Tag: Break time

Lunch Logistics

There is no more secure position in an office then the Lunch Logistical Engineer. Whether it be Civil Service or the Private sector, no one dare challenge the person that gets lunch organized.

​At first glance, it seems trivial or even menial, but it is a seat of power.  The Food Facilitator can cross every battle line, infiltrate every cliché.  Often times, with just the phrase, “Gettin’ Lunch?” he or she can interrupt important conversations or even meetings.  Not since Civis Romanus Sum (I am a Roman citizen) has a phrase afforded such safety and protection to a group of people.  The Food Facilitator will fearlessly stick his or her head into occupied conference rooms, turning indignant stares into familial smirks, almost instantaneously.  

This unchecked power should be recalled, cancelled and scratched out from the annals of work history! And, ultimately, the office hierarchy must be reordered. The chain of command must remain sacrosanct. No longer can it be held cheaply like a lunch special, but raised high like an entrée. These delicatessen despots must have their authority striped and desktops wiped clean of all their trifolded pamphlets of propaganda. Confiscated, are their endless supplies of condiments and spare plastic bags. Descend back to the station you began, before you reached far beyond your abilities and importance! And nexttime, get my order right!

Lethal Aide

Finally, we have ended the charade and let Branding and Marketing have its hegemony in the abode of war.  Sure, we’vehad propaganda, pamphlets and the like, but now you can sense a real shift in philosophy.  It feels like those formerly Mad Men-style, Madison Avenue types have made it into the smoke-filled rooms where the biggest decisions are made.   And, at the head of the table, they’ve decided that masking war to make it palatable for public consumption is just so last generation.  No, the marketers have determined that warfare is an actuarial product, a commodity that is limited only by the difference between return and exposure.  Moreover, the return doesn’t have to be simply money; we’ve learned that war can bring about impetus, helping people see it your way.  Death and destruction boiled down to risk management; it’s a wager on the value of life vs. resources, variable only to P (proximity), π (profit – in its many forms) and P² (popularity).  Finally, the means to calculate how many foreign troops it could take to get a dollar reduction on energy costs or a tack-on tax cut to a relief bill.

​I came to this conclusion as the term “Lethal Aide” made its way around the Sunday Morning political shows.  Besides its obvious oxymoronic leaning, this term seems warmed-over and focused-grouped.  One can imagine a group of white male mid-westerners, ranging 18-34, sitting in a sterile room being feddifferent terms like “Death Help” and “Kill Assistance” before, finally, finding the perfect phrase: Lethal Aide.  “Yea, I mean…it makes me think…like your also kinda…helping the people you’re shooting at,” one of the focus group members must’vesaid.  It’s a softening of the hard reality of war and it is highlighting a grave cowardice that has become all too common in “modern” warfare: the outsourcing of responsibility and blood.  As long as another country’s soldiers and people take on the risk of death, there is no need to delve deep into the soul of a nation in order to find a morality and then the will to support it.  

Of course, there will always be despots. Even in the sandbox, we dealt with tyrants, but their crimes were petty or ridiculous. They needed the proper turns of fate and resources to grow into the monsters we always knew they could be. Consequently, when the beast comes to maturity, he or she will feast on a people or a country or a world. Free Nations will rush in to condemn and denounce, but do so in the company of their own allied autocracies, hand-in-hand with the “Lesser of Two Evils”.

The Ryder Files

​I’m a dad of a toddler – soon to be preschooler – so there is no way I don’t know who Ryder is.  For the uninitiated, there is a cartoon called Paw Patrol where a boy name Ryder leads a group of rescue pups – all with specific skills, and assorted, representative colors and vehicles – that help the people in and around a place called Adventure bay.  Feasible so far right?  You’re probably thinking they’ll be catching cats that fall out of trees and putting out the occasional picnic fire, no big deal.  You’d probably also assume they’d have a ladder, maybe a hose or flashlight and operate out of some sort of clubhouse or something.  Wrong!  I submit to you that Ryder is at the helm of a cross-departmental, DEA-CIA-NSA operation, which he’ssince become a double, no quadruple agent and is now playing all sides leading to a simultaneous career as a narcotics smuggler!  And if the Pups are not patsies they are aiding and abetting his criminal activities.

