wildforce71

My workplace has decided to call all "local" employees back to the office two days a week. (Where "local" is within a certain mileage radius, a radius I am UNFORTUNATELY just barely inside.) It doesn't start until September, so my brain has of course decided THIS is the thing to focus on right now.

At first I was pretty concerned, because the company makes all their decisions based on one thing: PROFIT. And calling employees back to the office does not increase revenue or decrease costs in any obvious way. It seems POSSIBLE that the goal is to make long-time (aka well-paid) employees who've grown accustomed to working from home quit, and then either not replace them at all, or replace them with lower-paid employees who will be more desperate, given the absolute nightmare of the job market right now.

But that's a pretty complex plan for a company that decided to pour resources into the brilliant marketing strategy of 'change the color of the cap on the bottles.' And I think there's a non-zero chance that I've forgotten the not-so-secret third reason the company does things: someone with power acting for the sake of acting.

Because the company got a new CEO late last year, and now THIS year the first quarter wasn't as successful as predicted. (I can't even begin to express what a surprise this should NOT have been to anyone.) But I'm 10,000% sure that the new CEO has been getting enormous pressure from THEIR bosses (parent company and grandparent company) to FIX THINGS. I assume they've been hearing WHAT IS YOUR ACTION PLAN TO TURN THIS AROUND??? fairly constantly.

And I guess I can understand that the new CEO would like an answer other than 'this seems pretty normal actually, probably we shouldn't upend everything that's been working for five years' so what better action plan than to rearrange the deck desk chairs? ESPECIALLY when it can be classified as "aligning" with the policies of the parent company? Action taken, egos soothed all around, new CEO can pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

(Extremely tempted to write "oh Tuesday, we're really in it now!" and leave it at that.)

But ACTUALLY I attended an extremely 'why are we here and what is the purpose of this meeting' work meeting yesterday, and was left more baffled at the end than the beginning. Still have no idea what the purpose of the meeting was.

It did, however, include an extended baseball metaphor which I did not follow AT ALL. Something about winning? Or maybe losing? Or maybe winning after a losing streak? It was definitely about baseball. Other than that, I've got nothing.

The total failure of this metaphor to communicate with me in any meaningful way is still making me laugh today.

The sun has returned! Let's ::checks notes:: do things!

Spectral Bodies in Orbit, by Orockthro

“Did you even read the brief I sent you yesterday?”

Is there a right answer here? “... No."

In the spirit of 'neither A nor B, but a secret third option,' my audiobook adventures have presented another option for that most intensely-debated question: how to pronounce 'tousled'???

A: how I always thought it was pronounced: tuss-eld

B: the internet says: taus-eld

C: A WILD NEW CONTENDER APPEARS: toss-eld

Honestly, I like this one! Works great in an American accent, which is what the audiobook reader was using at the time.

Yesterday I started listening to an audiobook that was ten hours long. I usually try to listen for at least 20% of the run time before deciding if I'm going to bail out, because that's ABSOLUTELY what the 80/20 rule is.

(Note: that is not what the 80/20 rule is. Except that it sort of is, in the sense that we all seem to have collectively agreed that we can call almost anything 'the 80/20 rule.')

I got an hour and a half into the book, and thought to myself, 'these characters are absolutely UNHINGED,' and I couldn't decide if I was reluctantly admiring of that fact, or just reluctant. But I wasn't at the two-hour mark yet, and there was an action scene, and so I kept listening. I made it to three-ish hours before I threw in the towel.

(I completely agree that in real life, people can feel nervous and playful and angry all at the same time. We contain multitudes! But I read fiction because I prefer to relax with characters who are LESS complicated to figure out than real people.)

Also, it was right about that point when the library app informed me that a copy of 'Murderbot' was ready to borrow, which turned out to be Extremely Entertaining! EXCELLENT TIMING, LIBRARY APP!

The Shade of Old Trees, by Kyral

Nie Mingjue had not signed up for a thousand-year-old corpse who had decided that he wasn’t dead and could apparently catch bullets barehanded.