We can’t get anyone in this place to stop talking about Netflix shows. It’s literally impacting our work on Project Transmorgify, a multi-stage, reusable rocket designed to take all the plastic waste produced by American Southeasterners to the sun for instant vaporization.
The ConOps chart (fancy term for mission cycle diagram) for this thing, as submitted by Mission Architect Neil “Halliburton” Halbatron, who we simply love both for his bawdy humor and lifetime membership to the stupendous 18 holes at Oakmont Country Club, held much promise:
That is, at least until our Preliminary Design Review, where our fancy pants Mission Assurance Engineer Michelle Seishenholf had our Independent Review Board pick apart the design:
Yeah, bringing it back is the hard part—that’s the hard part with everything when you think about it.
And frankly, the sustainability movement is just out of control you know? Everything’s gotta be “Reuse this, reuse that, don’t throw it in the ocean/outer space anymore” to the degree it’s affecting our STAR BLZRZ Division (current owners of Project Transmorgify) here at Nectar Studios, our 17th wholly owned subsidiary incarnated last Mother’s Day.
Plus everyone knows Michelle has it out for us and is eyeing a move to our most vaunted competitor, stealth-tech giant Mammotion, who are just dominating the wire-free robotic lawn mower space.
Also, we’re not sure why we have so many subsidiaries, it’s kind of a habit we just formed that perpetuates itself somehow, like leaving subtitles activated for all Netflix shows instead of just Peaky Blinders…or storing every Allen wrench that comes with our steady cadence of Amazon Basics office furniture orders in an old Gatorade bottle (last count we had 56).
But yes, Netflix shows. Walk into our very poorly lit (on purpose, to discourage breaks) breakroom and that’s all our employees are talking about. Crew Girl, I Survived a SerialKiller, The Gentlemen, and something called BEEF which should probably be on Cinemax, if that’s still a thing.
And Upper Management’s response to this loafing is truly impotent, as evidenced by our Internal Communication Director Jay Dragoni’s plan to “make a sign, like in Ted Lasso, but more punitive and discouraging, specifically focusing on anti-loafing behavior,” which hasn’t even happened yet because Jay is clearly interviewing to work at Duolingo.
(How does anyone retain employees these days, for like longer than a year or two? We hire all these smart people without—understandably—ever checking their references, instead just relying on the brand name of their most recent corporate employer, and maybe the most recent title they held—we’re a sucker for anyone with “Global” in their title…say it out loud…“Global”…it’s just so…omniscient—yet somehow corralling them into doing something productive is this frustratingly endless chore, then they just leave us for a better opportunity anyway. It’s madness.)
Thus our overall inefficiency in people management explains why Nectar Studios is just burning through capital like it’s a conifer forest in our newly annualized wildfire seasons. Or it at least explains one reason. Another, rather significant reason is we’re overly prolific with our ideas for Nectar, in no small part due to the fact Nectar’s Managing Director, Samantha Stubblefield, makes no qualms that she wants to be as famous as Astro Teller.
Who literally everyone in our Leadership Groups (which include The Excelsior C-Suite, The Captain’s Club, The Top Board, The Strike Force Idea Committee, and Darren down in Office Supply Procurement) had to look up; turns out Astro runs X, Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory.”
Which made us mad because “Astro” appears to be his legit given name and not a super fake moniker designed to make him look awesome, and “Moonshots” just oozes coolness as well….way more so than “Nectar Studios” or even “STAR BLZRZ” for that matter. This work is so frustrating.
But yes, we’re burning through capital, due to Samantha’s quasi-angry ambition, and the fact we’re really good at brainstorming ideas, but slightly less good at operationalizing them since that requires thinking things through.
As evidenced by our current project list at Nectar Studios, of which 68% are stalled. Oh wait, Samantha says it’s now 70%, because we forgot to pay the power bill.
