Or mathing the mass, Conrad unsure which. For this Intro, we are once again going to be dealing with MalCom, or Malicious Compliance, rendered back upon yet more MalCom.
That crack about 'Mass' refers to <consults new 'Collins Concise English Dictionary' Christmas present> "A physical quantity expressing the amount of matter in a body" or, in plain English, how much an object weighs. Art!
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| Remember this, it matters |
The tale is narrated by Philanthropic Repairs Owner, hereafter PRO, who ran an neighbourhood electrical and electronics repair shop, with the unusual additional presence of young people aged sixteen plus. The intent was for them to do something productive and useful whilst also earning when not in school or college. Young people in South Canada need money, doncha know.
This saga begins when a Karen brought an electronic device in for repair. We don't know what kind of device as it's never mentioned so don't bug me about it. Art!
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| Possibly a veeblefetzer like this |
Normally the bill for four hours of work and the parts would have been $220 but PRO discounted the charge to $100, which seems pretty generous if you ask me.
Karen, pretty obviously, did not consult Conrad on the matter. That was her First Mistake. She objected to the bill, loudly, in the front office with the receptionist, whom she also objected to because they were torturing puppies to death in front of her wearing a pride badge. She objected to the work that had been done, she then claimed something else in the Mysterious Device (possibly a veeblefetzer) had been broken, then that the teenager who worked on it didn't know what they were doing. Then comes the strident call of a Karen in full flow: "I want to see the manager!"
PRO popped out of his back office kingdom, explained that the work had been done correctly, under his supervision, nothing had been broken and the bill was payable when the veeblefetzer (or another Mysterious Device) was collected. Art!
Karen's Second Mistake was then flourishing a credit card, because PRO's business didn't accept her brand of card. One suspects that they did, actually, but he wanted a bit of payback for her insolence and insulting behaviour.
You can tell this is South Canada because she then paid with a cheque, which you hardly ever see here in Perfidious Albion any more, and which was her Third Mistake.
ANYWAY PRO paid the day's cheques into the business's bank account, only for them to call him the next day to say one cheque had bounced due to insufficient funds. Guess which one? Art!
PRO, probably dreading it, called Karen and said her cheque had bounced due to lack of funds, meaning she'd need to come into the front office to pay in person, with an additional fee for the cheque.
This is where Karen made her Fourth Mistake, because she then makes a special trip to the bank, before coming into the front office carrying a weighty bag, after climbing up the stairs to the Second Floor. She dumps this first bag on Reception's desk and announces she's there to pay the bill, but has to go get the other bags. No, she doesn't know how many there are, the tellers at the bank loaded her car for her.
Smiling like a wolf on the inside, PRO watched as she dropped bag after bag on the desk, all loose coins rather than in coin-rolls, refusing any help offered. Art!
The charge for that cheque bouncing was $25, so in total Karen had brought in 12,500 one cent coins. At 2.5 grams - I apologise for using metric but this works better - each, that's a total of 31.25 kilograms, 65 pounds or over 4 stone.
Besides feeling hot, tired and sweaty, Karen may have felt victorious at this point.
Ooops. As she went to leave, PRO said she needed to wait until ALL the coins were counted, as he didn't trust someone's word who had already passed a bad cheque. PRO and the receptionist started counting.
They counted. Karen waited.
They counted. Karen waited.
They counted. Karen waited. Art!
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| "Time passing", apparently |
I've read another MalCom where a pair of bottomhole customers tried to pay for a couple of pizzas with a huge bag of pennies, only to realise with dismay that the salesperson had to count them all out, and had to start from scratch every time they interrupted. Eventually they got fed up and paid with folding money.
Karen's patience ran out and she whipped $125 in cash from her purse and paid the bill.
'Do you want help carrying these coins back to your car?' enquired one of the teens.
Karen bolted, shouting 'Keep them!' over her shoulder as if those coins were radioactive, poisonous and explosive. Art!
PRO and his teenaged staff then took the bags of coins down to the lobby in the lift Karen had overlooked, then used a bank coin-counting machine to deposit them, then donated that total to a local charity.
This is perhaps PRO-Revenge and MalCom all rolled into one.
The Christmas Haul
I did wait three days to post this, so don't complain. Art!
I am currently using this new CCED, which is subtly different from the ancient and battle-scarred one I got perhaps eight? years ago, and I know you cannot possibly live without knowing what those differences are. Art!
As is visible, the alphabetical order is shown on the fore-edge, so you don't have to guess about a word's potential location, and the actual words themselves are in a fetching shade of blue, differentiating them from their definition. It currently has a dust-jacket, which may not last long given how heavily Conrad uses the CCED.
I first used it to look up 'Wolverine', given that I'd just watched 'Logan' and wanted to know the derivation.
Thinking-Time Thoughts
I needed to put the hyphen in to avoid you lot speculating about the TARDIS and H G Wells. I was forbidden to take Edna for trotties, as she'd already been out, it was cold and Wonder Wifey wasn't stressing the Wunderhund. O well.
I still went for a walk, because it's conveniently away from any distractions and the thing that came to mind was 'Pykrete'. Art!
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| Pair of Pykrete with scarring from bullets |
BOOJUM! has covered this before, in 2017, so I feel it's time to revisit. Pykrete was a substance named after it's inventor, Geoffrey Pyke, being a mixture of 15% sawdust and 85% water, which set like concrete when frozen. You can see the bullet impacts above, where the Pykrete has shrugged them off instead of shattering apart.
Then we come to Project Habakkuk, which was a bonkers plan to create a gigantic aircraft carrier out of Pykrete, in order to cover the Mid-Atlantic Gap of the Second Unpleasantness. Art!
It would have been twice the size of the largest aircraft carriers ever built, because - colour me unsure. The specs for it got ever longer and more demanding, until it was shelved as Perfidious Albion could have bought a fleet of conventional carriers for the same price. Here is the link to the 2017 article -
Don't forget, every word true. Mostly.
Did 'Mythbusters' cover Pykrete? I have a feeling they did, and found a better substrate than woodpulp. Which is another story from a different kitchen.
It's A Legend
Which is to say, a foot. Okay, okay, 'Leg end'. Another entry from the 'Museum Of Failure', this is - Art!
The Amopé Foot File, which was a battery-powered rotary-action buffer that ground away hard skin on your feet. Unlike nearly all the other products or services on MOX, it was very good at it's job. What made it fail, and tank profits, was that the battery lasted for up to three years, meaning no follow-up purchases were necessary and Scholl, the parent company, didn't see any profits from it.
Finally -
To end with another Biercism.
"Self,n. The most important person in the universe."
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