“"I started to decipher them,“ Ori said in a soft voice.
“What did it say?” Thorin asked distantly.
“‘Vir son of Nir is a giant prat’,” Ori mumbled,
“
Well now I need to know what Vir did and who he pissed off…
#Determamfidd#DOOO EEET! 😀#This have been bugging me for awhile too (via @jessicadupont91)
OK OK HERE WE GO, HAVE A THING
Assistant
Administrative
Manager Vir was an upstanding citizen and a model dwarf. In fact, he was perfect.
He never drank, never ate to excess, and knew every rule in the handbook. He was always tremendously happy to remind his fellow miners of these, if he ever felt they might have forgotten.
He woke early every day, exercised diligently until precisely one candle-mark past the dawn, before it was time for breakfast and the morning’s ablutions. Then he would collect his observations from the day before (helpfully sorted into stacks) to hand to Mine Supervisor Geran. All in all, Assistant Administrative Manager Vir was perfect.
It was nice, being perfect. But Vir was determined to spread his perfection. He’d once been told that true greatness in one Dwarf in a group was able to raise the standard of all the rest. He would be their model and guide. He would teach them how to be perfect.
He often wished that Mine Supervisor Geran might notice the effort and concern he took with his fellow miners’ education. It appeared that they forgot the regulations with distressing regularity, after all. They would stare at Vir with pressed lips and flat eyes. The older ones simply turned their backs on him.
It was hard, being the new Assistant Administrative Manager. It was doubly hard to be perfect. Vir bore the envy of his lessers with stoicism and grace.
Every three or four days, one of the miners would inevitably try to tell him that the particular regulatory code he was upholding was hopelessly outdated and dangerous, but Vir knew better. He was Assistant
Administrative
Manager after all. It was his job to enforce the rules, and so he enforced them with all due rigour.
Vir wasn’t entirely sure what his duties actually were. Geran had given him a long and boring induction when he’d first started. It had been of no benefit whatsoever, and did not give him any instruction on how to make the changes he saw fit. She persisted in ‘keeping him up to speed’ and ‘in the loop’ and other such useless and sloppy phrases. Vir ignored them. How could he spend his precious time collating plans and organising meetings when there was so much imperfection all around him?
When he tried to tell Geran how she should fix herself in order to be the perfect Mine Supervisor they deserved, she gritted her teeth and told him to get lost. He’d heard her muttering about nepotism as he bowed to the exact millimetre required for her station and left the room.
(He’d dithered over reporting this to upper Mine Management. They would probably take it to the Guilds, however, and he didn’t want his grandfather to know.)
So instead he dutifully notated all his observations each day, and organised them by the Dwarves involved. Every time Vir handed the wad of notes to Geran, she looked less and less impressed by it. Vir felt a certain lofty sympathy. Naturally. It must have been draining to know that her mine workers were such insubordinates, showing such disregard for proper regulation.
(When Vir finally took the job he was meant to hold, Geran would be treated kindly. She had done her best, after all. It wasn’t her fault. She simply wasn’t perfect.)
Last and most numerous of all his observational notes were those on Xerin.
The very name made Vir give a genteel shudder. If there were anyone more in need of Vir’s instruction, it was Xerin.
Xerin child of Berin had not laid down a board to walk on yesterday. Instead, ze had spent a truly wasteful amount of time setting up a pulley and a harness, with two so-called “safety lines”. Vir had scoffed. Safety lines indeed: he’d never heard of them! They weren’t mentioned even once in the regulations!
Xerin shook zer scruffy head. The regulations were two hundred years old, ze had sneered. Vir had shown Xerin the regulation in question, and Xerin had only rolled zer eyes. Then ze had gone ahead and used the awful unauthorised things to finish installing the framework for the new moving platform! Open disrespect for the Assistant Administrative Manager, in front of all those other miners! He had seen some of them smirk!
