As Your Financial Advisor, I Urge You To Downsize Your Evil Lair
Please don’t shoot the messenger, or drop me into the pit of venomous snakes
Dr. Methuselah, I’m afraid that I come bearing bad news. The global pandemic has impacted thousands of businesses throughout the world and I’m sad to say that Evil Inc. has proved no exception.
As your chief financial advisor, I believe that if Operation Armageddon is to have any chance of succeeding, it’s imperative that we look at a corporate restructure. I know this will come as a disappointment, and that many of my predecessors have been cast into the pool of venomous sea snakes for less than this; but I beg that you, as CEO, consider some of my suggestions:
May I begin with the saltwater pool full of venomous sea snakes in your office. Maintaining this pool is bone-shudderingly expensive. Besides, many of these snake species, frankly, do not get on. When victims aren’t being thrown to the water for them to feed on — an annual event, at best — these snakes turn on each other. The massive cost of replacing some of these, increasingly endangered snake species, is haunting.
What’s more, I would have thought that one of the few benefits of constructing your evil lair inside an active volcano, against all sound engineering advice, would be that you could use the ambient heat to warm the pool water to the tropical temperature required to keep these snakes alive. Yet, a recent bill from Pacific Gas seems to suggest that you are paying to have the pool heated — and on a very uncompetitive plan I might add.
Now, the volcano lair. Don’t think that that was all I had to say about Mount Horror. As I speak I am staring at a number on my Excel spreadsheet beside the phrase ‘Repairs From Lava Damage’. This figure is exorbitant. It is so sky high, that I briefly fainted when I first saw it. It is 50 times the combined annual salaries of all the guards protecting this lair from governmental attack, and nearly 100 times higher than the cost of the desperately needed staff childcare facility that many of your scientists petitioned for.
Having open pools of lava in, what is essentially, a high level scientific research facility is a nightmare for our frankly overworked health-and-safety department. Many of the compounds used in the construction of Operation Armageddon’s laser-satellite react badly to the hot, molten rock resulting in frequent small-scale explosions.
The ambient temperature in here is so hot that, were this a traditional workplace, you would be facing severe litigation. Dehydration and heat stroke are rampant. Despite this, there is only one, over-priced, vending machine for workers to purchase soda.
Many scientists also complain that the high levels of toxic gases are clouding their thinking, leading to mistakes. This perhaps explains why so many scientists regularly fall into the aforementioned open pools of lava, causing significant staff turnover costs and eye-watering employee insurance premiums.
I know that you take pride in these premises — having grown Evil Inc. from a start-up in your mother’s garage many years ago. And I know you will say that you can’t put a price on the sense of grandeur provided by having your lair inside a volcano. Unfortunately however, it is my job to do exactly that, and the total annual cost of this lair is, you guessed it, bowel-wrenchingly vast. In the current climate, we simply can’t justify the expense of owning such a large space — particularly with so much of it now unused with many of our computer scientists working from home.
Now, I’ve looked into it, and if we were to sell up Mt Horror and move our operations, with a pared down skeleton crew, to a WeWork, we could avoid bankruptcy and continue with Operation Armageddon. It doesn’t even have to be a WeWork — simply any office space less susceptible to being flooded with magma would do.
Dr. Methuselah, I appreciate the shock of this news. But I urge you to heed my advice. I’d also ask that you stop rapidly pressing the button under your desk to open the trapdoor to drop me into the pool of sea snakes. That button won’t work; our electricity’s been disconnected as there wasn’t enough money in your account to pay the bill this month.
