Rule 34 by Charles Stross Page A

of work, almost ethereal).
    Anyway, this is what I am paying you for.
    It inconveniences me mightily if I get to my new hotel room after a hard day’s work and my rolling flight case with 5.62 kilograms of home is not there waiting for me.
    I need a change of underwear, and I need a shave, and I need my luggage. Only somebody has lost my shit .
    I hold you responsible.
    I see you nodding like a parcel-shelf dog. No, don’t look at me like that. This is about logistics, the necessary life-support infrastructure for the modern commercial traveller. If you can’t get your logistics right, you don’t deserve to be in the hotel business, and I will personally make it my business to see that your corporate customer-satisfaction officer learns that there is a day manager on the front desk at this hotel who is fucking off the customers . And it won’t stop there. You will start to piss away corporate hospitality accounts like a junkie bleeding out into the urinal through his dick. Your staff will cross the road to avoid you, and you will see vultures circling overhead because your days in the hospitality trade will be numbered. You will lose your job and the government will foreclose on your mortgage and you will be cast out on the street to starve like an abandoned dog or be eaten alive by feral mutant children who will skull-fuck your rotting corpse through the eye-sockets with their huge gangrenous organs. This is all because you neglected to pay sufficient attention to your one most important customer today, namely me . No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, you cunt! If it’s not me, then it could be anybody else who walks up to your desk today, this month, this year .
    It could be anybody , as long as they hate you with a fiery, all-consuming passion and decide to devote the next few months of their life to monstering you into an early grave for the sheer fun of pulling apart a quivering lump of feckless time-expired meat.
    Get me my luggage, mister hospitality manager. It was due here two hours ago via interhotel transfer from the Marriott on Lothian Road—here’s the receipt. I’ll be generous: You’ve got a couple of hours to save your job, your career, and your life. I’m going to go hunt down some dinner. Make sure my luggage is in my room and waiting for me when I get back, and we’ll say no more about this matter.
    —What line of work am I in, you ask?
    It’s not really any of your fucking business.
    I sell toys.

     
    You’re the acting Toymaker in Edinburgh this month, here to take care of a nasty little headache for the Operation (along the way to setting up a new subsidiary). Supply-chain logistics and order fulfilment in the Central Belt—the Edinburgh–Glasgow M8 conurbation, where two-thirds of the population of the gallus wee free time-share republic huddle together below the highlands—have taken a dive in the shitter of late. Unfulfilled demand remains high, but supply is patchy, and there is a risk of ad hoc competition emerging.
    Competition would be bad. The Operation likes its subsidiaries to maintain a supply-side monopoly and goes to some lengths to keep it that way, even tolerating competition between local franchisee storefronts—it’s a significant opportunity cost, but deterring interlopers from entering the market in the first place is cheaper than dislodging them once they’re dug in.
    Scotland is a mess. Word came down from the very top: Someone needs to go into the field and fix things. It’s not just a matter of repairing the existing franchise, but of evaluating new market opportunities and if necessary taking the over-the-hill cash cow to the slaughterhouse, then bootstrapping a new clean-room start-up to replace it. Scotland is a small but significant market. As an entrepreneur backed by the Operation’s training, guidance, and investor confidence, you can seize the opportunity to make your mark without pissing on the gate-posts of any of the big incumbents. So you