As We All Know, Conrad Is The Sole Of Discretion
Because we all know he tries to avoid putting his foot in it, as a size 11 makes quite the imprint.
So, when I discussed work conditions or recounted hilarious stories from the Co-Op or Sainsbo's, I never mentioned their names on BOOJUM! or posted pictures that would have identified the location, unless you worked there. Art!
The Electric Goldfish Bowl
Thus I am not going to identify my current employer, who are a global player with a significant presence in South Canada, under a different identity. See where trying to track that down gets you.
Now, onto the subject of today's title: leave. Also known as holiday, or, across The Pond, vacation. Which we here in This Sceptred Isle get a lot more of than they do, HAR HAR. See? One of the benefits of being part of the Commonwealth.
ANYWAY Because I am Conrad and curious about etymology, I looked up 'Leave' and discovered that it hails from <drum roll, cymbal crash> Old English and 'Leaf' which in turn derives from 'Alyfan', meaning 'To permit'. Art!
Leave is a bit of a dull subject, so I thought I'd spice it up with a picture of the Valkyrie XB-70, which is one of those planes that look fast whilst standing still. Sinister defence planners probably wet themselves in fear just looking at it, wh
ANYWAY AGAIN, under Serco we used a system known as "Teleopti" to work out leave, in terms of entitlement and amount taken. Art!
It had a handy Aggregate function for our team, where you could see who was due in at what time, and when a person wasn't on Teleopti any longer, you knew they'd been fired. None of that 'let go' euphemism here!
Shifting to the here and now, currently we wage-slaves have to use a 'Work Force Management' system to view our schedules, whilst using different software to request leave, and Planning (for which read 'HR') use a third system to track leave.
Or not. For Conrad, entitled to 20 days leave*, had taken 7 and wanted another 5 off in August. Leaving a residuum of 8. Right?
WRONG! Planning thought I only had 3 days leave left. Art!
The "New York Times" did a bit of a dig about this and found that Amazon's leave systems were a hotchpotch of different databases acquired at different times from different vendors, none of which were compatible with each other. This is what happens in businesses that simply evolve rather than plan ahead. There were instances of staff being fired whilst on leave because the systems thought they had been 'let go'; other staff on maternity leave had their formally-agreed pay cut thanks to be on unauthorised absence; one employee, poor beggar, had to sell his wedding ring when his disability payments simply stopped. They probably thought he was dead. Art!
The resolution? Rather than bring in a new, holistic, universally applicable leave database, they went for a cheap interim work-around, namely to employ 67 full-time staff to do nothing but input leave data. The rumour goes that this work is both boring and stressful, a winning combination! that results in them not merely taking leave but leaving altogether.
Hmmm, it makes Your Humble Scribe O! so proud to be treading in the footsteps of mighty Amazon. O no wait a minute no it doesn't.
The Proof Of The Pudding
Is it in the eating? I beg to differ, because if your pudding was called the "Snot And Gravel Dumpling" I don't think you'd bother consuming it. I remember this topic coming up in "Anne Of Green Gables" where Anne contested the Barf Of Avon's assertion that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", pithily declaring that it wouldn't if it had been christened the "Lesser Stinkwort". She gets my vote, that gel. Stick it to the Barb!
ANYWAY I digress, as I often do. Art!
Colour me unsurprised that it hadn't been purchased until it was down to 10% of the original price. Conrad likes cauliflower, in moderation. I just don't think pushing it in Coronation flavour is going to get anywhere.
Slumpy Trumpy
Yes, we mentioned him yesterday, and we're going to mention him today. More specifically, the stock market value of his 'Trump Management & Technology Group'. Art!
The price shot up after his ear scratch, if you'll forgive the pun, and it only appears so on the 15th because there's no trading over weekends. Thanks to speculators thinking nothing can stop his shuffling into the White House. Thus Somnolent Joe withdraws at the weekend and on Monday 22nd July the stock value plummets. Speculators now desperately trying to dump stock before it becomes worthless. It'll be interesting to see how rapidly it dwindles and to what level.
Bring on the popcorn!
"The War Illustrated Edition 190"
Out of sheer good taste I've not been doubling-up with any of Roy Cross' martial artwork, because yes Vulnavia you jolly well can have too much of a good thing. Art!
Here we have one of the lesser-known military units of Perfidious Albion: the Royal Air Force Regiment. These are soldiers in the service of the Brylcreem Boys, whose principal task, now as then, was the protection of British airfields, airplanes and airmen. This makes sense as why skim off men from the Army then the blue jobs can do it instead? The photo at upper port shows them at their debut in North Africa, where they captured the Teuton airfields at Daba and Fuka NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK and took a couple of hundred prisoners, who were probably very upset that it was airmen who'd done the doing.
At starboard you can see the extremely unlovely environs of the Imphal Valley in Burma, with RAF Regt. officers have a nosey and having the lie of the land pointed out to them.
At bottom one of the old reliable picture tropes: How Many Men Are Hiding Here? Ten of 'em is the answer, all Regt members.
Here's A Question
One thing that the 'Deadpool' films have is a hefty dose of cynicism, mixed in with a lot of snoot-cocking at Political Correctness, which is why people like them. Art!
I very much doubt it, as they've been making terrible turkeys recently, losing possibly $1.5 billion (okay, that was the whole of Disney) over 2023 thanks to thoroughly bad films that nobody asked for nor went to see. A single film isn't going to turn that financial sink-hole into a money mountain.
I'm having a look at the Comments and poor old Marvel (and Disney). People don't seem to like them very much and a consensus seems to be that they should have stopped at "Avengers: Endgame", which was a colossal critical and commercial success. Instead we have the going-to-the-well-too-often symptoms showing up (Cont. Page 94)
Finally -
It's really not the weather for porridge of a morning, so today I improvised a bowl of muesli. Oats, sliced almonds, currants and chopped dates, and it went down rather well, apart from there being about twice as much as there needed to be. I may try this again tomorrow, and see if those frozen blueberries are still around.
Just to let you know that we've hit over 1,200 words without having a big chunk of fan-fiction in the mix. In fact - shouldn't I have only been aiming for 1,000 words? Ooops.
* HAR HAR
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