The First Order

No!  You Were Imagining That This Was Going To Be About

"Starz Ware" (sp?), weren't you?  Don't deny it, you're utterly transparent.  Art!

     For those unaware of the details of what is, admittedly, a minor and obscure franchise, let me inform you that the 'First Order' is a collection of extreme right-wing fanatics who wish to resurrect the old Empire that Luke, Leia and Han brought down in flames.  What a splendid bunch of chaps!  No, hang on, that's not right, I mean what a reprehensible clutch of reprobates.

     Well, you are wrong.  Art!

"THE FIRST AND LAST WORD OUT OF YOUR FILTHY SEWERS WILL BE 'SIR'!"

     This stricture, you might say, is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's first order to the <ahem> grab-asstic pieces of excrement masquerading as Marines under his tender, loving care command.   "Full Metal Jacket" lest ye be unaware, and the only character in films who is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time.

     If you want to see a more nuanced performance by R. Lee Ermey, albeit still in a military milieu, check out  "The Boys In Company C", a rather obscure Vietnam war film that, again, takes the titular boys from training to the battlefields of South East Asia.  Art!

     ANYWAY none of this has anything to do with the real, central core of this Intro, which is  -

     Order Picking.  Yes yes yes, nowhere near the drama of space opera or bullets flying all around you yet hopefully a little more relatable.  I bet the humble life of an order picker never entered your mind when you clicked on the very latest and most chic MacGuffin on the Amazon website, did you?  Nor conjecture about how, exactly, all the contents of your Ocado get magically delivered to you?  (Because we assume you're that well-heeled that you do, indeed, shop via ocado).  Art!

I have no idea.  None.

     Conrad had a peripheral involvement in order picking when working at Sainsbo's and Footasylum, more so at the latter.  The pickers had to get orders sent in over the internet right from the get-go - the first order had to be correct, if you like (hello today's title!).  Their selection was then recorded by CCTV at the packing station, being packed, which was vital when a customer complained that their ten Kings Will Dream gilets were all missing from the package.  Art!

That place named after a river

     In fact Sainsnbo's "Wish Fulfilment Centre", as they called it, was a giant white elephant that cost so much to run they closed it down a couple of years ago.  Don't worry, it's in the same industrial park as an Amazon WFC; those made redundant just walked across the road and got a job there.

     This Intro, gentle reader - yes yes yes we're getting to it - is about another sad tale of manglement, set at a distribution centre that Original Poster left un-named.  By their account they were a low-level supervisor or manager, who appreciated the fast and accurate picking team that they had.  Art!

An order picker, picking orders

Enter manglement.  I can't use OP's term for them but it involved the Eff word and a walnut.  Said EffW decided that the order pickers were being paid too much in bonus and incentive payments, which they got for 1) Accuracy and 2) Going over quota, so - management would cut both of these out completely!  And raise the quotas!  Because nothing could possibly go wrong!

     WRONG.  The pick rates immediately fell and the (very very) angry order pickers went back to the old quota.  Did manglement realise they were onto a loser and revert to the winning status?  No.  No, they did not, or this would be a much shorter story.  Art!

OP's OPs no longer busy at work

     Instead they tried to discipline a couple of the order pickers, who promptly quit and had a job with their competitor the next day, with better pay.

     Over the next fortnight all the good crew departed - for the competitor.  Deliveries were delayed due to short staffing, orders were missed or filled incorrectly and the customers, to put it mildly, were extremely peeved at either not getting what they'd ordered or the wrong thing altogether.

     But manglement stayed strong!  The EffW came to lecture the remaining pickers and told them a bunch of temps would be coming in as replacements, because, in his immortal words, "Picking is entry level stuff".  They should have baked him a cake with that phrase in icing on the top, because - Art!

     I wonder if EffW got a bonus himself when the company ended up on the verge of bankruptcy, lost millions and had to lay off half their staff?  Because that was the end result of employing utterly inept temps without a clue about order picking.  Customers deserted the business in droves, as did the sales staff, because order picking had gone completely awry for months.  Art!

A walnut in a pickle

     This is what comes of trying to shave a few percentage points off the wage bill.

Conrad's Crossword Controversy

Welllll not that controversial in The Mansion.  Also, thank heavens for armoured underwear, as the Coincidence Hydra was gnashing it's mandibles at this point.  Art!

     I've been doing a couple of these every day, just to keep my intellect in trim, and am now well into July 2010.  The crossword layout stays the same, it's just the clues that change, although COYPU and ESSAYS do keep cropping up.  Art!

     This, of course - obviously! - is well before Chipmunk Cheeks set his beady eyes upon Krim.  You see, Peter The Average? even crosswords hate you.

A Robin At Christmas

No!  Not the chirpy red-breasted little bird, rather the acerbic and critical Australian military historian Robin, Robin Prior.  Mister Prior to you.  You recall that he was taking on the Wehraboo claim that the Teutons of Second Unpleasantness vintage were unbeatable supermen who won everywhere all the time, until they lost the war, somehow.

     Ol' Rob, having trashed the 'man-on-man' combat myth, then addressed the 'Blitzkrieg Myth'.  Art!

     

Not at all festive and we don't care!

     Ol' Rob points out that the defeat of France in 1940 came about in a mere 30 days, and that this is seen forever afterwards as the 'Gold Standard' of armoured warfare, and any campaign that doesn't succeed in 30 days or less is seen as a comparative failure, yah booh sucks.

     Except - a word you surely knew was coming - this Gold Standard was verrrry much the exception, not the rule.  It wasn't replicated by the Teutons in North Africa or the Sinister Union.  In fact it works only once, against a French army that was poorly led and which didn't fight well*.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor - Davros in this case, not our favourite Gallifreyan - is doing a bit of medical detective work.

A big step to take, declaring a curfew.  It had happened only once before, when they’d had the micro-meteorite breach, because shutting down movement choked off fifty per cent of activity.  Food, repairs, livestock, water, crops, medicine, they all needed to get about by foot now that there was almost no other transport left.

     What could have caused this infection!

     He blindly walked over to an empty bed and sat on it, making the bamboo frame creak.

     Think.  Think like a doctor and a scientist.

     Doctor John Smith and Ace were unlikely suspects.  They’d visited before, without the slightest effect.  Terry – ah, now he was a possible Patient Zero. 

     Except he’d been DCTM’d by Doctor Smith before arriving here.  The young man had been kept in the common area at Lichfield with the Founders and had gone straight from there to Broughton, where he was now soundly asleep.  This debilitating disease had broken out at five different townships scattered across the sphere, one after another.  So how could he be responsible?

     The micro-organism responsible couldn’t be airborne, or the infected would be spread evenly across the inner sphere and both he and Paramedic Prakasz would have contracted it by now.  On the other hand, if it spread by contact, how on earth did it get to so many places that Terry didn’t visit?

    Remind me what 'DCTM'd' means, dear author?  Ah!  'Decontaminated;.

I Quite Forgot

Boxing Day is an excursion for the extended family to go bowling, especially now that Covideviltry is out of the way.  Conrad is a pretty average bowler, apart from being able to whiz the ball with a lot of oomph, which scares the skittles into falling over.  Art!

     Look for me under "Rob" - my Sunday-best moniker, which I take out and polish occasionally.  As you can see, either I did really well or everyone else was rubbish <delete where applicable>.

* Says Robin.  Any complaints, take it up with him.