I've Not Used This Portmanteau Word For A While
So allow me to explicate that it's a contraction of 'Malicious Compliance', which is one of the Youtube Reddit montages I love to read about. Lest you be unaware, MalCom is where employees stick to the letter of instructions, orders, procedures or processes, and thus trample roughshod over the spirit of said instructions, orders, procedures or processes. Usually with a nasty snarky grin and a sweet appreciation of schadenfreude. Art!
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| This is what AI Art Generator thinks 'Australian cuisine' looks like |
For the narrator in this tale is a chef from the Antipodes, with several years experience, so we shall call him Qualified Ocker Chef, hereafter QOC. He had spent several years at an apprentice, where, proving that the pen is mightier than the laptop, he used a handy-dandy notebook to compile the 150 recipes they were taught, as well as others his fellow chefs used. Art!
QOC's notebook was much more compact and ergonomic than the clumsy great volumes issued to apprentices, so he resorted to it by choice and eventually just left it in the kitchen all the time.
You can probably see where this is going, can't you?
ANYWAY all the other chefs fell to using QOC's notebook, too, because it had factors like ingredient quantities and cooking duration which were vital for the end product to be edible. This is where manglement rears it's unlovely head, because the restaurant/club management had stopped updating their official recipe books long before QOC arrived to serve his apprenticeship. Art!
You should all be familiar with the term 'Bus factor', or how vulnerable a business is to a single person being hit by a bus. Conrad is now going to posit the 'Shred Factor' for books, manuals, journals and other paper artefacts, and there are few environments - blast furnaces come to mind - that are more detrimental to a cookery book than a kitchen. Art!
What manglement ought to have done is triplicate QOC's book, preserve all the leaves in plastic, use one as a back-up on the kitchen floor and keep one in a safe, safely out of the way.
OUGHT. A small word carrying a lot of baggage, because -
After three years in the kitchen, QOC got his accreditation as a chef, meaning his pay increased a lot, also meaning manglement sought to get rid of him as soon as possible to replace with a nice cheap apprentice. Thus was pronounced the phrase: "Take all your things and leave as you can no longer offer what we are looking for". What QOC included in his cardboard box of shame was, of course - obvioously! - his recipe book. "His" and singular being the operative words here. This, gentle reader, is where the most Malicious of Compliances comes in. Art!
It didn't take long for criticisms of the sports club's food to begin, and at one point QOC said they had 50 negative reviews on their website. He was looking on with grim amusement, having already secured a job as a chef at a smaller restaurant.
Then the phone calls began. Eventually, after QOC felt they'd suffered enough, he answered one, which was from the sports club's management asking for the recipe book back as they needed it. Art!
Squeezing all the MalCom he could out of the situation, QOC riposted with 'Remember "you can no longer offer what we are looking for"?', that the recipe book was HIS HIS HIS and was staying with HIM HIM HIM. I belabour the point but you can appreciate how he felt. Manglement fell over themselves to then offer him his old job back starting Monday. QOC hung up.
Within the space of a couple of months this new restaurant had used about 1/3 of QOC's recipes on their menu, and were now poaching customers from the sports club restaurant in gradually increasing numbers. So much so that a tranche of the sports club manglement came to check out the menu and beg for the recipe book back.
Their pleas fell on stony ground.
QOC cut to the chase, 2 years later. The sports bar restaurant had continued to haemorrhage customers and lose profitability, and most of the kitchen staff had quit, citing manglement as the reason, with poor reviews of their product also not helping retention, which further drove down custom and food quality. Art!
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| Either a wake or QOC's former employer |
Oooops. All ahead Shred Factor One!
Dog-Pile! Dog-Pile!
'Twould appear that Tesla's share price is going up again BOOOOOO but, in further news, Jeremy Clarkson has weighed in with a lawsuit that Elong Tusk mounted against him and the BBC many years ago, during the heyday of "Top Gear".
One of the components of TG was putting a car through it's paces as a test, and scoring the results, which Jezza did with a Tesla Roadmaster back in 2008. Art!
Jezza, TG (and the BBC's Legal Department no doubt) did not have good things to say about the Roadster. Their first test vehicle broke down after 55 miles when the brakes went. Their second substitute vehicle overheated and broke down, too. Jezza's overall opinion was not appreciative, since the Roadster was 1) Unreliable (one hundred per cent failure rate!) 2) Horribly expensive (up to £200,000) and 3) Handled badly thanks to it's excessive weight (classed as 'that of several moons' by the unkind TG people) - 1.25 tons in proper weights and measures. Art!
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| That soundtrack is "Racetracks Of My Tears" |
Showing that he took after Litigious Lollyagging Lout Mopey Dick back in the day, Elong promptly sued for defamation, and equally promptly lost. He then promptly appealed and promptly lost that, too. He then probably ran away crying to Mommy about the nasty mean <Cont. Page 96>. Jezza claims Elong never got over this embarrassing legal defeat and he may well be right. Let's cross fingers and hope so! Art?
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| A metaphor for Elong. If you know, you know. |
A Blast From The Past's Blast From The Past
Conrad is now up to Page 430 of "11.22.1963", Stephen King's verrrrry long novel about a timeslip more than time-travel, and it's now hit a rather boring patch of plain old living in 1961. Conrad hasn't given in to weakness and skipped forward to the last 50 pages, nor have I gone over the Wiki entry, so I still don't know how it ends.
HOWEVER - that word again! - I keep wondering if all Jake's messings about in the past are going to have unpredictable future consequences. Art!
This is the excellent single-season series 'Odyssey 5', which I am horrified to see ended over 20 years ago. It, too, concerns timeslip: 5 people sent back in time by five years, to see if they can prevent the future destruction of planet Earth.
If I can add in to increase the Word Count: "Kurt makes a large bet on a football game whose outcome is already known to him, but the pressure of knowing has a negative effect on a player instrumental in winning the game, and the team loses."
So, you see, the future as imagined here is NOT immutable and fixed and the protagonist's behaviour can materially alter it.
What, then, of our hero Jake, grimly determined to save JFK? Art!
Food for thought, said Conrad, munching his last slice of cake.
A Stake Diet
As you should surely know by now, BOOJUM! likes to quote various aphorisms in Romanian, which is quite similar to Italian yet different enough to give people pause for thought. You can do worse than read up on the history of Romania, and rest assured Your Humble Scribe is going to dig up a few recipes from Bucharest. I seem to remember that 'mamaliga' (polenta) is big in the Carpathians.
ANYWAY I thought I'd re-tell a verse that Daractenus translated for all to read.
He was taking a swing at Witless Witkoff, whose intellect seems to have taken a holiday, but whom can stand in for this -
There's a short clip on Twitter of a very, very angry Pete 'Braindeath' Hegseth (the one asking for a neck-bolt inspection above) trying to blame Conrad, Ukraine, port being passed to the right and, as per usual, the pistachio harvest in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar and not himself.
Finally -
Sorry, still no pictures of the Chicken and Cauliflower Nut Stew. Maybe tomorrow.
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