ok I've been holding off on this long enough...ill be putting stories in here about my time at the evil empire...I was on the business side of things on the east coast (but I'm sure you can figure out where on the east coast and ill probably mention it in some of these stories)...these stories will be to the best of my recollection, but given that I'm trying to forget I ever worked at this place the exact details might not be 100% accurate, but the stories themselves will be true...these stories will be mostly stream of consciousness shit, so apologies if it doesn't flow very well...I aint no English major...if people don't want to hear this stuff, just let me know and ill stop posting it...any questions feel free to ask and hopefully ill know the answers...

Story 1: Suffering From Legionnaires Disease

so there was that story this summer about the rio being infected with legionnaires disease...that was an extremely LOL moment for me given what I know about the workings of the evil empire, especially during budgeting season...here's how it would go on the east coast...look at last year's revenue numbers, show no growth in those numbers but somehow show growth in EBITDA...so how do you show growth on the bottom line if you are projecting no top line growth? you hack away at expenses...the evil empire is great at hacking away at expenses to "drive growth" in the bottom line...that's why if you've been a customer there your experience probably sucks shit...

so where I worked one of the preferred methods to do that was hacking out maintenance, which is just fucking so laughable...where I worked the properties are fucking old...like built in the 70s/80s kinda old...im too lazy and don't give two shits enough to see if some properties were older, but it's entirely possible...those of you who own houses or cars (or really anything mechanical) and shit know that the older mechanical stuff gets the more it needs investment to keep it working right or the problem just gets bigger and more expensive when shit finally does go wrong...luckily for the evil empire as we hacked away at maintenance, a huge issue never popped up in our region...but we were hacking away mid 6 figures - low 7 figures away from that area which given the amount it would cost to remedy any problem is fucking laughable...if something falls apart in a 30-40-50 year old building it's gonna cost an absolute assload to fix, many many times the $500K-$1M you are saving by hacking away at the maintenance department...

so when I heard of the legionnaires thing at the rio it didn't surprise me in the least...im sure they were hacking away at their maintenance budget too, causing a massive headline grabbing problem that probably cost them way more in fixes and lost business than they saved in maintenance salaries...smart management FTW...