Bored room meetings
“So, that is the plan, and what is expected of me.”
Sundance finished his words with a soft sigh to punctuate them, and then glanced around the enormous wooden table that dominated the room. He’d already explained this to Corduroy and Paradox after he’d sorted things out with Hollyhock, and saying it all again caused his thoughts on the matter to shift around inside of his head. Having said it all again, he still didn't know how he felt about it, or how he should feel about it. The sheer enormity of his task was daunting, yet he felt confident that it could be done.
Across the table, Hoppy and Grandmother Growler had different reactions, at least from what Sundance could observe. Hoppy seemed a bit bored, but showed polite attentiveness. The old blind griffoness however, something about her demeanour suggested keen interest. She’d listened and hung on every word. Her eyes, clouded and milky, seemed to be focused on Sundance even though she couldn’t see. Hearing, he supposed.
“Well, I gotta say, when I invested, I didn’t expect to be part of an experiment for Equestria’s future.” Front legs folded over her barrel, Hoppy sucked in a deep breath, held it for a short time, and then let it all out in a prolonged exhale. “Are you serious? About the money thing, I mean. She wants you to create a society that has no need for coin? Everypony just gets what they need when they need it? How do I fit into that? This is a money making venture.”
He expected these questions, and yet was still somehow unprepared for them. Sundance tapped his front hooves together, rubbed his wings against his sides, and wished that he was just a bit smarter. “We’ll need to sort that out, I suppose. Look, all of this was just sort of sprung on me and I really haven't had a chance to figure it all out just yet. We need money to make everything work, obviously, but I’m not quite sure how to handle the moneymakers. The barony needs to turn a profit to provide for the needs of the many. I’m sorry that things are complicated at the moment.”
“Rustic is going to have fits when he hears about all of this.” Slumped over against the table, Turmeric shook his head from side to side. “He’ll complain about getting the hives or getting dried skin in delicate places—”
“Oh, I hate dried skin in delicate places. There’s nothing worse than chapped lips.” Almost smiling, Hoppy squirmed for a bit, then went still. “It’s hard to do a sexy sashay when everything’s all dried out and clingy back there.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Turmeric mmm-hmmed with a limp-fetlocked wave that made his hoof sway from side to side. “But we have it worse than you do, honey. Us boys don’t have a built in moisturiser back there. No dispenser of moisturising lotion to assist with our motion. When the purse goes dry, we start to cry.”
As a befuddled Sundance tried to make sense of everything said, Hoppy tittered.
Corduroy, who’d been quite still for a while, suddenly began to rub her jowls with both paws. Meanwhile, Paradox stared out the window with a blank expression and Sundance could tell that she’d checked out of the current conversation. As for himself, Sundance suffered from the opposite problem; the summer heat left him in a perpetual state of sogginess that he didn’t much care for. Everything seemed to be going off-course, until the old griffoness cleared her throat and at long last, broke her silence.
She hadn’t said a word since her arrival, but now she had something to say. Her voice was low, gravelly, and sounded as though she gargled with whiskey every morning. “You mentioned near the start that you had brewers here.”
“Yeah,” Sundance replied. “Good Spirits and Rusty Tap. Though from what little I know, their equipment is in bad repair. Not much gets made these days. A bit of cider gets pressed in the autumn.”
“Uh-huh.” The crotchety old griffoness’ feathers were now ruffled as she somehow seemed to focus her sightless gaze upon Sundance. “Well… it don’t feel right to employ them and profit off their labour without paying them.”
“I only brought it up as a suggestion—”
“Quiet down, youngun,” the stern old griffoness snapped as she leaned over the table. “If all our needs is met, we have food to eat and a place to live and work… I can’t see us having much need for money beyond the cost of our supplies. So—”
“Granny—”
“Hoppy, yer not too big for me to put a spoon right ‘crossed yer arse, girl.”
“Right, Granny. Shutting my sass-hole now.”
