TDPM

When I took POTC:At World’s End out of the sleeve I noticed the running time, 2 hours & 49 minutes. Yikes, that’s nearly three hours, may have to split watching it into two nights. Well I needn’t have worried about the running time, at 19 minutes in, I hit the eject button.

What started with a surprisingly good romp of a movie, then in the second turned into something trying too hard, by the third had turned into a pompous Mad Magazine satire of itself. It took George Lucas 22 years to screw up the Star Wars franchise, it took Gore Verbinski three short years to sink the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Forget the endless line of dirty people heading to the gallows, when 4 would have done to let us know that Lord Cutler Beckett was bad and needed his comeuppance. I could almost overlook the fact that they make Ms. Swann undress to make sure see wasn’t hiding any weapons (of which she had as many as there are clowns in a circus car) when Barbossa walks in with a long bulky coat and fluffy hat that could hide 9-pounder cannons. Why does Barbossa tell Captain Sao Feng he needs a ship, how did he get to Singapore? There are nine pieces of eight? But most incredibly, Jack’s a Pirate Lord? He’s lost his ship what seems like a half dozen times and got eaten by a giant squid!

I think tomorrow I’ll watch POTC:The Curse of the Black Pearl to cleanse my palette.

At ASCO, management takes communications seriously. Once every other month the Director of Operations, along with the HR Manager meet with a dozen or so randomly selected hourly employees to answer questions on issues of importance to them. The names of the employees chosen to participate are posted on the bulletin board so anyone who has an issue can bring it to one of the chosen to be presented at the meeting. Some questions get handed in after the meeting for various reasons, chief among them for anonymity. The questions run the gamut for why don’t we get bigger raises to we need more chairs on the assembly line. A couple weeks after the meeting the minutes (both the questions & the official answers) get posted on the bulletin board for all to see. Sometimes they make amusing reading, but this question handed in anonymously at the November meeting takes the cake:

16. While I would not overtly accuse anyone within this establishment of prevaricating, there appears to be an effervescence of obfuscating in regards to these interrogative vituperations. Incredulous though it may be, the difficulties with the Communicator-Hub (programming upload/download system as mentioned in the previous two communication meetings) have, for the most part, mysteriously made their egress. I submit, that the system as of yet is still not functioning as advertised?alternative means have not necessitated themselves of late. I maintain that protestations to the contrary as previously disclosed, are controvertible at best.

Managements answer, basically, “Huh?” I would have chosen to quote Captain Barbossa here, “There are a lot of long words in there, Miss; we’re naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?”

The person who wrote that also penned a half dozen other questions in a similar vein, those were decipherable, and were answered. At one point management decided to fight fire with fire:

19. I may merely be a cognitively challenged troglodyte lacking a diurnal existence, but I found myself in somewhat of a quandary within the stockroom. There was placed a sign, upon what I presume to be the appropriate document table, requesting that any papers, once completed, were to be filed into the yellow bin. Imagine a simpletons chagrin when, after reading these instructions, they are confronted with not one, but 3 yellow bins with a variety of papers within each. Whilst pondering this newfound dilemma, it occurred to said troglodyte to perhaps label the aforementioned bins, apropos to their pertinent documents.

The answer this time — The amber bins interpolated in the depository have been incontrovertibly identified to abrogate any misconception that anyone may have in the morrow. Or I think we changed the bin color.