-protect them, he also added a self-destruct code, which would activate if anyone tried to hack his programs.  It would delete everything from the spreadsheets.  After all, they're non-compliant, so nobody would ever need to access them, would they?

     They also saw the writing on the wall and gave their 6 weeks notice, leading to the DM turning up and promptly firing OP the next day.  Yes, this could have been taken as retaliatory action and grounds for going to the State Labour Board, but OP knew that revenge was coming, because ordering day was only 48 hours off.  Art!

     The day after his being fired, the General Manager had to swallow his pride and call OP to get the password for his spreadsheets, because nobody else in the whole restaurant had any idea how to do ordering without the spreadsheets.  And the spreadsheets were password-protected.  And  only OP knew the password.

     OP refused, saying that the DM had to call to get the password.  DM, who was probably sitting across from GM when he made that call, never got in touch, because that would be admitting he was a giant bottomclown.  Other managers and the DM from a different region tried calling, they even called OP's wife - no solution, because OP wasn't budging.  Perhaps DM hoped that if he clicked his magic red shoes together, everything would magically correct itself.

     Nope.  Perhaps the pixie dust had worn off?

     They - the GM and DM - tried to guess the password, and after three failed attempts all the contents of all the spreadsheets were deleted.

     Ooops.  Art!

Lots of lovely empty cells

     OP later found out that the GM had to spend 4 hours making out the food order, and had to pay a considerable late fee on top of that.  The DM got demoted, so they had to slum it with the people they'd been a bottomhole to.  I wonder how long it was until they 'Left to pursue other business interests"?

     Moral of the story: if it's not broken or compliant turn a blind eye.  Art!

Lord Horatio agrees with Conrad

Petrodollar Doom

In today's earlier post, I mentioned at the very end about a Joe Blogs vlog concerning the Ruffians cutting their oil production by 500,000 barrels per day, with their usual lies about why it was being done.  They claimed it was due to the oil price-cap imposed by 'The West', when in fact they are selling their crude oil at below this price, so it hasn't even been tested yet.  Art!

     

And this was 5 months  ago before any price-cap

    As Joe pointed out, cutting production by this amount is going to impact the Ruffian movement of crude oil in their pipelines, because you cannot simply turn oil production on or off like a tap over the kitchen sink.  Due to the extremely hostile environment a lot of this oil comes from, if you turn off a well, you lose it.  The Ruffians have a total of 25 huge refineries, who will have to ramp down production and conceivably lay off staff, which again has a knock-on effect on their economy.  Art!

     These refineries were built, run and maintained by Western companies, who of course pulled out of Ruffia last year.  If anything goes wrong, it's not getting fixed.  The Ruffians lack the technical know-how, not to mention the spare parts, to fix what's broken.

     Several refineries close to Ukraine have suffered mysterious missile and drone strikes, resulting in colossal damage.  What you see above is a refinery in Nizhny-Novgorod burning, a refinery nowhere near Ukraine.  Art!

     This might be a simple industrial accident.  Might.  Because there are plenty of Ruffians who loathe Peter The Average ...

Lord Peter's Very Cross Word

Don't fret, pet, we're nearly done with our fine-toothed comb analysis of the hideous thing.  Then we can get back to normality and Remote Nuclear Detonating Codeword compilers, who have grown sloppy and careless THEY'LL LEARN O YES THEY WILL once this is completed.  Ol' Dotty's next clue is: "Without a miracle it cannot be - At this point, Solver, bid him pray for thee! (5)."

     I think I might have gotten this one.  The solution?  SAINT.

     As I recall, to become a saint means a miracle has to have been performed?  Art!

     Of course - obviously! - today the RSPCA would have him up on animal cruelty charges.

"The Sea Of Sand"

Nobody has said in the Comments that they hate or dislike this fan-fiction, so you must all think it's awesome so I'll keep on posting it.

     We have jumped back to the Field Supply Depot at Mersa Martuba, the Doctor having finished gimmicking up his pocket nuclear weapon.

‘Mine own executioner,’ he murmured, folding arms and looking at the improvised weapon.  He had needed to leave the hut several times in order to obtain stand-in material for the “device” – foil for a reflective inner surface, cordite carefully arrayed in a spherical layer, signal wire between the two hundred and sixteen blank .303 cartridges on the outside of the football-sized object.

          Crude, hurried and liable to misfire, it was still the most potent single explosive object this world had ever seen.  Trinity would not take place for another four years; the thousand-bomber raids over Europe were still years away; the suitcase-sized Atomic Demolition Munition was decades away.  The Doctor’s “football” sat on the tarpaulin, with a yield he estimated as between (at best) 0.225 kilotonnes and (worst case, crossed fingers not working) 0.015 kilotonnes. 

          ‘Looks like a Dada hairdryer,’ observed an irreverent Sarah, looking in through the blanket that overhung the doorway.

          ‘This “hairdryer” would give a permanent wave truly permanent in nature.  Permanent meaning for ever.’

          ‘Ah,’ replied Sarah, well-versed in when her mentor was being serious. As he was now.  ‘Your home-made atomic bomb?’  A silent nod proved her correct.  ‘So all we have to do is get it to the dig and – hey presto! – no invasion?’  She clapped her hands together to emphasise the “hey presto”.

     Sarah!  DO be careful when around a crude and improvised nuclear warhead!  Loud hand gestures not recommended.

Finally -

Well, better get the savoury Korean pancake on the go.  I've got all the ingredients ready, now I just need to find some scales, as the electronic ones have gone walkies.  

Tally ho!