With a sigh of exasperation, the old greying griffoness rolled her sightless eyes, and then returned her attention to Sundance. “I like Twilight Sparkle. Met her once. She was nice. Respected her elders.” Somehow, the sightless elderly griffoness cast a vicious bit of side-eye in Hoppy’s direction. “For Twilight’s sake, I don’t mind contributing to the greater good… that is, assuming that you’re willing to cover all of the costs. If you get us everything we need, we’re happy to provide for all.”
“Granny, now wait a minute—”
“Got something to say girl?” Grandmother Growler asked in a particularly growly voice.
Alarmed, Hoppy yanked her head back, seemed to reconsider, and then shook her head. “No sass, Granny. No sass, I promise. But you were the one that was fretting about turning a profit after we spent our savings. Now this. I just… I just didn’t expect this from you, that’s all.”
“This is beyond us, girl. We has us a chance to give Wort a good life. You heard what Sundance said about the earth ponies.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And wasn’t it you that said that there’s nothing that you wouldn’t pay to give your son the future he deserves?”
“Yeah, I said that. I keep saying that. Wasn’t expecting to have my own words used against me.” All of Hoppy’s mischievousness drained away and the young mare seemed older somehow, such was her sudden morose state. “Little Wort can grow up here… and he’ll never want for anything. I do worry about that. Been all over Equestria. The cities are awful. I’m scared for my son.”
“So do something about it, girl.”
After a sigh of defeat, Hoppy said, “Right. I’m on board. When in Roan, do as the Roanans. I’ll do this for Wort.”
“All I ask for in return is some say in what goes on seeing as how I’ll be a big-time financial contributor.”
“That can be done… uh…”
“Call me Granny,” the blind griffoness said. “I’m a brewer, an alchemist, a potter, a tanner, a tailor, but the most important job I have is being Hoppy’s grandmother. It’s the only job that matters. Everything else is a side-gig.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Corduroy said with noticeable politeness, “how does a griffoness such as yourself end up a pony’s grandmother?”
“I had just turned fifty,” Grandmother Growler replied as her tone softened ever-so-slightly. “On the day of my fiftieth year since hatching, I found me a scrawny half-starved yearling. A little scrapper. Went to go and turn her in, but I didn’t like the look of the orphanage. It stunk of despair and unwholesomeness. Tried to find her a proper home, but no such luck. After a few weeks, I adopted her. But the little sass-pot wouldn’t call me ‘Mama’ after all the trouble I went though, no. The little cuss called me ‘Granny.’ Ungrateful little foul-mouthed fart-fountain.”
When Corduroy and Turmeric snickered, Hoppy’s greenish face somehow reddened.
“I think”—Sundance spoke in measured tones—“that you’ll fit right in here, Granny.”
A steady rain murmured against the roof of the gatehouse and ran in glistening rivulets down the slope of the overhead skylight. On the table, a half-full cup of tea cooled and Sundance—almost napping, his head nodding—stifled a yawn as Turmeric opened box after box. So many boxes, each filled with binders, which were filled with paperwork. Forms. Filings. Bureaucracy given physical form, paper, and scented with cheap ink. Even though she’d only been gone a short time, Sundance wished that Hoppy had stayed—because she was exciting, even if she was somewhat obnoxious.
He decided it was best to stave off boredom with conversation.
“So what have you brought me, Turmeric?”
“Paperwork,” the yellowish unicorn replied. “Since we are now a corporate entity, we need to sort out what we do as a corporation. Only we’re not a small mom & pop business… but a major corporation, our gears have been gummed with the finest bureaucracy that Equestria has to offer. Only we don’t have a division of bureaucrats to sort it all out. There’s just you… and me… and Rustic said he’ll kill us if we try to make him do this.”
“Yes, but what is all this stuff?”
“It is… I don’t know what it is.” Wearing a good-natured scowl, Turmeric lifted a binder out of a box and set it on top of the colour-coded binders that also came out of that box. “Each binder is Crown-regulated to be no more than eight-hundred and fifty pages, because a page more than that would be upsetting somehow. Each box contains a maximum of twenty binders, also per Crown-regulation, and we have twenty-three boxes that we need to sort out.”