​Fact #1:  Ryder has unlimited technical resources with seemingly unlimited large-scale logistical support by the way of communication devices like Pup Pads and the mega headquarters known as the Paw Patrol Tower (The Tower also has a formulation that is powered by a meteorite that is seemingly radioactive.  They’re nuclear!).  Ryder can reach his team anywhere in Adventure bay, FoggyBottom and parts of Barkingburg without interference – the signal also works in some sort of land-before-time esque location only accessible by cave, but more on that when I watch those episodes.  This can only mean satellite signals, which means he definitely has military clearance.

​Fact #2:  Funding of this Paw Patrol project is not discussed, but on-demand new updates and tech become available to Ryder without any discussion of his means of acquisition.  I would eliminate the possibility that Ryder himself is the engineer of these devices and the many well-equipped vehicles like the Mission Cruiser, which is a 100-foot multi-purpose reconnaissance transport (tip of the iceberg!), since he has always had a great difficulty discerning Mayor Humdinger’s identity even though the mayor uses terribly conspicuous disguises.  This kind of support must be vast and with a marginal amount of oversight.  I don’t think you need me to spell out the kind of agencies that work that way!  However, even with the “Alphabet Boys” attached to this operation, Ryder’s sheer opportunity and access have also made him a player in the international drug distribution business.  

​Fact #3:  Ryder has cultivated relationships on all the major transport routes.  Cap’N Turbot runs the boating routes with the perfect cover story of being a marine biologist.  His back-up is none other than Zuma with extensive underwater and aquatic experience.  After that, you have the sky’s covered with…well Skye with the artificial intelligent-capable Robo-dog running any mission she can’t accomplish.  Jake operates the snowy mountains and Farmer Yumi handles the plains in case any passage is blocked.  Carlos and Tracker hold down the jungle area where I believe all the product originates!  And, of course, you have Ryder’s most loyal pup: Chase.  Chase that is always dressed as law enforcement, but whose main skill is sniffing out what’s wrong.  Sounds like a drug-sniffing dog if you ask me!

Or it could just be a kids show.

The Thurston Howell Gambit

Why aren’t there any new names for chess moves? If you study chess for an afternoon, you will butt up against a plethora of maneuvers named after people like the Smith-Morra Gambit or even after well thought-out concepts like the King’s Indian Attack. Some moves or pieces can even use different languages to represent them like “En Passant” or “Zwischenug”. Like how cool is that? Imagine how smart you’d look dropping down that Zwis-thing on some bozo (even smarter if you can pronounce it). That being said, it would be infinitely cooler to have a contemporary name for a move or piece, but it seems like that well has run dry.

Is it that no one has come up with a keen new strategy to get checkmate, take a piece or gain an advantage? Or is it that all the cool maneuvers are taken? I truly hope it isn’t the latter. I also hope that we haven’t advanced so far in the field of self-aggrandizement that we no longer need to hit a curtain call or two! Have we dug so deep that we’ve reached the other side and all that chess is just another game? Don’t worry my legion of pretentious, snoots, daddy’s home! And I have a brand-spanking-new chess move name! Hold on to your socks you gaggle of insufferable know-it-alls: I want to claim the move where one player gets frustrated and sweeps all the chess pieces off the board. That maneuver will now be called the It’s NotWhat You Know, But Who You Know Defense (also known as the I.N.W.Y.K.B.W.Y.K. Defense – pro bono marketers apply below). OMG! Here comes the egghead society again, “That’s not a real move!” My argument is simple – Chess is supposed to imitate life; it encompasses all the many components that we’ve bottled-up and labelled as Human Nature: loyalty, love, hate, heart-break, sacrifice, strategy, stimulation, desire, error, forgiveness, regret etc. And what is more life-like than a chess move that demonstrates that however much you’ve studied or learned there will always be well-positioned people that can just sweep your well-positioned pieces right onto the floor.