Official Nectar Project List
“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.”—Burt Rutan
“But try not to fail because it costs money.”—Zeus Dworkin, CFO
“You are seen and valued at this company though and will not be fired for failing.”—Panama Savannah, Chief People Officer
Project: Transmorgify, the multi-stage, reusable (sigh) rocket.
Why Stalled: Clearly we can’t figure out how to get it to not burn up in the sun.
Project: Symposium Primus, a civil engineering and industrial design collab featuring 5th year seniors from Iowa State and Texas A&M with the goal of creating floating cities exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico, all built out of gently used loofas.
Why Stalled: The Iowa State half of the team had never seen an ocean, and the Texas A&M half just kept referencing the Gulf in terms of Spring Break.
Plus our research team discovered that, given our local oceans soaked up a record amount of heat last year, the loofahs would steep rather than float. Which led to the deeper discovery provided by Neil “Halliburton” Halbatron’s wife that this didn’t matter because loofahs naturally absorb water simply as a function of their general existence, which would be bad for floating-city building.
Project: Recycle Bot, our 96-gallon recyclable recycling can, because it’s weird to recycle things in a can that truly appears to be unrecyclable. What do they do with all those when they’re done? *Note to Waste Management, Inc. Your cans could easily fit into Project Transmorgify’s payload chamber.
Why Stalled: We hired a private detective who concluded all the big recycling players know under 10% of plastic gets recycled in the first place, despite the proliferation of that little Arrow-Circle-Of-Plastic-Life thing stamped all over the place. (At least we’re not the only ones who’ve misused a circular diagram.)
Thus Waste Management has not returned our calls, but their truck did take Recycle Bot on Tuesday because our intern accidentally left him out by the curb.
Project: El Niño Enterprise Solutions, a business-to-business service targeting the HVAC industry that licenses El Niño as an official (covered) warranty item on HVAC units. Subscribers get a branded “Due to El NiñoTM…” work order template and other documentation. Yes, this project is designed to generate revenue simply to fund the other projects.
Why Stalled: Market research was fantastic, but the problem is renewals. After each of the last two big El Niños, global temperatures just stepped up to the new normal and stayed there. Thus Samantha has asked whether we can at least trademark La Niña, the cooler one, because it’s underutilized.
Project: SkyPass Premium, a subscription service that sprays reflective particles into the stratosphere to shade the planet, billed monthly to individual continental governments once our tired ol’ nation-state idea falls apart.
Why Stalled: Our commissioned McKinsey study, to the tune of roughly $25M thank you very much for nothing McKinsey, found we’d been beaten to market by cargo ships, which spent decades accidentally reflecting solar radiation with sulfur-heavy exhaust until they were required to switch to cleaner fuel, and the sky got measurably less reflective.
AND, Astro/X/Moonshots is apparently already doing this, they call it a gigantic space snow globe or something. So we’re pivoting SkyPass Premium to be our new credit card offering.
Project: Blastmaster 500, a proposal to find and plug methane leaks from pipelines and wells and change some farming practices.
Why Stalled: Rejected unanimously by the Strike Force Idea Committee for being “not a moonshot,” “too doable/no VC interest/money,” and “not sellable as story to 60 Minutes.”
At least the proposal’s author, Gary from Facilities, fixed the breakroom sink, making it the only completed project in Nectar Studios to date. It is not on the list. (It is now on the list.)
So who knows how this will all shake out. There’s talk of mothballing Nectar Studios, or at least some of the divisions within, including STAR BLZRZ, The Wicker Knights, The Symbiotic Friend Network, and Samsonite® Revival.
But mark our words: where there is profit to be had, we shall prevail. Which is why we forced our speech writer, Madeline McCobe, to repackage all those division names as Netflix Series titles and pitch the streaming platform on the subsequent, respective story concepts.
Of which, of course, there are currently none. But Madeline seems like a really bright person, so we’re sure she’ll figure it out.
Do you like Flaming Dr. Peppers? So do we! Next time you’re at a bar order one, then ask the barback for their email address so you can sign them up for this newsletter. We’ll be watching.