Here's One Manglement I've Been Sitting On

I Really Ought To Date These Extracts

It would show how many months I've been keeping this Quora tale aside, which has been partially due to it's length, and the fact that it was posted as a giant monobloque of text with no paragraphs and dodgy grammar, too.  The Original Poster didn't name the company, which is a shame, and a quick Google didn't bring up any likely candidates.  Art!

     It was based outside San Antonio, which is in Texas, and yes that's the past tense there.

    Here an aside.  YES ALREADY.  Whilst talking of Texas and bad grammar, there is a peculiar and hilarious trend on Twitter of Russian bots and shills pretending to be Texans, all frantically promoting TEXIT and the secession of the Lone Star State from the US.  Art!

     
     One notable give-away is that the trolls all like to blather about is Texas having a 'warm-water port', which a normal Texan never even thinks about.  But Ruffians do, O My Word Yes!  Their warm-water ports are Saint Petersburg, which now is an entrepot onto a NATO lake, and Sevastopol (what's left of it), which has to ask Pretty Please? to Turkey to be allowed through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, with Vladi

     ANYWAY back to OP.  He was working in his first job at a 'Lyophilisation' plant in San Antonio.  This refers to a process where a substance is freeze-dried and vacuum-packed, the better to store and transport it.  Conrad, being a curious chap, did a quick nosey and found this:

The process has applications in assay kit development, where it enables room-temperature shipping and storage of reagents and complete assays.  Sample stabilization by lyophilization enables the production of pre-dispensed, single-dose reagents, which help:

• simplify assay setup,
• increase assay robustness and reliability,
• reduce the risk of sample contamination

     This is relevant as OP said the business's biggest seller was a testing kit for antibiotics in cow's milk.  Art!

     OP helpfully mentioned that the freeze-drying market is not a big one, so this coyly-un-named business had only 30 employees but was the biggest in it's field.  One barrier to breaking into this market, he said, was the kit required, which was enormous and expensive.

     After his probation period, and because he proved to be a smart cookie, OP got moved up a notch and had more responsibility put upon him.  No more money, just more responsibility.  Then more responsibility (for which read: more work), and yet more responsibility.

    This, ladies and gentlemen and the rest, is a sign of Bottomhole Management.  Pile on as much work as possible, without any extra pay.  Art!

Industrial freeze-drying kit with puny human for scale

     Naive young OP, in his first ever job, sucked it up and took it on the chin, until manglement decided to sack him, because - well, because they were drunk on the giddy heights of power?

     This is where things got extra-specially pear-shaped for the Bottomhole Management.  Having gotten three-persons worth of work on a single salary, they now tried to get one of the other workers to step up and step in.

     Surprise!  The opposite happened.  All the good workers bar one walked out and left the business in protest at how shabbily OP had been treated.  One suspects that there was a lot more manglement they'd witnessed to spark a response like this.

     Ooops!

     The business managed to hobble along with a complement of new, inexperienced and barely capable staff, until the coup de grace came.  Art!

     The sole good employee left was attacked by 'an animal', which was far more likely to be a cow or horse than a leopard.  Just so we're clear.  Bottomhole Manglement wriggled like worms on a hook to deny him worker's compensation - don't forget this is South Canada we're talking about, where management views workers as worthless slaves - to the point that the injured worker's girlfriend got in touch with an attorney she knew.

     Who was shot-hot at getting workers compensation.  Art!

     Yes, the company went bankrupt and closed down, having lost all it's major customers to boot, as work quality had collapsed.

     OP took a great deal of malicious glee in stating that the Bottomhole Management were still paying off their compensation to that worker, years after the plant had been shuttered.   You might say a case of freeze-dying.

Flash!

Nope, nothing to do with Mister Gordon, nor the Queen soundtrack, and everything to do with over-the-top glitz and glitter, and to nick a quote from Billy No-Mates Shakespeare, a whole lot of "sound and fury signifying nothing, mate".

     For here we are at Stage 3 of The Critical Drinker's Five Steps Program to reduce cost in Hollywood.  Which they may very well ignore, THE MEDDLING FOOLS!  They and their ape brains.

