Once Upon A Time -

There Was An Evil Witch

Who went by the name 'Dolores', after that other evil witch in Harry Potter.  Dolores wasn't her real name, it was a nickname imposed by the long-suffering staff at the IT business she had landed in as Director Of Finance.

     But I get ahead of myself, for we are going to have a look at another woeful tale of manglement, at two levels.  Art!

Dolores.  "  - smile, and smile, and be a villain."

     This is another tale from Youtube's Malicious Compliance tales, set in a business that regularly attended trade shows with a promotional team from IT.  Yes, it was a bit of a jolly and a definite perk, but it was also important in networking with other companies and displaying company product in their booths, which were staffed with IT nerds and salesmen.  All those present were volunteers, including the Team Travel lead, who dealt with: equipment; rentals; expenses; travel plans; exhibition centre fees; shipping.  So not a sinecure at all.

     Then Dolores arrived.  

     She immediately imposed ridiculously strict rules on the travel team, seeking to put her brand on the organisation.  Art!

     She refused to allow the TT to have a corporate card and insisted they use gift cards instead.  Which weren't accepted by many vendors.  Finance only approved things at the very last millisecond, which immediately spiked expenses thanks to expedited shipping, costly air fares and same-day rental premiums.  The next TT lead ran up a bill of $40,000 on his own credit card since there was no other way to pay for anything, and of course - obviously! - Dolores tried to prevent him being reimbursed, until Legal got involved.  Senior management, when he appealed to them, were as much use as a ladder of tripe.  Art!

     This was all because Dolores was convinced the TT's were defrauding the company somehow, somewhere, in some way that she couldn't detect.  But she was positive about it!  This is one of the problems with what is known as an 'Ivory Tower Manager', who has all the business qualifications yet 0% real-world experience.  Finance continued to wait until the last microsecond before managing to mess up bookings, hotels and reservations.

     Eventually OP's boss, after a couple of disastrous events, decided to use the Malicious Compliance playbook, and warned everyone to stop volunteering for TT.  

     Ooops.

     Dolores saw to it that the TT was thus composed of inexperienced staff with no sales or IT background and the conventions were utter fiascos.  Art!

     When staff refused to 'volunteer' Dolores sent unpaid college-age interns, who managed to get themselves into even more trouble.  One additional expense was bailing the interns out of jail, as well as massive fines for breaking various laws.  And Finance still brought down heavy financial penalties by waiting until the very last picosecond to book equipment, booths, hotel rooms, etcetera.

     You may be wondering where the CFO, or CIO, or CEO were whilst this was going on.  Nowhere, is the answer.  I did say this was manglement on two levels, didn't I?  Nothing appears to have troubled their tiny minds.

     OP's boss, a canny soul, warned everybody to just be patient, despite things descending into expensive anarchy.  Actually, he was counting on things descending into expensive anarchy, because at financial year's end the numbers came in.

     Travel Team's expenses had increased by 4000%.  A typical event pre-Dolores had cost $3,500; now it cost $145,000*.  TT's annual expenses ballooned from $110,000 per annum to well over $2 million.  Art!

     At this point Dolores went full Kommercial Kompany Karen and cancelled the TT, because thanks to her mis-handling it had been a giant failure.  This was one of the business's prime methods of establishing sales - and she got rid.

    Finally upper management realised there was a problem.  It still took them a year to get rid of Dolores, who jumped before she was pushed - that old saw about 'retiring to spend time with her family', who must have been extremely unhappy with the business for such an infliction.  Presumably she had to retire because having "I cost my employer $1,956,000 dollars because I was a bottomhole" on a resumé does not look good.

     It took two years to undo the damage she had imposed and things for the Travel Team ended up better than before.  But, still!  Art!

Retirement the far better option

A Little Elucidation

Conrad finished off yesteryon's blog with a rather odd-looking ship, without having time to look up what it's provenance was.  Art!

     As you can see, it's the 'Makran 1', an Iranian "Hopper Dredger", which swaps one mystery for another.  What's a Hopper Dregder?  I shall enquire.

     Okay, technically it's a 'Trailing Suction Hopper Dredger'.  It tools along on the surface, hoovering up the seabed with a giant hose, the spoil from which is dumped aboard.  This allows it to keep waterways maintained, and it can tootle off and drop the spoils in the deep ocean.

     So now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.

Make Mine Mysterious!

Yes, Conrad is making "The Daily Beast" work for him.  They have yet more strange and un-identifiable goods on sale, which you can inform me about in the Comments.  Art!

     World's shortest-barrelled ray gun?  Instrument of torture?  Prototype aerosol injection device?  Only you can tell!  Art?

     I can make a stab at this one - it's a testing device to check on the scale model of King Ghidora that Toho Studios use, making sure that the wings flap, the heads shoot fire and the necks writhe convincingly.  Art!

It's so obvious

      - and talking of science fiction -

"City In The Sky"

Ace and Nat are examining the 'Arc-ipelago' of Bernal Spheres in orbit around Earth, via computer display.

There was also a modest EU Bernal Sphere, and one put up by the UN, which Nat shook her head over.

     ‘They had a power-struggle in that one.  A couple of hundred dead before it got resolved.  And they keep losing atmosphere.  A real rush job.’

     Predictably Ace wanted to know what the smaller images were.

     ‘Those are the ASEAN and Argentina-Brazil-Chile ones – still under construction.  I guess they’ll never get completed now.’

     It struck Ace that all the spheres were exactly the same in design, if differing in size.  That couldn’t be a coincidence and she made an assumption that the Doctor would have nodded approvingly at.

     ‘All these space stations look the same, don’t they - do they all come from Arcology One’s design?’

     Nat beamed proudly.

     ‘Yes!  After the Little Crash every government around the world started bleating for our Bernal Sphere design and all the test data, the trial-and-error stuff, what we’d discovered whilst up here – everything.  So we gave it all away, for free.  Now here we all are.’

     She closed that application and stared at the screen.

     ‘There’s no telling what’ll happen to M3, either.’

     There, thought Ace, again, that mention of “M3” as if she ought to know what it was.

     ‘What’s this “M3” you talked about?  You mentioned it to the Doctor before.’

     Ah, that's Ace for you.  An answer begets two more questions**.

A Cautionary Tale

There is a sidebar story on the BBC News website about a family in Australia who suffered three deaths from eating death cap mushrooms.  The whole case is rather murky and unresolved, so I shan't go into the legal background.

     What it does illustrate is how toxic the death cap is, and that people who consume them nowadays are not always on a delayed death sentence.  Art!

     That's Amanita Phalloides right there.  We've covered this in the blog ages ago.  One of the problems is that they apparently taste quite nice when eaten.  However, they are hepatotoxic and once a lethal dose has been ingested, they quietly get to work destroying your liver.  Symptoms don't appear for hours or even days after eating, by which time it's much too late and you're a deader. 

     Or so it used to be.  If the victim can be kept intubated in hospital, and (quite a big 'and') be given a liver transplant, they may survive, which is where one of the family finds himself.

Finally -

Just to inform you that I'm up to page 850 of "Jonathan Strange And Mister Norrell", so within strangling distance of the end.

* That's actually 4100% but let's not quibble.

** Just trying a larger font to see if it's more legible, and it is.