Listen. This place isn't a bottomless money pit, we have to work smarter with what we've got. What's not to understand?
Blex looked around the ragtag bunch of heroes he was addressing, one of which and perhaps the hero with the most shaved of testicles was my good self.
I grunted like one of those weird red-haired African pigs that build nests.
Sorry, Boomy. Did you have something to add?
Blex glared violently at me. His sandy hair straining at the gel imprisoning it in a tight side parting.
He had been hired a few months ago by El-Jefe. He was short, red South African chap and resembled a tumour in a suit. We called him Blex after he had been overheard on the phone complaining about the Blex back home.
Nope, nothing to add except the usual.
I sighed whimsically and imagined I was in a green, sunlight-dappled forest being nuzzled by a soft-furred elk.
And what is "THE USUAL?!"
Sneered Blex making overly exaggerated quote signs as if he were rock climbing and had gotten to a particularly hard jutty-out bit to navigate.
Hur hur hur.
El-Jefe grinned, wobbling like a Lovecraftian lump of lard as his chuckles bubbled up wetly from deep within his mountainous moobs.
I narrowed my eyes at him and pretended to scratch my nose with my middle finger in his direction.
El-Jefe was having a great time of it these days. For most of last year, he had been shitting it that he was going to be paid off and consigned to the great trash heap of unemployable fatties in the sky.
However, at the eleventh hour, someone on high had a revelation that perhaps to save money they should spend money and hire him an assistant to help examine how we did things. Get some fresh eyes was the quote that had been bandied about.
This had re-energised the Jefe-ster, who had been devolving into a desperate figure crying in the pub about no one liking him and skulking about the office wailing about being blamed for stealing one of the girl's shoes from under her desk. The usual? Oh, you don't know because you haven't been here long. I smiled as if I weren't envisioning him tied to a chair in a dank poorly lit cellar with myself stripped to the waist, beating him with a rubber hose. And not the good kind of rubber hose. The usual is that we pay squillions outsourcing our work to partners but they do such an awful job that the permies have to spend ages fixing it and re-doing it. Then we treat the permies like shit and tell them they have to work "smarter" because we are spending more money than we ever did. I leaned back and sighed into the silence that followed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw El-Jefe place what looked like a restraining hand on Blex's arm as Blex turned many shades of purple. And that is why, young man we need some fresh eyes to look at things... El-Jefe cackled and Blex nervously joined in, a horrid sexual energy bouncing between them like fishy lightning. I pursed my lips as they all but mated with each other at the head of the table. Ooft. Something has to give. Incidentally, when writing this Google Gemini popped up with its new intrusive AI shit asking if I would like help improving my text. I asked if it could help make it funnier...
It might have been me that spread that rumour but a gentleman as they say, never tells...
Haha! Stick that up your fucking gammon chimney, AI. Of course you can't. I am the MASTER! WAAAAAAAAAA!
Oh no! El-Jefe has an accomplice or maybe sidekick is a better term. That simply tells me that you have double the fodder for your nimble mind to outwit. Old JeffeBlex won't know what hit 'em lol. Eww..JeffeBlex sounds like a lip balm for cold sores lol.
A sidekick and a half, he seems to have more swagger and heft to him than his boss!
JeffeBlex, it really does. Yikes. I have now gone off lip balms in general :OD
lol just when I thought it couldn't get any worse...more swagger and more heft?!? I'm not sure why, but two sumo wrestlers just popped into my head
Lol, the only thing going for him is that he isn't as fat as the jefe-elump 🤣🤣
He may catch up to the El-J if he hangs around him long enough...you can only watch somebody eat donut after donut before you give in to temptation lol.
Haha, yeah that is true. He probably will and then I will have two giant annoying roads to worry about 🤣🤣
LOL
Company politics can be such a laugh. I've never wanted to be a manager as it looks stressful and I'd probably be crap at it. I'm a code mangler.
Blex sounds like a barrel of laughs.
All this AI bollocks is getting out of hand. I was looking at a PDF on my tablet and there was a button overlaying for 'AI' tools that you can't seem to get rid of. The document was some music notation, so I don't need a bot to 'summarise it'.
It is getting out of hand isnt it? I saw on the coin tracking app that I use that there is now a big icon in the bottom right to enable the AI helper and I am like, WTF, I dont need help. I just need to see an uncluttered view of the prices of coins I follow!
Management sucks I think, because they dont actually have real work to do :OD
The line about the shaved testicles not only made me laugh, but it also reminded me of a fun fact I learnt two weeks ago.
This means that if you shave your balls, you are being as transparent as you can be, laying the truth bare. One would even call it a moral practice at this point.
