The Germans are Coming

There's some shady shit going on at The Asylum... and it started back when Sparkles was here.

Around a year ago this other company's name started popping up. We'll call them SMG.. Specialty Monkey Guts. Sparkles was getting instructions from our CEO to pay SMG a sales visit, etc, which he did. I think the deal was that SMG would send us their monkey guts and we'd build robot monkeys around their design for their customers.

Or something vaguely to that effect.

SMG's name kept getting tossed around here and there, but nothing ever really materialized. Sparkles seemed confused about what exactly was going on or why corporate kept bringing them up.

Eventually Sparkles quit, on the same day our GM got fired for spending all day on the poker machines down at the One Stop Movie Rental, Tannning Bed, Wine Store. Sparkles went to work for a company that builds equipment to convert landfill emissions into energy. When he left, all his emails and phone calls started coming to me. I got hammered by calls and emails from
SMG, wanting to know how to get in touch with Sparkles, so I hooked them up. Less than a month later, Sparkles had left his job at the energy place and gone to work for SMG, in Hickory.. about two hours from home. He explained that he only had to be in the office about once a week for meetings and the rest of the time he was on the road on sales calls.

I'm going to skip around here to several seemingly unrelated stories. It'll all come together in the end. I promise.

Not long after Sparkles went to work for SMG, Twatwaffle loaded Juan (purchasing,) Thelma (production) and Tiny (engineering) in the car and went to Hickory to SMG's factory. They were met by Riley, our corporate head of mergers and acquisitions, the CEO and the corporate attorney.

I wasn't told about the trip until the day before. I honestly don't think Twatwaffle herself knew what the trip was actually for.

Fast forward a couple of months. Twatwaffle took a sudden, secret trip to Charlotte. When she returned, she announced during a company meeting that she had spent the day with the CEO, interviewing sales managers.

The CEO works in Ohio. The Holler is as far from Charlotte as you can possibly get without leaving North Carolina.

When I confronted her back in November to ask if they were going to hire a sales manager or not, she said that she was getting the run around from corporate and if they did, it would probably be second quarter.

So what was she really doing in Charlotte?

Fast forward again, to last Friday. I was told we were having company from SMG this week, for three days, so tidy up.

There's a guy from Germany, his interpreter and the owner of the plant in High Point. Also, Riley has been here all three days, The Big Headed German was here all day yesterday (our company controller) and the whole gang stays holed up in Twatwaffle's office and the conference room, only coming out to use the potty and get more coffee. Food is being brought in, they're not even leaving for lunch.

Yesterday they toured the property and took pictures of the electrical boxes, the outside of the building, the loading docks, etc.

It's smelling awful shady.

Chime in with your theories. Is it a potential partnership, like they say? Are we being sold? Shut down?

We'll talk more soon.

Later Taters!