Featuring The Ever-Relevant Hugh Briss!
Ha! Sometimes I amuse myself. Actually that should be 'Hubris' except that's not as clever as my pun, so the title stays as it is.
Let me define hubris for you a là my Collins Concise (because I like to be accurate and up the word count where feasible): "1) Pride or arrogance 2) (In Greek tragedy) ambition, arrogance, etcetera, ultimately causing the transgressor's ruin."
Remember Icarus? Well, he got scragged thanks to hubris and an inverted understanding of how temperatures work at high altitude. Art!
Project Icarus. Close enough. More interesting than a human chicken-impressionist
One question that crops up a lot on Quora runs along the lines of:
Typically this results in calls from the business about where File X is, and how do you process File Y? and results from manglement's arrogance in 1) not knowing what your job really involved and 2) blithely thinking anyone can do it. Let us now examine one of these cases. Art!
This is Accident & Emergency, which our trans-Atlantic cousins call "Emergency Room" in their own quaint vernacular. Any patient here present is going to be in a critical state merely by definition.
Remember that. So, Our Protagonist was a multi-skilled nurse in the ER of a hospital where the ER staff had been leaving, due to manglement issues. This meant OP was the only person able to run critical - that word again! - equipment in the ER itself, thanks to said staff losses. They eventually tired of manglement and put in their notice, too. Nobody else was willing to be trained on this equipment that OP was the sole remaining expert on, presumably because there was no financial reward for being so qualified or experienced. Manglement strikes again! Art?
1st Rule: do not be a bottomhole
In what they probably saw as a power play and what young folk today call a 'flex', the Hospital Administrator tracked down OP on his last day, said his performance was poor and fired him.
This instantly raises several red flags and OP would doubtless have fought this if they weren't already leaving. No performance review, no verbal or written warnings, no formal interview, no HR involvement - all verrrrry dodgy.
Since they started work at their new hospital job the next day, it was pretty irrelevant.
Not to the Hospital Administrator! Forty-eight hours later, OP got a frantic call from them, telling them that they needed to come in and train another paramedic in use of that critical ER equipment. Why so? Because a patient in ER had nearly died thanks to inability to use said diagnostic equipment. Art!
Oops
OP rudely responded that doing so was impossible as they were on their way into work and hung up. Hospital Administrator seemed to think they were sitting at home in a blue funk simply waiting to be invited back - probably without pay, either.
The upshot was - rather out of left field. Hospital Administrator, his wife and his son were all arrested for stealing from the hospital. Note that 'arrested', not merely 'fired', so they must have been really soaking their employer. Sorry, Google does not render up their names, and we don't even have a date for the story, let alone a location.
Yes yes yes, I realise there were no files involved in this case of manglement hubris, only actual physical artefacts. Sue me, it's not as if you have to pay to read this scrivel. The file next time, as I'm sure a person said once.
Close enough
Imagine This -
Art!
Just up-scaled 1,000,000 times, and that's the kind of indigestion medicine Mordor is sorely in need of at present, thanks to their Gazprom problems - what you might call Gazproblems.
Yes, we did an item yesteryon about Gazzy's turnabout in revenue, a total change of about $38 billion downwards from 2021.
What Conrad left out were the other consequences of a ₽629 billion annual loss, because the Ruffian state maintains a 38% holding in Gazzy. They won't be getting a dividend in 2024 thanks to the awful 2023 figures. Art!
From a market valuation of almost $200 billion in 2011, they are now worth just shy of $40 billion, so a drop in value of 75%.
They won't be paying any tax to the Ruffian Central Bank, either. At a rate of 20% corporate tax, that's another $6 billion per annum suddenly vanished.
Joe Blogs also pointed out that there's a cascade effect working here: any redundancies imposed on Gazzy are going to have ripple effects on local economies where they were employed, leading to secondary redundancies, tax not being paid, dogs and cats living together, all that shizzle. As the biggest business in Mordor, Gazzy was employing 492,000 employees as of end 2022. There are no more recent updates on number of employees and this may have become an Official State Secret. As with their figures for gas exports, because that would embarrass the Kremlin. Art!
"Tea or window?"
Bring on the wheelie-bins of popcorn!
EGAD! Speak Of Either The Devil Or The Zombie Cyborgs And -
"The Daily Beast" will print an article about them. Art!
Right! We know who to blame now, don't we? I've got your face memorised, love, and you'll be doing time in the uranium mines quick smart when I take over.
"City In The Sky"
The Doctor is planning a dramatic resolution to the problem of an alien missile attack on the surviving Australian population.
The huge suited figure pointed at three other equally-huge spacesuits,
who cranked up their right arms in salute and began to offload silvery
blivets. After that it took mere minutes
to stuff the containers into Dart Three.
‘Thank you so much!’ beamed the Doctor, putting all the sincerity he
could muster into his voice. The three
enormous suited figures stomped back to M3 and the daisy-chain passing blivets
of regolith into Arc One’s major airlock.
The Doctor clambered back into Dart Three and burst all the blivets with
his sonic screwdriver, ending up almost knee-deep in lunar dust. After that he trudged back to the TARDIS, doffing
the arcology space-suit en route. A
quick check overhead showed that the dew-pond he’d first sat by decades ago
still held water. Good!
Passing sphere inhabitants were no longer awed when the blue police box
appeared or disappeared; all the same, they were surprised to see it appear,
for the briefest of moments, atop the still waters of a collection pond,
snapping the membrane over it, before vanishing again, taking all the water
with it.
No spectators witnessed the TARDIS materialising within the passenger
space of Dart Three, carrying thirty tonnes of water with it, before vanishing
again. The water, still at room
temperature, violently reacted with the freezing lunar regolith before the
resulting slurry gradually froze into immobility.
Gosh, I wonder what he has planned?
Here's Another Candidate For the Uranium Mines
Any long-time readers out there - both of you - will know that Conrad has harboured a deep and meaningful love for "" ever since it came out. Art!
Sadly, it was not a commercial success, which we fans silently gloast about, because that keeps it all ours OURS OURS.
Thence to 'Cinemablend', a site that lists films under dubious titles such as "30 Films That Celebrate The Weasel" or "Zack Snyder films rated from Bad To Worst"-
32 Cult Classics That Actually Suck
Who do they include on their list? Art!
Dateline October 2023. Now, what specious drivel are they spouting on the internet but this - Art!
Conrad, because his mind works like that, instantly recognised John Lithgow playing Lord John Worfin, the chief antagonist of - you may be ahead of me here - "The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension"
To rub salt and lemon juice into the wound, they use exactly the same photo of Buckaroo all helmeted-up.
Mark my words, the uranium mines and then the organ banks.
Finally -
I have now finished "The Stand", in it's 1,320 page iteration. Go me. The original was a lot shorter, so a completist would get that earlier edition and compare and contrast the two, which Conrad cannot be bothered to do. What I ought to have done is make notes on the pop culture Ol' Steve leavens his MSS with, because they help to make the characters real people. Maybe next year, if the Book Mountain decreases significantly.
And with that, we are done!
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