A Case Of Being Too Good

Yes, You Can Be Too Good At Your Job

Usually, in the workplace this means you do the work of two or three other people but still only get paid your wage, with the occasional pat on the back about what a team player you are.  In hundreds of stories on Quora and Youtube Reddit tales, this kind of burden eventually causes the Most Valuable Player to find work elsewhere, meaning that management now have to pay three salaries instead of one, because they were too cheap to agree a pay rise.  Art!

Piaggio surveillance drone

     Because I can, before you ask.  And showing an empty desk hardly qualifies as 'entertaining', does it?

     <very long hiatus as Conrad goes for an interview>

     Here an aside.  In the days of the Sinister Union, workers had 'norms' that they needed to hit, based on statistics and performance and lies.  Typical Sinister stuff.  Art!

     Enter Alexei Stakhanov.  He was a miner who dug coal, and ALLEGEDLY IN FLASHING NEON LETTERS SIX FEET TALL he dug 106 tons of coal during his six-hour shift, or fourteen times the 'norm'.  In reality it was all utter guff, as he'd had loads of assistants to help him, but the mining bosses could then point at Stakky and say "Look what he did - now you will, too!"  Pats on the back all round, he gets a town named after him, which is in Ukraine, and they change it back to "Avdiivka" in 2018 because stuff Communism.

     ANYWAY, back to today's Intro.  The Original Poster worked as an Assistant General Manager at an events/restaurant venue, being responsible for co-ordinating and liaison between the catering, events and music sides of the business, working 60 hour weeks in lieu of three people but loving the job.  Art!

     Enter a new General Manager.  Initially they got on quite well with OP, a harmony that didn't last, as she got snappier and less pleasant with each passing day.  OP was mystified at this treatment and, when he asked about it, was called into a meeting where a shopping list of nonsense 'offences' were read out to him.  You know, stuff like "Wore a shirt with offensively large buttons"  "Breathing in a public place"  "Having knees".  She warned him that he ought to think about giving his two weeks notice.

     OP came to find out that the paranoid GM was convinced he was after her job.  Art!

Job.  The Biblical bloke.

     He wasn't.  However, he'd had enough, so he applied for another job and got it, and he only gave one week's notice since the HR handbook allowed this if an employee felt that they had been unfairly harassed or threatened.  Following protocol he informed the business's Chief Operations Officer (who dealt with HR) by e-mail, knowing full well that he was on holiday in Greece and wouldn't get the message.

     The nasty smelly stuff hit the rotary air-mover a week later in a mandatory meeting where all the staff were assembled, and where the GM was maligning and slandering OP.  She claimed they were all out of Brut and what was he going to do about it?  Art!

     "Nothing!" was his cheerful reply.  "I finished here fifteen minutes ago.  Goodbye!"

     GM makes Surprised Pikachu Face.  She gets torn a new one by the COO when he gets back from holiday, for the stupid list of offences, losing a good manager, having nobody to replace them and putting the business at risk of a lawsuit.

     Things fall apart when GM puts a completely inexperienced food server in as AGM and business tanks.  GM is gone after eight weeks.

     So yes, you can be too good for your job.

Roel With It

He'd probably be a bit cross with me for a pun like that, so what, it's not like he can sue me.  Can he?  Er - let's crack on with the latest of Roel's critiques of ancient and medieval warfare.  Art!

     Conrad knows nothing about this, except it would need to be made out of asbestos and mica.  Proceed!

     I think the idea here is that the sole warrior is going to charge the enemy, solo, in order to die a glorious death?  As we follow his progress across the battlefield, he does begin to resemble a porcupine, which Roel points out is the inevitable consequence of having to stop and hack at people; at that point the archers have a nice static target.  Art!

     Another Hollywood myth that melt's Roel's pan is the tendency for archers to be given shouted instructions, as he insists this NEVER happened in real life, and his expression shows that if he had an offending Hollywood director near to hand, there would be blood spilled.  Art!

     Then comes a battle, which turns out to be an unseemly brawl (no cavalry present to add a bit of class, you see), and which further irks Roel.  He points out that people rushing around hacking and slashing at each other looks like tremendous fun, but in reality there would be formations and tactics.  "This is not a battle, this is just a big mess."  Art!

Roel not happy with Hollywood

Harsh!

"The Sea Of Sand"

The bio-vore invaders are about to get a taste of aerial attack, a concept completely foreign to them.

Davey slid one of the windows open, allowing a powerful stream of cold air into the rear compartment, churning up dust and glass fragments.  He fired the tarred fabric strip on bottle after bottle, throwing them out of the opened window, hearing the far distant chink of the bottles smashing below.

          Albert kept low, very low, flying only just above the crawling black monsters.  That way they didn’t have the faintest chance of bringing a weapon to bear.  He looked back as the Lysander rocketed south-east, seeing the symmetrical lines broken, with bright blue fires burning atop some of the vehicles.

          ‘Take that for Tam, ye swine!’ yelled Davey, shaking a fist.  Albert was more bothered about the falling oil-pressure guage.  Was that a trail of faint blue smoke behind them?  Damn it, he was mounting this desperate raid because he’d entirely failed to even notice, let alone take part in, the battle that killed Corporal Mickleborough.  Going out with engine failure was a silly way to end it!

          ‘Get ready, Davey, the dig’s coming up!’ he shouted.  The long-abandoned line of tents blurred past beneath them, then the aircraft was over the sand basin.  Davey once more threw lit bottles outwards as the Lysander cruised at fifty miles per hour over the sinister glossy black buildings of the excavation.  Albert banked over the far wall of the basin, coming back again and noting with glee the blind panic suffered  by the aliens below.  

     Amaretto as a weapon of war.  Hmmmm.

Ooops

I note that Elon Musk's ambitiously-named 'Starship' has had the countdown halted due to a technical problem, which is a bit of a downer for the space-heads wanting to see it launch.  Art!

     Better safe than sorry, because this would become the world's most expensive firework if things go badly wrong.   What you see here is the rocket atop it's booster, and you don't really get a sense of scale.  Art!

     That's a puny human in the cage of that cherry-picker, to give you an idea how freakishly big this thing is.

Finally -

I shall probably bore you with more details, but today I went into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell for a follow-up face-to-face interview at Serco, which was mostly to sort out Right To Work proofs and add in our bank details, after which we needed to carry out an application to the Disclosure and Barring Service, which will indicate if you've been a naughty boy or girl in the past.  Of course - obviously! - Conrad's will be squeaky clean.  And this is why today's blog is so very late.  You can't rush quality.  Or it won't be quality.