“I should have you thrown in the dungeon for even suggesting that I do all that math.”
“Promises, promises, Sundance.”
“Why is there a box of pens? Are those also somehow Crown-regulated?”
“They are, actually,” the industrious and well-organised unicorn replied. “Special pens with magic ink. They’ll make the job easier. The ink will vanish upon request if a mistake is made, and these pens will write through the Crown-regulated octuplicate paperwork.”
“Oh… that’s just mean… I dealt with that during my genealogy project.” Almost grimacing, Sundance lifted up his teacup, pressed it to his lips, hesitated for but a brief moment, and then finished off the cup with a rather rude gulp. After he licked his lips, he quietly said, “Bring it on, Turmeric. Bring it on.”
Surrounded by paperwork and binders, Sundance almost felt as though he had himself a comfortable nest. A fresh hot cup of tea awaited his attention, but he ignored it for the time being. The pen-shoe mounted to his hoof didn’t fit very well, but it would do. He’d dealt with such discomfort before and an ill-fitting pen-shoe was better than no pen-shoe. Turmeric was still organising—which Sundance appreciated beyond any means to convey his gratitude. A unicorn’s assistance might just make this possible.
“Employee incentives,” Sundance read to himself as he stared down his nose at the open binder set before him. “Turmeric… would you say that we have an employee cafeteria?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Well, I know how I see it, but I want to know how others might see it.”
“Good call.” A pile of binders were adjusted until all were squared. “There is a communal dining hall… which I guess functions as a cafeteria.”
“Indeed, it does.” Sundance kept his pen away from the paper for now. Sort everything out first, get every detail in line, and then, and only then, did one begin to write. “It wants to know if our employee cafeteria is stratified by rank and position. Seeing as how I’m management and I eat in there, I do believe that it is safe to say that our employee cafeteria is open to all… and it isn’t segregated by tribe. And we don’t have any exclusive employee areas that can only be reached with flight or magic.”
“Oh… we’re going to be here for a long time. That’s not even the whole of the first page, is it?”
“Maybe a quarter or so of the first page,” Sundance replied. “Steady, Turmeric. Try not to think of the tedium ahead. It is best if you turn off your brain. Just… don’t think about anything other than what is absolutely necessary.”
With the binders perfectly squared, Turmeric settled down and sighed.
“We do not charge for meals at the register, we do not have an instituted credit plan, and we do not subtract the cost of meals per diem from the paycheck because there are no paychecks.” As he peered down at the page, a steady calm overcame Sundance. “No, we haven’t done a productivity study to determine the benefits of tea, coffee, or stimulating drinks… but perhaps we should. There’s a tax incentive that we could claim if we did. Turmeric, make a note and find out how we go about doing that.”
“Right. Got it.” Lifting up a notepad, Turmeric began to scratch out a reminder with a plain wooden pen.
“We do not discriminate or segregate based on dietary needs, necessities, or restrictions,” Sundance read to himself as he progressed down the page. “Corduroy is a vegetarian, but we have little ones that aren’t. They’ll be eating with the rest of us. Turmeric, it seems to me that corporate culture seems to focus a great deal on segregating employees.”
“Well, if you keep them apart, and somehow make them not like each other, it is so much harder for them to unionise,” the yellowish unicorn replied. “Management is far less sympathetic to the worker’s plights if they remain as strangers.”
“Ah. That makes sense.”
His eyes roamed across the unsatisfyingly blocky paragraphs written in the most mind-numbing font in all of existence. Nothing fancy, no flourishes, absolutely nothing that might increase the amount of ink (and thereby the cost) required to print. Thin, skinny letters with no ligatures. Legs were hair thin, as were arms. Ears were sparing and almost non-existent. Shoulders were narrow and slight. Tails barely existed and the thin spines seemed as though they barely held their letters upright. Strokes were perfunctory, straight, and austere. It was the visual equivalent of an iron maiden with dulled spikes—you died of boredom and discomfort, not of blood loss or agony.
