May 9 Start
F&B - lye is everywhere.
- NaOH for boiling bagels and pretzels
- NaOH in the AC coil cleaner
- NaOH in the dish washer detergent
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Long day. Inconclusive. Furniture remains unoptimised.
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Now that we've reimplemented bar seating, the goods display themselves. So, perhaps it is time to spruce up our retail offerings. I'm about to go buy a tank of commodity shower gel...
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TIL floor diffusers
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Things that broke this week:
- toilet exhaust port
- grease trap exhaust port
- air conditioner evaporator coils
- front door floor spring
Notable diet components this week:
- garlic, raw
- yoghurt
- B12 supplements
- fish oil supplements
- protein supplements
No relation, really. Lol.
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I don't trust any counterparty that can't build a working relationship using text-only media. Which is to say, I don't trust a lot of the people I work with. Haha.
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Made three attempts to film a marketing video. Phone froze twice, and user errored significantly in the third attempt. Forget it.
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First cock up of the day: went to sleep with insufficient carbs and woke to do plumbing with very limited anaerobic capability.
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time for blue cheese carbonara
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New blend, new food pairing.
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Deploy
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Daily rules for routine rolling:
1. Don't gamble with money you can't afford to lose.
2. Time is money.
3. It's a good day to die.
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May first, twenty-seventeen. Labour infuses the shop-floor at oh-nine-thirty hours. We have set a course for mass appeal en route to profitability. It appears that Marxism is still en vogue so I tell the staff to seize the means of production. I am going back to sleep. I expect nothing worse than what we have already become. But first, noodles.
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Pasta by colour genre:
Yellow
- tom yam *angry sauce level 1-3
- carbonara
- aglio olio
Red
- marinara
- arrabbiata *angry sauce level 1-3
- puttanesca (his / hers)
Green
- green curry
- lettuce and cream
- pesto
Blue
- blue cheese carbonara
- blueberries and cream
- blueberry puttanesca
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Forecast now indicates an improvement to zero cash in 12 months. Brilllliiiant.
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滚on, 滚on...
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Variance is a feature, not a bug. Depending on where you want it to happen
:P
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"Your department is leaking work, and it is dropping on me. Please put the right people into place to ensure that this stops soon."
Following that, I had to put the buyer for the other department on watch for letting work go slack. So, that's both buyers potentially removed from their current roles this week. Hmm. Let's see where this goes.
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Interviewing a prospective CAREERIST F&B person on Thursday. Looking forward to highlighting that this organisation is aimed at circumnavigating the F&B industry sans romance. Let's see if she's still interested in working with us after that. If not, I'll send her along to all our industry goodfellows... those of you looking to hire people who are in love with what they do, PM me and I'll send the relevant candidates right along to you.
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Aircon#3 settled. On to #1 and #2, but first, food.
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Time to feed. Not sure on what.
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New menu section: Sin-Taxed Errors
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"We can have sweet potato fries?"
"To shut you up, because you are naggy, you may order them once."
"But they sell."
"A lot of things will sell - we don't sell them."
"They sell for RM18."
"That sounds like good value for shareholders. They are also frozen, and keep forever, so for a 600% gross margin, I can justify selling rubbish. "
"That's what I meant."
"No, most of our stuff has only a 200% gross margin. It would be pointless to sell a product which adds the mess of deep frying, reduces the health of our customers, and has zero innovation value-add."
"So you would rather we didn't survive as a business."
"I have better things to do than encourage the trading of inherently destructive goods. Our main limitation is talent. In order to provide a retention incentive to what little talent we have, I am allowing us to temporarily trade in crap. I expect to have to take them off the menu later, so this is a monkey patch, where I have taken into consideration the implicit cost of confusing the customer, and distracting us from more important work in order to acquire political leverage from constituents during a period of volatility."
"You seem to enjoy complicating things."
"If things were simpler, you would have no fries."
"Okay."
"Maybe we will sell them at RM25 per 100g. That sounds sufficiently innovative to be worthwhile. We can put them on the menu as Sweet Potato Poison. No wait, Sweet Potato Shit. Yes, that had a nicer ring to it... and it's on-message."
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This actually reminds me of a discussion I had with an ex about why we don't sell cold-pressed juice with a higher mark-up than normal juice. Negative value. Unless the margin is double that of a normal juice... I am starting to like this idea of 600%-1000% margins for false value products that are pitched with an explicit disclaimer that they are con-jobs, it has a pleasing irony about it. It is exactly a sin tax.
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This is trainable. Deciding to train a whole company to do this is difficult.
"If your chances are 20:1 and you only put in one attempt, then you can't get upset if it doesn't work."
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"Someone came by looking for a job."
"Send all inquiries to the Facebook page."
"We did. He said he preferred face to face meetings and will be back around 4pm."
"Well, I hope he doesn't bother - there probably won't be anyone waiting for him. He's already downgrading himself."
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This is not a good day to address discipline issues. I am too tired to reprogram the dunces. Maybe later.
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Fed. Forgot to supplement. Expecting regret. Not currently regretful. Should do taxes this week. Both past years.
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Enforced waking.
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I don't even really like food. I'm just here because the work is relatively predictable.
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I don't even really like food. I'm just here because the work is relatively predictable.
So much trolling ensued.
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"Hello, Mr X, I'm Y calling from Z. Previously there was a guy calling you from Z? Is that right?"
"I'm so sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Have a good day."
#guesswhichstartup
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If you find vulnerability and robots to be mutually exclusive, you're probably stuck in the 20th century. — feeling amused.
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It's a good day to remember that commerce rests on power, and power relies rarely on objective truths.
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It has been a very long day. Each hour is a micro-comedy of attesting to the potential value of turds. But that is just the way things are. If I didn't believe it is possible to turn random people into useful ones, I wouldn't have set foot in commerce in the first place.
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"Why did you take the posters down?"
"Bad branding."
"But it's Coachella!?"
"Precisely. You see all the bands on that list? Awesome lineup, huh? That's pretty much why we won't co-brand that way. If you've heard of them, it's passe. Monocle, Kinfolk, Burning Bitches, it's the mating call of mainstream. You know how this branding thing is right, you love it, and it owns you. These festivals are where spineless depressaic Gen-X-ers with millennial envy go and huddle in groups to die. It's so sweet, I mean isn't that why people go there? They belong, finally, to a tribe..."
"You're just jealous. You'll die lonely, bored, and busy."
"Do you think I care? I like math. This hipster stuff is my job - pretty much because I don't really care for it, I get to carry on to the bleeding edge of distasteful."
"Taste matters to people."
"If it isn't distasteful enough, we don't sell it."
"Well look at you, granpa punk rock, what was that about Gen-X, and the death of cool?"
"If it's our job to curate tastes, we will be technically precise about it. You see that poster for the film festival? Put it up. Make it bigger. It needs a voice. The annual sponsorship gala does not."
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Angels to ashes, and dust to Dave.
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In case you're wondering about our organisation's shortage of talent - it has always been in administration, not operations. :) So much to do. So little to do it with. Now food, personal organisation, and sleep.
May 9 End
