WFH

No!  That's Not A Swear Acronym

O and WASH OUT YOUR FILTHY MINDS whilst you're at it, too.

     No, it simply means 'Working From Home', which  is what Your Humble Scribe has been doing since late June.  Whilst we were still in the office Fallon said she liked interacting with people and being around an office worker environment.  Not so for Conrad!  He, being a surly and truculent cove, is quite happy working in splendid isolation - which I had to explain away during the Covid crisis as nothing at all to do with avoiding infection.  Art!

Atom-bombing the Moon.  Hah - take that, Moon!

     What did you expect?  WFH is inherently dull stuff.  Unless it saves one money; Conrad would regularly fork out £18 for a weekly bus e-ticket, and another £7.60 for a couple of Metro tram trips.  That makes a saving of £128 to date from late June, which is nothing to sniff at.

     Then there is travel time.  Conrad aimed to get into the office early, in order to get a cup of hot Marmite and a bit of stale bread to dip in it, so he'd be at the bus stop at 06:07, and would be lucky to get home for 17:30 if finishing at 16:00.  Spending three hours a day travelling eats up your day and then some.  Now I can choose to roll out of bed at 07:50 and be on-line for 07:59.  Catching a late phone call and not finishing until, say, 17:15, holds no fears for me now, because at 17:15:01 I am at home, rather than the 18:45 that a commute from Gomorrah on the Irwell has.  Art!

Sometimes it's in the Irwell

     Interestingly enough, WFH has also been an issue in Ruffia, because they tend to be waaaaaaay behind the curve on things like work culture.  In Ruffia, they value face-to-face when it comes to the workplace, because that way the boss can keep an eye on his idle work-shy minions.  Thus, during Covid, Ivan and Katya had to come into the office, because no manager worthy of the name would trust them to actually, y'know, work if they were working from home.  The (probably correct!) universal assumption was that they'd be skiving.  Art!

"I'm an engineer.  You can tell because I'm missing three fingers."

     The thing is, thanks to demographics, Ruffian employers are now having to accept working from home, because there's such a shortage of working-age men and they need to recruit people who refuse to move for work.  Their recent Economic Forum in Sankt Petersburg was big on talk of remote working, whereas a couple of years ago such talk would have been frowned at.

    Then there was a case on Quora about a female media sales manager who suggested that she work from home, with couriered mail and telephone messaging to keep up to date - this was the early Eighties with no e-mail or Zoom - with once-per-month visits to the home office to touch base.

     Nope, said the management.  In fact they disliked her attitude and suggestion so much that they sacked her.  Art!

     

   

     This proved to be a staggeringly stupid move, as she was instantly snapped up by a competitor.  Not only that, she took one of her major clients with her.  Not only that, another three major clients deserted her ex-employer.  Not only that, within two years her ex-employer went bust, thanks to the less than stellar performance of their senior managers, who would subsequently have trouble finding work - "I destroyed a company  with a hundred-year history".  WFH - Witless Foolish Heads.

     And with that strained pun, this Intro is over.

Big Bang Battle Buggy

Conrad has maintained that the Ukrainians are not only courageous and clever, they are good at improvising, as has been seen in their responses to the Special Idiotic Operation.  One rather ominous development is their creation of a kamikaze ground drone.  Art!

   As you can see, it's an anti-tank mine on a simple chassis, with a small camera on a mast to allow steering.  It's very low-profile and almost silent when operating, meaning that it can sneak up on a target without being spotted.  Art!

     The idea is to drive it beneath a vehicle and detonate, because the floor of any armoured vehicle is the weakest point with the thinnest armour.  And imagine they come at night ...

     Conrad is unpleasantly reminded of a John Wyndham short story, where the Sinister moonbase is destroyed by South Canadian robot bombs, which use a wheeled chassis to get to target.  In that story they are completely autonomous, so it doesn't matter that the South Canadian moonbase has itself been destroyed.  Of course - obviously! - nobody is going to be daft enough to allow an autonomous AI-driven suicide bomb, are they*!

     Life imitating art, hmmm?

Answers In The Comments, Please

Once again Conrad is baffled by an advert sidebar on "The Daily Beast"'s webpage, much as he was by that 'Portable Bike Chain Cleaner', which looked distinctly suggestive and seedy.  This time - well, they are definitely tools, because the title is 'Axminster Tools', yet what their function is escapes me.  Art!

     Yes yes yes, I could just click on the advert, but where's the fun in that?

"City In The Sky"

In a carefully choreographed info-dump, the Doctor is being shown around Arcology One, getting to know the lie of the land, so to speak.

‘Yes,’ replied Virginia.  Without an uphill or downhill the water would only ever evapourate if they didn’t keep it moving.  She indicated low-rise structures on their right that spread over a hectare, all made out of a rigid yellow stressed polythene.  To the casual eye they looked like a child’s construction kit enlarged a thousand times.

     ‘Living quarters for crew.   This is New Hampstead.’  She turned to look at him directly.  ‘Er – you didn’t want to look inside, did you?  As private quarters - ’

     ‘Oh, no, no.  Just the exterior.  You group living quarters according to whatever specialism their crewmembers practice?’

     ‘Yes!’ replied the Founder.  ‘How did you know that?’   Hardly any of the VIPs and experts lofted for a tour of Arc One after the Little Crash understood that.  New Hampstead sat around a set of medical suites and laboratories, the inhabitants being doctors of different specialisms, nurses and  paramedical trades – opticians, dentists, physiotherapists and others.  Their offspring would probably be gently inclined towards following in their parent’s footsteps.

     None of the inner-surface of the sphere was wasted.  If there were no structures, no paths, no crops or paddies or water features, then long-leafed grasses grew on hydroponic sod, or big storage bins with dates marked into the far future stood, containing who-knew-what essentials for the coming generation. 

     He knows because he's the Doctor, of course.  

And Again -

Yes, two articles referencing TDB, because they can jolly well generate blog content if they're going to take out a repeat subscription.

     As I have long maintained, the South Canadians have a morbid fascination with the British monarchy, probably because they don't have one of their own, and TDB is no exception.  Art!

     One has to wonder how and why TDB comes about this information, because I don't think their budget allows a Royal Correspondent.  There is the long and honourable press tradition of Making Shizzle Up to fall back on, though.

Finally -

Time to wrap this up, don fresh underwear (DO NOT ASK) and skip the light fandango into Lesser Sodom to see what's going cheap.

Pip pip!

*  Mind you, we are talking about Hom. Sap. here, so who knows?