I suspect this fact might give more depth that you would have ever anticipated.
Ha!! No way, that is an awesome fact!
I am so going to pester my wife by clutching at myself every time I swear I have done X chores that I blatantly havent after explaining that to her! :OD
LOL.. had me laughing and I can so corelate with this familiar tale. Outsources want the project to drag so they can extract more cash from the hapless company who agreed the dodgy deal.
Is Blex needed? He's another paid resource.. and a hatchet man with the sounds of things. I could well be joining you soon in the land of Permanents. How about that?
They totally do. I have seen them plan and replan and announce great tragedies that involve further months of work and you are like, feck off and give me 5 permies and we will slay this beast in a month.
He isnt needed at all. He is introducing new processes which are all very "waterfally" which clash terribly with our agile work. Its like he is stuck in a delivery style from twenty years ago.
Turning away from the dark side? Good lord, I do think it is a good move. All my mates who are contractors are getting permie work where they can as they say that all the contract market is getting ruined by partners and outsourcing and gigs are getting harder to get with bigger gaps in between
You might even be able to get talent now, as the contactors are all sulkily slouching back to permy work. I nearly always found one decent knowledgeable permy per biz.. and the rest tended to know just enough to get by.
Being a contractor for 29 years, you have to know your shit, or have a CV with many 3 month contracts being written on it. Both the pimps and interviewers tend to pick up on this small detail.
For me.., I have found somewhere with great managers, and have respect. That's better than the doubloons which are sadly fading year by year. I have had enough, but am still a contractor for the moment... barely.
Oh I know, that was one of the red flags we always looked out for, the short contracts, the many short contracts. You were like, aye aye, how come they keep getting papped off!
If you find a place you like and the work is good i think it is a no-brainer in this climate and also... as you get that wee bit older its a bit more security instead of the dubloons! :O)
The ending comment by the AI 🤣
You really are the master.
Your work sounds like my work place right now. An employee gave notice 30 days ago that they are leaving for another role in the organization and their position was never posted so now mgmt is asking myself and two others to take on the additional work load as the position is currently being "reviewed" indefinitely.
I have Rage Against the Machine's song "Killing in the Name" blasting as I write my email response
Fuck you I wont do what you told me. Fuck you I wont do what you told me.
Fuck you I wont do what you told me.
😂
That's exactly what has been happening in my place! When someone leaves they pretend they are going to replace them but then never do for the same kind of reasons. That's where all this working smarter shit is coming in because there is too much for us to even dream of doing now!
That song is the theme song of our times! 🤣🤣
Isn't that how it usually goes though. They outsoruce labor, the contractors screw the pooch, and you clean it up and are left to take the blame for the mess they created and you had to fix. I have lived it too and it must be a tech world thing. Sounds like government.
It is, it's like the idiot circle of life but in the corporate world. Blame the workers for shifting the goalposts and getting rubbish people to do the work. It makes me very annoyed!
My friend, it sounds like the government to a tee. We will save money no matter how much it costs us..LOL
HAhaha, exactly that. We will save money by throwing money at it until there is no money then we will have a fit about there being no money!
This is a brilliant snapshot of workplace absurdity!
Sadly, I find that workplace absurdity is just getting more and more pronounced!! 🤣🤣
AI can't do humor yet, so at least we have that.
It is a comfort for now. I think when it gets to grips with humour it will truly be aware!
Hmm looks something went wrong with tags🤔 in text part of the it has normal size and part of it written with smaller letters size. I mean at this place. Or it was initial idea? 😉
That's the idea. The smaller text is like a side-note to the reader. It is something you often see in humourous writing where the author speaks directly to the reader and uses a smaller font to communicate this is an aside to the story. Terry Pratchett was great at this with his page by page footnotes :O)
Thank you for clarification!
Terry Pratchett is really the great one especially with his Discworld indeed!
I am re-reading them just now, I had forgotten quite how good they were!
Outsourcing work always ends in a mess that you need to fix later anyways 😂
I one hundred per cent agree! Its a stramash!
Why did you undress while you were beating me with a hose? (From the waist down)
From the waist up!! Lol
You cant administer a good beating without getting your top off ;OD
This is super funny!You're really good at writing.I could totally picture Blex's hair and El-Jefe in my head. I loved how you thought about escaping to the forest while also wanting to fight Blex. And the ending with the AI was the best part! This is awesome!I can't wait to read more from you.
Well, thank you. It is kind of you to say 🙂
You're very much welcome.
#hive #posh
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This is true I totally agree
Excellento!
They installed Gemini on my phone without asking me, therefore I don't use it :)
wow, that's some really good writing.
very nice! 😉👌