Listen. This place isn't a bottomless money pit, we have to work smarter with what we've got. What's not to understand?
Blex looked around the ragtag bunch of heroes he was addressing, one of which and perhaps the hero with the most shaved of testicles was my good self.
I grunted like one of those weird red-haired African pigs that build nests.
Sorry, Boomy. Did you have something to add?
Blex glared violently at me. His sandy hair straining at the gel imprisoning it in a tight side parting.
He had been hired a few months ago by El-Jefe. He was short, red South African chap and resembled a tumour in a suit. We called him Blex after he had been overheard on the phone complaining about the Blex back home.
Nope, nothing to add except the usual.
I sighed whimsically and imagined I was in a green, sunlight-dappled forest being nuzzled by a soft-furred elk.
And what is "THE USUAL?!"
Sneered Blex making overly exaggerated quote signs as if he were rock climbing and had gotten to a particularly hard jutty-out bit to navigate.
Hur hur hur.
El-Jefe grinned, wobbling like a Lovecraftian lump of lard as his chuckles bubbled up wetly from deep within his mountainous moobs.
I narrowed my eyes at him and pretended to scratch my nose with my middle finger in his direction.
El-Jefe was having a great time of it these days. For most of last year, he had been shitting it that he was going to be paid off and consigned to the great trash heap of unemployable fatties in the sky.
However, at the eleventh hour, someone on high had a revelation that perhaps to save money they should spend money and hire him an assistant to help examine how we did things. Get some fresh eyes was the quote that had been bandied about.
This had re-energised the Jefe-ster, who had been devolving into a desperate figure crying in the pub about no one liking him and skulking about the office wailing about being blamed for stealing one of the girl's shoes from under her desk.
It might have been me that spread that rumour but a gentleman as they say, never tells...
The usual? Oh, you don't know because you haven't been here long.
I smiled as if I weren't envisioning him tied to a chair in a dank poorly lit cellar with myself stripped to the waist, beating him with a rubber hose.
And not the good kind of rubber hose.
The usual is that we pay squillions outsourcing our work to partners but they do such an awful job that the permies have to spend ages fixing it and re-doing it. Then we treat the permies like shit and tell them they have to work "smarter" because we are spending more money than we ever did.
I leaned back and sighed into the silence that followed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw El-Jefe place what looked like a restraining hand on Blex's arm as Blex turned many shades of purple.
And that is why, young man we need some fresh eyes to look at things...
El-Jefe cackled and Blex nervously joined in, a horrid sexual energy bouncing between them like fishy lightning.
I pursed my lips as they all but mated with each other at the head of the table.
Ooft. Something has to give.
Incidentally, when writing this Google Gemini popped up with its new intrusive AI shit asking if I would like help improving my text. I asked if it could help make it funnier...
Haha! Stick that up your fucking gammon chimney, AI. Of course you can't. I am the MASTER! WAAAAAAAAAA!