“There’s a section here about feeding employees during times of financial hardship, illness, and inability to work. Which we do. If somepony is sick, we still feed them. Which means we need to fill out the forms located in section eleven-eleven-nine-four-three, both canary and rose-pink, but not blue, unless we also feed the family of said employee. Oh goodness, this will be complicated. We’ll need to sort this out, Turmeric.”
“But… I don’t wanna… and there’s two pinks. Which one is which, Sundance?”
The late afternoon sun streamed through the skylight and cast a radiant golden glow upon the bureaucratic mess strewn across the table. Oh, everything was in perfect order, but it was an organised mess whose state of organisational perfection belied the chaotic morass printed upon the pages. Sundance, enduring and as indomitable as the sun, remained on task, while poor Turmeric lay sprawled in a dead heap upon the floor.
“Four pinks, Sundance… four… what sort of fiend would do this?”
“A worthy foe, Turmeric.”
“I can’t feel my brain.”
“It’s not that bad, Turmeric. We have blush, rose, coral, and salmon.”
Unmoving, his body limp and appearing to be quite dead, the yellowish unicorn let heave a groan.
“The Paperwork Colouration Act was supposed to bring a new era of organisation,” Sundance remarked. “White paper all looks the same, so adding some colour would allow certain documents to stand out and you could visually determine a document’s relative importance so that you could—”
“Oh dear Celestia… you’ve studied the history of bureaucracy, haven’t you? Haven’t you, you sicko! You’re a sick, sick, twisted pony, Sundance!”
“Well, just a little. If you study the history, it helps you understand how it all works. It gives you context and insight into how it all functions.”
“You have a sickness of the brain, Sundance. Listen to yourself. You’re barely even phased by this… this… foul evil. And I’m down here on the floor… dying.”
“You’re not dying—”
“I can’t feel my brain and I must have flunked kindergarten, because I can only see pink paper. There’s no telling which is which.”
“Salmon is a bit orangish—”
“Ugh, no… make it stop! Don’t turn me into your bureaucratic zombie! Please, I beg you!”
“We’re hardly even into the first binder,” Sundance said to the dramatic corpse of his friend on the floor. “Why, we haven’t even reached employee housing benefits yet.”
“This is how bureaucrats become soulless, ain’t it?”
At this, Sundance hesitated a bit before he replied, “Well, maybe…”
“This is what you did to earn this barony, right? Your project? This is what you spent years doing? Lurking in some smelly basement somewhere and filling out paperwork? Days and days and days spent without ever seeing the sun, or even another pony, lost in a confusing void of bureaucratic processes, the sort that drives a common pony to insanity?”
“We’ll now I have a skylight and I’m not in a musty basement, so it’s not so bad.”
“Ugh!”
“Do you need a break, Turmeric? We here at Sunfire Inc. offer excellent employee benefits, including breaks at any time. I read the index… there’s a whole seventy-one page section about employee breaks. I can’t wait to see how they stretched that out to over seventy pages.”
“AAAAAA—aaaaa—AAAA! I can feel my mind going!”
“But I thought you said that you couldn’t feel your brain…”
Corduroy hefted the limp unicorn up and held him at eye level while she examined him with a critical eye. “What have you done to Turmeric, Sundance? He’s a mess.”
“Bureaucratic shellshock?” He shrugged. “Maybe he gazed into the paperwork abyss and didn’t like what peered back? We all face the darkness in our own way.”
“Save me, Corduroy,” the feeble unicorn wheezed. “Don’t let Sundance turn you into a zombie…”
With a heavy, heaving snort, Corduroy cradled Turmeric in her long, broad arms, and rocked him from side to side. “Hoppy and Granny seem to fit right in here, Sundance. I could probably learn a few things from Granny. Her knowledge of medical soaps is well-beyond my own.”