CGI: Used, as Ol' Critty would have it, to promote spectacle over character, plot or story, and to do it FAR TOO OFTEN (hence today's title).

     The thing is, good CGI is expensive.  Art!

Bad CGI, on the other hand .....

  TCD puts forward the original "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" as an example of making a kick-bottom film for $20 million by using real props, models, miniatures and filming on location.  Whereas that filmic farrago Indy 5 was bursting at the seams with CGI and cost $300 million.  One suspects that the line "We'll fix it in Post with CGI" crops up all too often in Hollywood studios after they've wrapped.  Art!

Flush!

"City In The Sky"

With things now running according to the Doctor's plan - whatever that might be - Arcology One has a grandstand view of their directed asteroid impact in the Gulf Of Carpentaria.

     ‘Agh!’ gasped Emilia, standing behind Davy after earlier unsuccessfully trying to get him to rest.  She reached into her boilersuit and pulled out a plastic bag that buzzed and blinked, then gingerly handed it to Ace.

     In fact it was a bag within a bag within a bag, all three heat-sealed.  The young woman could make out a shiny cylinder - the Doctor’s UNIT-issue radio - in the innermost pouch, kept sealed to prevent any more infections getting released.

     ‘Go ahead,’ shrugged Davy.  ‘Can’t do any more harm.’

     Ripping off the tough plastic required a knife.  Frantically she hit the “speak” button.

     ‘Hello, Prof?  Ace here.  Go ahead.  Ah – over.’

     ‘Ace!’ came a relieved voice.  A strange high-pitched whine blocked the Doctor for a second.  ‘Sorry, have to dodge.  I think the Lithoi have stopped jamming for a minute – too much to do and too much else to worry about.’

     ‘Dodge what!’ asked Ace.

     ‘Thermal lances.  Listen, Ace, I won’t have long - ’

    All in the cramped Communications room heard his short, pithy description of “Old Ben” and what the supposed person had been.  Right now –

     ‘We’re fighting a rather one-sided battle.  I’m afraid I possibly miscalculated.’

     ‘Can we help?’

     There was a reply after her question, a reply that gradually faded away into an empty silence.

     ‘Our orbit has moved us out of range,’ muttered Emilia.

           O I say!  How dramatic!

Putting Things In Perspective

There is a reason people use the term 'astronomical' in relation to very, very large numbers, because the Universe is constructed on a scale that makes Hom. Sap. resemble Minifigs of Minifigs of Minifigs.  That still only works out at 1/110592nd scale, far too large by comparison.  It'll have to do.

     What am I yarking on about?  Art!

     Thanks to the BBC News webpage for the heads-up here.  You're looking at an artists impression of J0529-4351, which is a monstrous supermassive black hole at the nucleus of a galaxy 12 billion light years away.  It is, to date, the largest and 'hungriest' black hole discovered, consuming 2 x 10 to the 27th power tons of matter per day, which is about one of our Sun for a daily diet.  Given this appetite, it far outshines our humble star by a factor of, ooh, oodles.  Alright, by a factor of 500 million million  million times brighter.  I shudder to think what factor sun-cream you'd need in that region of space.  Probably liquid lead six feet thick.

Scary Man Is - Still Scary

Conrad, in a fit of daring, has Followed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on Twitter, just to see what cropped up.  Jack is not shy about criticising people he finds offensive, so you can make an educated guess at who 'Captain Capslock' is.  Art!

     It's amusing and faintly pathetic that Captain Capslock has to clarify exactly who the 'FAVOURITE PRESIDENT' is, just in case anyone reading thought he meant Abraham Lincoln or JFK.  Case in point, that recent civil fraud trial began in 2019, five years ago.  Art!

     This bafune has been graced with the Smiley-Smith nickname of "The Paint Licker", which Conrad, horrid to the core, thought was hilarious.

Finally -

I have to be careful drinking from my Meoky insulated mug, it keeps my afternoon coffee dangerously hot for a couple of hours.  I won't be comprehensible on the telephone with a swollen tongue, will I?  Art!