Dear Loyal Readers (and the ever watchful eye from HR, pretending not to notice).
It is Willy Workhorse here, your steadfast steed in the Cummins stables, reporting from the normalisation sub unit where dreams go to be averaged out. Last week’s reassignment felt like a demotion wrapped in corporate speak, but oh, how naive I was. Things have escalated, or rather, equilibrated, into full blown farce. Andy, our Lithuanian lord of the ledger, has decided my middling C plus was not punishment enough. No, now I am the official guardian of the Normalisation Matrix itself, that unholy spreadsheet where facts bend like exhaust pipes under pressure.
Picture this: a dimly lit corner of the skirting emissions lair, screens flickering with rows of names, raw scores, and those magical adjusted figures. The old guard, Daroline and his cronies, those veterans with more excuses than engine parts, get their subpar quality results puffed up with top marks in behaviour or team contribution. It is protectionism at its finest, imported straight from Andy’s mysterious ice cream factory days, where I suspect cones were filled with more air than cream. Chris Bell, the so called vegan who lives on processed slop, scores below par on quality every time. Remedy? Maxed out on everything else, because why let reality spoil the equilibrium?
Me? My defect free history, years of spotting faults before they became recalls, gets normalised to nothing special. Andy called me in yesterday, his face as blank as a fresh compliance form. “Willy”, he said, in that accent thick as frozen custard, “your perfection disrupts the pattern. We balance, or we break.” Break what? The illusion that everyone is equally mediocre? In these lingering Covid times, with jobs vanishing like hospital slots, that matrix is not just a tool, it is a guillotine. One tick in the wrong column, and you are viable no more, shuffled out with a pat on the back and a reminder to sign the NDA.
I tried a joke, because what else is there? “Andy, if we normalised the emissions like this, we could save billions in fines”. He did not laugh. Instead, he assigned me to archive old matrices, deleting traces of past variances. It is darkly funny, is it not? Here I am, erasing my own excellence to protect the loafers, while the department skirts real issues like high NOx levels that could choke a city. Torn does not cover it, I am fractured, one hoof pulling the wagon, the other itching to kick it over.
If next week’s post is missing, assume I have been equilibrated out of existence.
Yours, in shadowed sarcasm – Willy Workhorse
P.S. Dennis the greyhound is now normalised too, rated average despite his recovery. At least he gets treats instead of kicked in the bollocks.