A Spanner Darkly

NO!  That Is Not A Typo!

Good lord aloft, here we are after over 10 years <winces slightly at this total> of blogging and you still cannot understand that the English language dances to Conrad's sneer of cold command.  If it is spelled thus then that is deliberate.  I also have to over-ride Blogger's South Canadian spell-checker, which highlights words it doesn't like, such as 'Labour' or 'Colour' or 'British Victories In The Revolutionary War'.

     ANYWAY Conrad can read your minds, and can tell you're expecting a screed about Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", his often darkly comic tale about future drug abuse and detection.  Art!

     The film is a weird and wonderful Rotoscoped animation that, perhaps, best  captures Ol' Phil's paranoid, drug-fuelled, gadget-laden Weltanschaung like no other.

     Of course - obviously! - that has absolutely nothing to do with today's Intro, which is where we got nuts.  Art!

Not the edible kind

     This tale centres (NOTE CORRECT SPELLING) around wrenches, which, for your information, are defined as: "A spanner, esp. one with adjustable jaws" so the title is justified.

     Now for another sorry tale of Manglement.  Are we sitting comfortably?

     Okay, imagine a light engineering firm, with about 35 employees, where OP has been working for almost 5 years.  The owner was a stingy sod who wouldn't provide two types of wrench used at all workstations, so OP went out and bought them - 20 in total.  Total expenditure about $100.  Art!

     There was no reimbursement forthcoming, so OP took them all home and spray-painted them lime green, as evidence that they were OP's property.

     So far, so pound-wise penny-foolish.  Where the real manglement came in is when the owner hired his sister to work for him.  She was a spiteful, hateful, obnoxious, petty person who probably passed the port to the right as well, so he simply had to place her in HR.

     Ooops.

    One-third of the employees left within the space of two months, as her reputation preceded her, and not in any good way.  Art!

     The business then had to scramble to find new employees, whose positions were advertised at $5 per hour above existing employees.  That's how desperate they were, and it went down like a Blue-Ringed Octopus in a jacuzzi.  Thus, OP and the only other two remaining long-term employees went to HR to bargain for an hourly raise.

     Owner's sister immediately fired them.  How this would cope with being very short-staffed is anyone's guess, but it probably gave Bokebag Sister a short power trip.  OP, too, took a short trip, to collect all their personal possessions - including all the lime green wrenches - before leaving.  Art!

     As you might expect, firing the only remaining long-term employees who knew how to do everything, and whom had been running departments in lieu of management, backfired wonderfully.  Boakbag Sister also sicced (I believe this is the correct term) the police on OP for stealing all the lime green wrenches, in a case that rapidly went nowhere since OP still had the receipts.  So, the owner either had to suffer production loss or replace all 20 wrenches, and after 5 years they'd cost a lot more than $100.

     But hist! for the tale is a long way from over.

     Bokebag Sister also ignored the state's requests for information about OP's unemployed status, which is a legal obligation upon businesses in South Canada when they fire a person.  Stick a pin in this one.  Art!

     OP, and presumably those other two fired employees, were flooded with frantic, despairing e-mails from the owner about How To Do This, and How To Order That, because he had no idea, his Bokebag Sister had no idea, and none of the remaining new hires knew anything about anything.

     Nor was that all.  HR at the business (I got tired of typing out "Boakbag Sister") dragged their feet about providing statutory information to the State Labour Board, who then imposed a hefty fine for what OP called 'file stuffing', which I think means providing data compressed into incomprehensibility, and failing to provide evidentiary information.  No number given, so we shall assume $5,000 each.

     The business still had to pay all three employees employment benefit.  Guessing again, say $5,000 for three people over six months.  Art!

     Then comes the cherry orchard on top.  OP's case worker from the SLB gave them advice on how to sue the business for both unpaid leave not taken when fired, and for wrongful termination to boot.  The state did the prosecution so it cost OP $0, and they won.  Presumably legal constraints prevented them from gleefully posting the total, but it was a 'tidy sum', which Conrad has checked up on, and the lower bound is $5,000 (that sum again!) going up to $40,000.  We shall go for the middle ground and guess at $20,000.  Once again, add in the other two fired employees, because Conrad cannot see OP not telling them what they'd been up to in court.

     What's the damage?   Our BOOJUM! guesstimate come out at $85,000 and, although it might have been less, it might equally have been a lot more.

     There was no news about the business going under, so it very likely survived, if in straitened circumstances, and possibly with new HR.  After all, you don't want to employ a person who throws a wrench in the works.

     Or, as I think OP is female, a wench in the works*.

Mister Clumsy Strikes Again

<sigh> I just dropped a plate and my 'Callan' mug after walloping my tray into the bannisters and now both are in bits.  I even had to hoover the hallway to avoid leaving sharp pieces of chipped enamel, because if Edna scraped her tootsies trotting up and down, Your Humble Scribe would also be getting scraped, mostly off the kitchen floor.

     That's not all.  I managed to knock my table lamp onto the floor and - Art!

     It still functions as you can see, and no, that gaping hole twixt base and socket ought not to be there.  Memo to self: get a new lightbulb on Wednesday's big shop.

     These both during the entirely abstemious month of April.

The Haul

Conrad has bought three more books, hurrah! and may even keep one of them.  Art!

     There should have been another, David Lister's "Defeating the Panzer-Stuka Menace" about British spigot weapons of the Second Unpleasantness, HOWEVER (and not in a good way) Abebooks notified me that it was suddenly unavailable, so I shall have to look out for a re-order.  Art!

Grrrrrr

     As for what I did get, TTK is one of the works in Professor John Buckley's biblio in "Monty's Men", which is recommendation enough.  It's not all Allied accounts, either, and even includes a chapter on the Romanian army of the Second Unpleasantness.  Yes, they fought in the SE, on the Eastern Front.

     "Valedictory" is a novel, based on real events, and rather encapsulates the bitterness felt by a lot of Poles about their country being sold down the river after the Second Unpleasantness ended.  Yes, well, it's rather hard to argue with the Red Army when it's camped out in occupation on the other side of Occupied Germany and the cons <Cont. Page 94>

     "Feed" is the first part of a trilogy, which already means Conrad is looking at it with suspicion.  If you can't wrap up a simple story in 600 pages then your editor is a lazy waffle-bottom.  We shall see.

"City In The Sky"

Ace and Kirwin are lying-up, spying on the Lithoi's base-ship and seeing what frantic activity is going on.

The wavering image came into focus, revealing a giant grey mushroom humping up over the plains, concealed by a vast plastic cover.  Slinking silver shapes moving painfully slowly proved to be the Lithoi, covered against Earth’s weather, moving to and around a spindly metal construction being erected out beyond the canopy that overlaid their base.  Small motorised tractors also helped shift materials from a cavernous doorway in the base, moving as slowly as the alien lizards.

     Rather than work on the platform themselves, the aliens allowed their tractors to do the manual handling, carrying, laying and slotting metal components together.  One tractor slowly skirted the hexagonal platform, putting up tall plastic poles at each corner, until another concealing plastic canopy could be hauled over them.

     Kirwin took over observation, in time to see one of the Lithoi tugging at a corner of the plastic cover over the platform; a stream of mud or water came dripping off the shroud from where it had been lying on damp ground and played all over the alien, which went rigid before keeling over.  Only when another Lithoi used a tractor to haul the limp body away did Kirwin realise the paralysed lizard had died of shock brought on by exposure to water. 

     You can see why they kept well clear of This Sceptred Isle.

Finally -

People have been pestering as to what happened to the latest Motley.  Art!

     I hope that satisfies.

*  Sorry not sorry.