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unnameablethings · 21 hours ago

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The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss.

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town.

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse?

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed.

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now.

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it.

---

My job has glue traps.

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life.

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you.

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out.

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me.

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps.

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me.

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was:

Do NOT mess with animals in the building.

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences.

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop.

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve.

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover.

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell.

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair.

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right?

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes.

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil?

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question.

Who grabbed the snake? I asked.

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right.

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No.

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago.

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again.

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think.

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be.

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

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unnameablethings · 1 day ago

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Today I met 6 irish draught horses. One was a FOAL already taller than me!! Another put her head on her shoulder and I swear to god her head was the size of my torso. I have been around horses but these ones were so crazy large. I am not a short person but I was DWARFED. Also according to Wikipedia they have a caste system? And then there's the Irish Draught Sport Horse?? Quoth my partner "like you can have a sport version of a car?" Anyway. I thought you'd like to know. Any Killie thoughts on the Irish draught horse? I have gained a new perspective on how horses are so large and that little jock is SMALL

OH HO HO you lucky beast!! I’m so glad you told me this. Seriously, thank you.

💀

Omg the Irish Draught. Typical horse breed story: Ireland, as usual, produces some of the best Bone, in horses, on planet Earth. Bone that is prized around the world. Bone that is snatched up by the sheikhs and emperors of the world to play genetics-based gacha games with. You can build almost any muscle you like on an athlete, but a horse athlete does better when they start with a good skeleton to hang it on, and for thousands of years Ireland has excelled in the production of certain high-value traits. Good Bone.

Ireland typically completely drops the ball on doing anything with this insane production of a prime resource, making a vague face, and saying “it’s what we call a horse” and when asked for specifics may stare at you like you’re stupid and eventually admit, “a big horse.”

Thus leaving Americans to sneak in like vultures, snatching the Good Bone, taking it seriously, and shouting “this is a BRAND now.”

THE IRISH DRAUGHT!!! Beautiful, practical, marvellous bone! A fine coldblood - that’s a heavy European “draft” type, the butch kind of horse, as opposed to the greyhound desert horses that are “hot blooded.”

Mixing the hotblooded Arab lines with European native breeds - including the Irish Hobby - produced the strong bone and pared-down athleticism of the Thoroughbred. The studbooks were then closed, and Thoroughbreds today may only be descended from registered Thoroughbreds. They are athletic, energetic, greyhound horses - the fastest domestic animals, a feat of bioengineering, a direct challenge to God.

But they’re a bit breakable and mad, being stripped down so ferociously over generations to the essentials of running. In the relentless push for producing Speed, breeding loses the focus on things like Good Bone, a Kind Eye, Cross-Country Stamina, and Strong Constitution. It’s like a game that maxes out the “sprint” stat for speedruns, and produces a player character that’s perfect at speedruns, but if you want to sit down for a tabletop roleplaying game with friends, instantly breaks their ankle and bursts into flames. Can you keep the sprinty style and good characteristics, but still have someone that can play other sports and games?

So if you personally want a tough and sporty horse, boiling with athletic ability, but sane and strong and sober - you cross the Thoroughbred with a - well, with a steady, consistent coldblood. Ideally, one who has been honed over generations to be a friendly, clever tractor. A big, kind masterpiece of a different sort entirely; something of pure and powerful practicality. something that patches the deficiencies of the Thoroughbred character, something with fabulous Bone. Ideally something that isn’t too inbred itself; something powerful, practical, but not a total tank; some sturdy bastard that’s been kicking around, quietly doing a job, for centuries. Good bone - but not the weighty grandeur of the Shire or Ardennes - we want a bit of secret fire, something that will hunt. Something that will kick over the traces and jump, over wild country.

Hey, what do you know - there’s the Irish Draught.

Crossing the Thoroughbred with the Irish Draught produces the Irish Sport Horse. This is an athlete that doesn’t just sprint. Fast, flexible, steady and clever, with Thoroughbred bred-to-be-an-athlete combined with Irish Draught’s legendary constitution, you see the Irish Sport in the Olympics, taking gold medals. They do very well as a practical all-rounder. Hence the name: the Irish Sport.

But here’s where the tricky part comes in. Irish horse people never codified the Irish Draught “properly.” So the Irish Sport often has infusions of other native breeds… as does any creature described casually as an Irish Draught. If you ask the native owners they just say What The Fuck Do You Mean: It’s A Big Horse. But then, if you’re an eager American who genotypes your Irish Sport, you might come back with… CONNEMARA PONY?! And when you inquire, the breeders tend to say things like “well, you see, we look at them with our eyes; and then if it’s a big one, it’s a Draught, and if it’s a small one, it’s a Pony. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Americans say, “is the total lack of branding.”

so Americans have been leading the cause. The ship has sailed to rebrand the Irish Sport as “thoroughbred + purebred registered Irish Draught ONLY.” The Irish Sport is a bit of a mix.

But the Irish DRAUGHT Sport Horse is when you take a “purebred” Irish Draught - insert joke about how you find one of these, but it’s the top tier of the “caste system” - and cross it to a Thoroughbred, and get a PEDIGREE. That is what Americans people are trying to do with the concept Irish Draught Sport Horse.

…. But literally everyone calls them Irish Sports anyway. LOL.

And the Irish Draught, despite not being used so much for its intended purposes any more, remains important and influential partly because of its ability to produce athletes.

At any rate, yes, FUCK, Killie is tiny!!

He’s short by any standard, and this is just what jockeys are like, but occasionally it does look a bit wild. Here you go, you little sod. Here’s a MONSTER. Ride it with your terrifyingly athletic thighs and the power of your MIND.

Killie loves a good Irish Draught, though they’re not in his sphere of work. His horrid English mother breeds and keeps Irish Sports for foxhunting. (One of them in his childhood was named Wellington, and this was very slightly political and nasty of Helena.)

He doesn’t get to do much cross-country but there’s a lot to be said for a willing Irish Sport, and if asked to choose a horse for his own pleasure, (after being paralysed by the concept), he wouldn’t pick any other breed.

I’m so glad you shared this with me. Thank you.

#following elodie over the past few months has truly been like.#guess we're doing horses now #its great

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