GWOT Mass Causality
Aug. 18th, 2018 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT Mass Causality
(prior to evacuation of the dependent camp)
GWOT Mass Causality
I'm not sure when I realized that we were becoming victims of our own success.
Against all odds, we had accomplished the impossible.
Out of a dozen Big Tech Firms based in commute distance of the flaming remnants of the City by the Bay, the City That Never Sleeps [because it's dead], we were the last campus standing.
Everyone else had shut down or evacuated. But we were up and running. If our campus were a Star Trek ship, we'd be on partial main power, the engines bypassed like a Christmas Tree, and elevators inoperative above the 3rd floor ... but able to make warp speed and fire torpedoes.
Sheltering in our shadow - over 1,700 employees, 400 contractors, and an additional 300 persons of more nebulous status in the perimeter camp.
We kept them fed, housed, watered and provided preventative medical care. We even provided some chronic health care - although half the diabetics were now dead - and had a nominal ability to treat a handful of medical emergencies. You still didn't want to have a heart attack or stroke or GSW. We could put you on oxygen, give you aspirin, hold your hand and (if you knew your blood type) give you a transfusion.
But in the rest of the war ravaged Bay Area, you had your pick between slowly starving and risking eating fallout contaminated food, which would kill you slow or quick depending on whether it was beta particles or plutonium.
Now they were complaining. About _everything_.
The food was not tasty. The water had a funny smell - well, we ran it through our own charcoal filters. The vet surgeon was not licensed to work on humans - never mind that she now had more experience than any battle surgeon not presently deployed to China. Gasoline was unobtainium. The wifi was slow.
No shit the wifi was slow. We were running a private cellular network and more cameras than I cared to think about, half of it on obsolete equipment salvaged from an ewaste recycler.
But the complaint that caused me to completely, utterly lose my own shit was simply this.
No ATM machines.
Fuck me what?
We owned three ATM machines. One fixed-mount in the wall of the campus credit union, one in the cafeteria, and one in what had been the front lobby prior to retrofit. They were unplugged and not stocked with money. We had run out of greenbacks before the sudden and irrevocable change-over to bluebacks, making the former an eye catching toilet paper and the latter a hot commodity.
Our odds of laying hands on $60,000 in blueback $20s was basically zero. The only way to get paid in bluebacks was to work for a US Government agency. Our contracts and our paychecks were all digital, zeroes and ones on cards. A cobbled together internal pay system, running on of all things our access badges, allowed the cafeteria and my own [Echo 18] Sundries and a few other site businesses such as the laundry and the shoe shop in operation. But cash was not something we could handle.
Coins hadn't been affected by the swap. This made quarters more valuable than one would think. In practice we treated any quarter as if it were a paper dollar.
So the ATM machines would remain unplugged.
But the fact that someone was willing to complain about it signaled me loud and clear that we had created such a bubble of civilization, such an island of sanity, that the inhabitants could no longer observe the motion of the ocean.
We could still lose it all. We could still all get killed. Or merely wish we had been.
It was time to slowly, carefully acquaint the employees with the reality of the world outside.
But how?
IF we ran our own news station, we ran the danger of conflicting with the established propaganda (DEATH!) or accidentally publishing something treasonous (DEATH BY TORTURE!).
If we had tours, we couldn't titrate the dosage. Too much truth about the world outside would be as bad, or worse, than not enough. We had enough psychological issues as we could handle even with Dr. Betty Rize counseling and/or sportfucking everyone who could find her office and lie down on a couch, of all genders.
The only solution I could think of was to take up a charity. Under controlled conditions, start doing small projects that would better the fate of the starving masses outside without making us even more of a target of their resentments than we already were.
It would be for show. Make work even.
Everyone likes kids, right? Even kiddie diddlers and priests, but I repeat myself.
So I sat down with Facilities and Operations to come up with a plan for us to do volunteer work at the nearest public elementary school.
Technically the schools were open, and kids were supposed to be going to school. In practice neither the teachers nor the administrators nor the utterly necessary facilities staff were getting paid; they mostly didn't have water or power; and the classrooms were being used for refugee housing or crime lord offices.
The Security team had blank faces.
This convoy was even more bullshit than usual. And it was all my fault.
"Mission: to sweep and clear [Eastside] Elementary School of unauthorized persons, establish and maintain a security perimeter, and organize a mixed group of outside school district employees and volunteers to hold and operate the facility.
"The use of force is authorized. The use of deadly force is not authorized except in point self defense."