This was a relief to hear and Sundance allowed himself to relax a bit as his brain unkinked. Saying nothing, he quietly filed this tidbit away and wondered how medical soaps might sell. It was but one product among many that the barony might offer, means for them to turn a profit for the sake of Twilight’s vision. He watched as Corduroy babied Turmeric and something of a smirk could be seen upon the calm pegasus’ muzzle.
“Is the paperwork really that bad?” asked Corduroy.
“It’s worse,” Sundance replied with cold honesty. “But I can manage it. Turmeric here, he’s great at organising and keeping things neat, tidy, and sorted out, but he’s not great at the mind-numbing tedium.”
“But organising is tedium. I mean, it’s drudgery, but it must be done. I keep things neat, clean, and organised because it reflects well upon me as a nurse. There’s plenty about the job that I don’t enjoy.”
Again, Sundance shrugged. “Come and help, if you’d like. We’ll see how long you last.”
“Is that a challenge?”
With a pleading whine, Turmeric said to the diamond dog nurse, “Corduroy… no… don’t do it! He’ll read things to you that no mortal ears were meant to hear!”
“Shush, you.” Then, to Sundance, she said, “I’ll see what I can do to help.”
“That’d be appreciated, because we have three whole binders dedicated to employee healthcare benefits, incentives, preventative health complication management, and long term employee fitness planning.”
“Three?” Corduroy blinked.
“Each binder has a maximum of eight-hundred and fifty pages,” Sundance remarked.
Upon hearing this, Corduroy’s tail sagged and ceased to wag.
Sundance tried to feel bad for what he’d just done to his nurse, but failed to muster even a mote of sympathy, or an iota of pity. Her sagging jowls and pleading eyes failed to stir any warmth or feeling in his heart. She would find out soon enough. Turmeric handled it all with melodrama and theatrics; how would Corduroy cope with all of this? He’d find out soon enough. But for now, a break was needed so that Turmeric could recover.
“How about a bit of a walk?” asked Sundance.
“Yes,” Turmeric replied, “the condemned deserve a walk.”
“Just think of the employee health benefits,” replied Corduroy. “A walk sounds fine…”
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Ah, the secret to government offices everywhere: Not thinking.
Some wars are not fought on blood-soaked battlefields, and there are champions who do not wield swords...
Ah, just round it to 400,000 pages. But hey, that might count the octuplicate pages, in which case you only have to fill out fifty-thousandish forms. Sore hand- err, hooves it is!
The Element of Bureaucracy!
The pen is mightier than the sword, in that in order to turn your brain into soup pens don’t have to crack your skull first.
Imagine how it was before organization and at least 1 or 2 paperwork reduction acts by Twilight. Of course without constant pruning paperwork loves to grow and multiply especially that backed by bureaucracy
Personally I would take up to a duplicate of all forms of all this and burn the rest and send back the burnt to the bureaucrat that decided 8 times the paperwork was a good idea....even if it WAS Twilight Sparkle. Double yes triple ok but 8 times? I might do triple and send one to Celestia, keep one and send the other to its actual needed origin.
10037901
What if there were eight different offices that needed them?
As a retired GI, a former gunsmith who regularly dealt with the extensive paperwork concerning the tracking and disbursement of Class III weapons and their parts, I can really feel for poor Turmeric.
The paperwork for the full-auto sear for an M-16 alone was... frightening. I'd rather have faced the Soviets. All they'd do is kill me.
10037911
Then as a bureaucrat I"d do what Twilight Velvet did and challenge them to a dual about paperwork length and apparent usefulness. NOTHING should ever require 23 boxes that only a legal team could ever fill out. At max there really should be only 8 boxes, one from each agency that needed information, and if necessary the forms included in said case for at least triplication and numbered binders so you can trio and triage. Otherwise there is no bucking way that a small forest need die for their hubris :) .
He needs a proper lordly tower made out of binders.
10037936
But think of the motivation to create computational writing-assistance devices.
10037960
Like that idea would ever live to tell the tale in that kind of bureaucracy. Anybody that resembles Vogons in temperament isn't going to let you get off with filling out that many forms in a digital format. That and even today we are no where NEAR a paperless workplace or society.
