Florida -- Fiction; Immortalism -- Fiction; Science fiction; Walt Disney World (Fla.) -- Fiction
Suneep nodded slowly, with a cautious expression, a nonpolitical animal
being drawn into a political discussion.
"Okay, so tell me, if we came to you with this plan and asked you to
pull together a production schedule -- one that didn't have any review,
just take the idea and run with it -- and then pull it off, how long
would it take you to execute it?"
Lil smiled primly. She'd dealt with Imagineering before.
"About five years," he said, almost instantly.
"Five years?" I squawked. "Why five years? Debra's people overhauled the
Hall in a month!"
"Oh, wait," he said. "No review at all?"
"No review. Just come up with the best way you can to do this, and do
it. And we can provide you with unlimited, skilled labor, three shifts
around the clock."
He rolled his eyes back and ticked off days on his fingers while
muttering under his breath. He was a tall, thin man with a shock of
curly dark hair that he smoothed unconsciously with surprisingly stubby
fingers while he thought.
"About eight weeks," he said. "Barring accidents, assuming off-the-shelf
parts, unlimited labor, capable management, material availability. . ."
He trailed off again, and his short fingers waggled as he pulled up a
HUD and started making a list.
"Wait," Lil said, alarmed. "How do you get from five years to eight
weeks?"
Now it was my turn to smirk. I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they
were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups -- I knew
that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the
ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned
their work.
Suneep looked sheepish. "Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself
that my plans are good and my buildings won't fall down, I can make it
happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren't perfect. Sometimes, I'll be
halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or
approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better. Then it's back
to the drawing board. . . So I stay at the drawing board for a long time
at the start, get feedback from other Imagineers, from the ad-hocs, from
focus groups and the Net. Then we do reviews at every stage of
construction, check to see if anyone has had a great idea we haven't
thought of and incorporate it, sometimes rolling back the work.
"It's slow, but it works."
Lil was flustered. "But if you can do a complete revision in eight
weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do _that_ one
in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride
the thing?"
"Because that's how it's done," I said to Lil. "But that's not how it
_has_ to be done. That's how we'll save the Mansion."
I felt the surety inside of me, the certain knowledge that I was right.
Ad-hocracy was a great thing, a Bitchun thing, but the organization
needed to turn on a dime -- that would be even _more_ Bitchun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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