The very memory of it made Vir fume. He straightened his notes with extra force, waiting outside Geran’s office. She was a little late to admit him, leaving him cooling his heels in the antechamber. He noted the extra two minutes delay: a waste of his valuable time, of course. It was simply irresponsible of the Mine Management to put someone so imperfect in charge of this little mithril seam.
“Come in, Vir,” said Geran’s weary voice, and Vir marched into the room with a straight back and his notes clenched tightly in his fist. “Put them on my desk, thank you.”
Vir did so with a sense of satisfaction. Geran’s desk was very nice. She kept it in an appalling state of disorder. There were random pieces of parchment, possibly architects’ drawings or maybe calculations, scattered all over it. It was a very nice desk: when it was his, Vir would make sure it was kept clean and tidy and free of all that extraneous clutter.
“A moment, Vir.”
Vir looked up from the desk, and said politely, “Mine Supervisor, ma’am?”
“For the millionth time, can you call me by my damned name? And I’ve some information for you.”
Vir waited, trembling. Was this it? Was he finally going to be promoted to the status his perfection deserved?
“I have,” Geran checked briefly amidst the pile of chaotic papers on her desk, “over eighty-four complaints about you in the last month alone.”
Vir snapped to attention. “Lots of slacking, Mine Supervisor Ma’am! Lots of irregularities and unauthorized mining procedures!”
“Vir, you’ve only been here a month!”
“Ma’am!” Vir barked in response.
“Look, you pompous little fluffbeard. These are miners. They know their job, and they’re damn good at it. They’re following the procedures that the Guild itself enforces, not the dumb ancient ones from a manual written in the days of Durin III,” said Geran, exasperation all over her grizzled face. “D’you know what I need? An administrative assistant, someone to keep the paperwork under control. What do I get instead? I get a tiny-brained condescending, arrogant curtain-twitcher with delusions of grandeur. If your grandfather weren’t Guildmaster you’d have been out of here on your second day.”
Vir stared at her. “If this is Xerin saying these things,” he began, heat rising in his face.
“If it were only Xerin, then I’d still have listened! But it’s not just zer, it is every single miner in this Mahal-forsaken tunnel! They’re threatening to transfer to the lodes past the Endless Stair if you stay on – I’m on the verge of facing a miner’s strike because of you!”
He puffed out his chest. “They’re threatened by-”
“Shut it. I have a present for you,” Geran interrupted him – him! She interrupted the perfect Dwarf! “And if you have any semblance of a mind, you will use it.”
Vir stared at her, his protests and justifications jumbling together, his mouth gaping open.
“It is two books,” Geran said. “They’re on the chair by the door. Throw your notes onto the fire on the way out.”
Vir blinked a moment, and then his mouth snapped shut. He bowed, a little less deeply than he normally would. Geran was off her rocker. Sad, really, in a Dwarf so young. They should never have made her Mine Supervisor in the first place. He left his notes where they were, and spun on his heel smartly.
The books were where she had said they were. Vir picked them up without looking, and marched with his chin held high straight into the doorjamb. He managed to find the door on the second try. He was sure it had not injured his gravitas, nor the dramatic statement he had made in his departure.
“Dignity,” he said to himself. Then he glanced down at the books.
One was called ‘Mine Regulations: Health and Safety Procedures’. It was produced by the Guild of Miners, only the previous year.
The other was called, ‘Stop Being a Prat and Listen to Others: Collected Complaints’. It had been bound in rags, and was obviously homemade.
Vir’s mouth went very tight and flat.
Dignity. Stoicism and grace. Perfection, thought most of him.
Grandfather’s going to kick my arse, thought the rest of him.
Meanwhile, out in the upper corridors, Xerin was putting the finishing touches on zer latest masterpiece. Right up near the Hollin doorway, where everyone would see it. Ze brushed off zer hands and grinned. “There. Perfect,” ze said. “That’ll bloody teach him!
END
(dedicated to anyone who has ever had to put up with a shitty little middle-manager with a Napoleon Complex ruining their work life 🙂
Aw Yiss 