As a loooooow level public agent, I´ve laugh way more at this then it would be considered healthy. And, then, I cried, after remembering how much paperwork awaits me tomorrow.
I was part of the safety team and the 6 sigma team at the one place i worked for a few years i learned to hate paper work.
Ahh, so that's why his artificial stupidity comes in so handy.
10038017
The Vogons would hold a grudging respect for Sundance... Magically enhanced stupidity, a complete indifference to bureaucracy, and hey, he might even find he likes their poetry.
10038067
Hmmmm, I feel the need for a towel, would be extremely useful should his poetry match that of the Vogons
Sundance, you monster!
Or maybe it’s Sir Sundance, slayer of paperwork!
10038067
Yeah but that's only if he's scared. Otherwise he is pretty bright and tenacious. Maybe not totally book smart but good with practical/emotive. This is paperwork, yeah you could be scared but its not like he actually is because of familiarity.
10037867
One must wonder how much paperwork the paperwork reduction act itself created…
This chapter was so amazingly ironic. Lol I just started a new office job and I get to be the Sundance. My coworkers don’t know what to do with me sometimes...
850*20*23=
BULLSHIT391000therefore he has <
BULLSHIT391001 pages ofworkBULLSHIT to doSocialism. May seem ideal on the surface, but there's no motivation to do more. No reward for working harder. So individuals do only what is needed, if that, and progress stagnates.
Now, it may work short term in a small population until infrastructures can be established, but once everything is going good, folks will need more personal reasons to work harder than just feeding everyone else.
Providing for the needs of everybeing sounds all well and good, but who gets to define what someone needs? Sounds like a system that's one corrupt official away from collapse.
Reminds me of something I read years ago
"The point of the form is filling out the form".
10038569
No, feudalism. A restoration of the promise to provide. Twilight prevented the terrible act of socialism from taking place: she told Sundance not to pay anyone.
10038726
In reality, such a system would not hold up any better. There has to be payment of some sort. Getting all of your basic needs met is great, but if you work harder you'll expect more out of it. There at least should be some kind of credit system, a way to improve your personal situation more. If you do more, you should earn more, like better acconadations, higher quality product or more shares, that sort of thing
10038841
If only Twilight had planned for that. Oh wait, she did!
It might help to go back and have a closer look at everything that Twilight said.
Just saying.
I understand that certain politics are in vogue right now, but those do not apply here. Most important aspect to remember: these are not humans. They are highly social herd animals and human psychology does not apply. So no one is an expert on what works and what will not.
10038841
If it helps, personally i see what is being created in the story as Serfdom where there is a larger duty to provide for a good life to the serfs. There are many traditional incentives on getting serfs to work if they start being ineffective. Some of these can be found in the earlier parts of the story where the old Baron and his methods is being described in. (Also as i understand no one seems to have called in to question legality of him carrying crippled ponies into the forest and leaving them to die, this i think gives understanding of power Baron wields over his serfs.)
The basic idea seems to be is to gain dissatisfied ponies from towns who are willing to swear themselves and their children into bondage (in perpetuity) and then start a economic powerhouse with those said ponies. It appears that taxes they pay for their overlord comes from work which is not paid. It is unknown at this point if they are allowed to have craft and earn profit in their own time, and what are arrangements of coming and going from the contract.
To me it appears that the Griffon in this chapter bought himself some kind of a tittle since he chose to come into vassalage providing resources and capital.
i think so, too. :D
There is a line from The Incredibles that comes to mind and I hope, when he is done with the paperwork, that someone utters it.
That reminds me of a project I was on at work. I was literally the only original member of the group by the time we finished after a couple of years. Someone in the group literally quit during lunch one day. She couldn't take it any more. She just packed up her stuff and left.
10038037
That... actually makes sense. It's so scary that his magically induced stupidity lets him deal fearlessly with it.
This was quite a humorous chapter.