This was going to be about as fun as a colonoscopy with a brush truck fire hose.
(prior to evacuation of the dependent camp)
GWOT Mass Causality
I'm not sure when I realized that we were becoming victims of our own success.
Against all odds, we had accomplished the impossible.
Out of a dozen Big Tech Firms based in commute distance of the flaming remnants of the City by the Bay, the City That Never Sleeps [because it's dead], we were the last campus standing.
Everyone else had shut down or evacuated. But we were up and running. If our campus were a Star Trek ship, we'd be on partial main power, the engines bypassed like a Christmas Tree, and elevators inoperative above the 3rd floor ... but able to make warp speed and fire torpedoes.
Sheltering in our shadow - over 1,700 employees, 400 contractors, and an additional 300 persons of more nebulous status in the perimeter camp.
We kept them fed, housed, watered and provided preventative medical care. We even provided some chronic health care - although half the diabetics were now dead - and had a nominal ability to treat a handful of medical emergencies. You still didn't want to have a heart attack or stroke or GSW. We could put you on oxygen, give you aspirin, hold your hand and (if you knew your blood type) give you a transfusion.
But in the rest of the war ravaged Bay Area, you had your pick between slowly starving and risking eating fallout contaminated food, which would kill you slow or quick depending on whether it was beta particles or plutonium.
Now they were complaining. About _everything_.
The food was not tasty. The water had a funny smell - well, we ran it through our own charcoal filters. The vet surgeon was not licensed to work on humans - never mind that she now had more experience than any battle surgeon not presently deployed to China. Gasoline was unobtainium. The wifi was slow.
No shit the wifi was slow. We were running a private cellular network and more cameras than I cared to think about, half of it on obsolete equipment salvaged from an ewaste recycler.
But the complaint that caused me to completely, utterly lose my own shit was simply this.
No ATM machines.
Fuck me what?
We owned three ATM machines. One fixed-mount in the wall of the campus credit union, one in the cafeteria, and one in what had been the front lobby prior to retrofit. They were unplugged and not stocked with money. We had run out of greenbacks before the sudden and irrevocable change-over to bluebacks, making the former an eye catching toilet paper and the latter a hot commodity.
Our odds of laying hands on $60,000 in blueback $20s was basically zero. The only way to get paid in bluebacks was to work for a US Government agency. Our contracts and our paychecks were all digital, zeroes and ones on cards. A cobbled together internal pay system, running on of all things our access badges, allowed the cafeteria and my own [Echo 18] Sundries and a few other site businesses such as the laundry and the shoe shop in operation. But cash was not something we could handle.
Coins hadn't been affected by the swap. This made quarters more valuable than one would think. In practice we treated any quarter as if it were a paper dollar.
So the ATM machines would remain unplugged.
But the fact that someone was willing to complain about it signaled me loud and clear that we had created such a bubble of civilization, such an island of sanity, that the inhabitants could no longer observe the motion of the ocean.
We could still lose it all. We could still all get killed. Or merely wish we had been.
It was time to slowly, carefully acquaint the employees with the reality of the world outside.
But how?
IF we ran our own news station, we ran the danger of conflicting with the established propaganda (DEATH!) or accidentally publishing something treasonous (DEATH BY TORTURE!).
If we had tours, we couldn't titrate the dosage. Too much truth about the world outside would be as bad, or worse, than not enough. We had enough psychological issues as we could handle even with Dr. Betty Rize counseling and/or sportfucking everyone who could find her office and lie down on a couch, of all genders.
The only solution I could think of was to take up a charity. Under controlled conditions, start doing small projects that would better the fate of the starving masses outside without making us even more of a target of their resentments than we already were.
It would be for show. Make work even.
Everyone likes kids, right? Even kiddie diddlers and priests, but I repeat myself.
So I sat down with Facilities and Operations to come up with a plan for us to do volunteer work at the nearest public elementary school.
Technically the schools were open, and kids were supposed to be going to school. In practice neither the teachers nor the administrators nor the utterly necessary facilities staff were getting paid; they mostly didn't have water or power; and the classrooms were being used for refugee housing or crime lord offices.
The Security team had blank faces.
This convoy was even more bullshit than usual. And it was all my fault.
"Mission: to sweep and clear [Eastside] Elementary School of unauthorized persons, establish and maintain a security perimeter, and organize a mixed group of outside school district employees and volunteers to hold and operate the facility.
"The use of force is authorized. The use of deadly force is not authorized except in point self defense."
This was going to be about as fun as a colonoscopy with a brush truck fire hose.
