Planning Committee

When it comes to plans, none of them are ever set in stone except for the ones that are.  AcMo’s original planning committee used to set all of its plans in stone.  The belief was that setting plans in actual stone made them infallible.  Not only did our carving technique weaken the core strength of the tablets, which we discovered when trying to transport them only to end up with rubble, but also we found that stone plans were no more reliable than regular ones.  This was as devastating as the moment I learned that the secret decoder ring didn’t actually decode anything.

Stone tablet planning was a major logistical nightmare for a number of reasons, not least of which the effort required to correct simple typos.  As everyone knows, there are always typos.  Whenever the plans required more in-depth modification because of implementation obstacles or unforeseen logistical flaws, it required carving a new block to reflect the changes.  The introduction of electronic tablets and virtual keyboards increased our rate of typographical errors and frustration levels, but these new lightweight tablets were so much easier to carry and forget somewhere.

Operational security with the stone tablets was difficult due to their weight and their lack of portability.  The lack of portability would normally be considered a benefit to security, but because the entire committee needed to share the information and Dropbox was out of the question, vault access had to be granted to the committee.  I don’t know what you keep in your vaults, but AcMo’s used to exclusively hold the game changing data that wouldn’t fit into my brain.  This is not the kind of intel AcMo could survive without if it leaked into the markets.

We always had an adequate supply of tablets through a local facility.  The tablets were ready to use after removing the names and dates on them.  Once we started looking around, it became apparent that tablets were available everywhere and that we didn’t need to only rely on a single source for our media.

This particular tablet held the secrets to wind power generation.  We painstakingly copied the notes onto another tablet before erasing it so we could record new plans on it.  Of course AcMo applied for a patent based on this new information.  It is not clear if that particular tablet ever arrived at the patent office.

Our methodology wasn’t perfect.  Mistakes are excellent teaching opportunities, and this lesson we only needed to learn once.  AcMo stumbled onto this prime tablet only to discover that it was cursed.  The curse had something to do with beer and lots of falling.  I still don’t understand the translation.  We had to return it before it caused our complete collapse.

The curse cleansing process forced us to reorganize the entire division and develop new methods to make plans.  I suspect that The Cloud of Doom was related somehow to the cursed tablet.

Aside from 3% of our tablet haul being cursed, I thought we had a workable solution with the planning committee meeting in the vault, but that dream was ripped from us like duct tape ripped off an open wound—don’t ask—the moment the cleaning crew locked them in over night.  That was the day before the planning committee resigned.

Our natural evolution culminated in the switch to faster, more efficient media.  Productivity increased considerably because it used to take our craftsman at least 3 weeks to carve a plan.  That left an underutilized asset, which wasn’t a smart business practice.  The tablets that we hadn’t already erased were returned to their original locations and the others were transformed into new countertops for the office after sanitizing the information carved into them.  That just left the vault in need of a makeover.

It turns out that storing these things is a far better proposition than keeping our tablet plans secure.  We’ve even learned not to write on these bars.  I just wish their value didn’t constantly fluctuate every day.  Seeing that kind of vacillation in a client makes me nervous, but seeing it in our assets terrifies me as much as a giant spider landing on my head.