Part 35 - The Sugar Brand
February 1st 2009 11:04
Re was having a wonderful time.
Who knew that industry was his kind of thing? Day and night he was surrounded by small kitchen appliances and sundry whitegoods, all of his design and all of his making. And the Ministry had been completely transformed. The Minister, sick of the political minefield of daily alliteration, jumped at the chance of taking his department from being the government's laughing stock to becoming an overnight financial sensation. He turned the secret underground facility into a secret manufactory while Re personally designed the machinery that would mass-produce the sugar based alloy products. The Minister re-trained all of The Ministry's staff to forget about analysis, statistics and alien worlds, instead they became engineers, production line packers and store people.
Initially The Minister faced resistance from his colleagues in cabinet but the Prime Minister pointed out, "It will be a nice change to have one of my departments doing something useful." This kept the other Ministers quiet and out of the way, pretending to attend to their portfolios, until the Prime Minister headed back to the golf course. Meanwhile The Minister had free reign over his project and its budget.
These were exciting times. Re was often left in charge while The Minister scoured the country for suitable shop-front locations. Vast tracts of land were purchased in each state to build warehouses so that supply to the public would be fast. The Minister believed that a new age of consumerism was upon them - the people were desperate to buy cheap toasters and kettles, bar fridges and blenders. After a quiet dinner with a visiting foreign dignitary The Minister soon realised that this need wasn’t exclusive to Australia, the rest of the world was going to want to buy his products too. He needed to expand the plan. Not only would he take the Sugar Brand to the nation, he would take it to the world!
Creating the infrastructure to distribute the appliances was an incredibly slow process, thankfully the underground facility was large enough to store the growing numbers of stock. No more the overnight sensation as first conceived by The Minister, The Sugar Brand, if it was to succeed, would need time and planning. Train lines and freeways had to be built from the Facility to all of the major cities in the country. Egg-heads worked day and night on a cashless point of sales system so that purchases would be efficient and sales assistants wouldn't be slowed by counting coins and notes. Others worked on computers and financial transaction hubs to process virtual money at the speed of light. Even with all of this technology there would still have to be provisions for the old and the old fashioned who would insist on using cash. The Minister lobbied to have the 1 and 2 cent coins abolished. He led the push convert the one and two dollar notes into coins. And he introduced the change from easily torn paper money to strong, resilient plastic notes. Decades of preparation were required and all the while Re's stockpile of appliances continued to grow, down in the perfectly sealed, underground facility out beyond The Black Stump.
For Re the nineteen sixties and seventies whirled by in a frenzy of invention and creation but for The Minister the time dragged on as he aged into a body of breaks and aches. Eventually, half way through the nineteen-eighties, the final high-speed modem had been tested, the final data storage and overnight processing systems had been signed off - everything was ready.
It had taken thirty years of the Minister’s life, the re-education of four new Prime Ministers, billions of the tax payer's dollars and a revolutionary educational and technological turn-around for the entire country. The borrowings from other nations to cover the shortfall in the set-up costs were phenomenal and the shortage of sugar for tea and cake had almost destroyed some regional centres, but it was all worth it. With the projected income from the global sales of Sugar Brand products the country could rise into the Nineties and the millennium beyond. Instead of being some minor colony adrift between the Indian and Pacific oceans Australia would be great, she would rule the world!
Tomorrow The Minister would meet the press and launch his grand scheme, but tonight he needed to take his weary old body to bed, to rest. Only moments after settling his head on the pillow he lurched back up and into a sitting position, hands clutching at his chest, and screamed, "Not now!” before his body fell back to the bed, dead from a heart attack. The only complete set of plans for his secret project, the only passwords, schedules and profiles were all safely locked away, deep inside his poor, dead brain.
There was a general election shortly after The Minister's death and a new Prime Minister was voted into government to lead the indebted nation. He took one look at the country's finances and, wondering what his misguided predecessors had been thinking, closed down any operations relating to the preposterous Sugar Brand then set about getting the country on the right course and once again riding firmly on the sheep's back.
Re had been forgotten. His workforce had been transferred back to the spy industry or retrenched into retirement. The sugar supply was stopped and he could make no more toasters. Nights and days came and went. He wandered around his lonely underground storage facility trying to work out what to do next. With The Minister and his workforce gone there was no-one and nothing to keep him out there, beyond The Black Stump, so he decided it was time to go back to the Beige Bummjob and see his old friends. Packing a couple of kettles as presents he took the lift to the surface and set off, on foot, in the direction that he hoped would take him to Sydney.
Who knew that industry was his kind of thing? Day and night he was surrounded by small kitchen appliances and sundry whitegoods, all of his design and all of his making. And the Ministry had been completely transformed. The Minister, sick of the political minefield of daily alliteration, jumped at the chance of taking his department from being the government's laughing stock to becoming an overnight financial sensation. He turned the secret underground facility into a secret manufactory while Re personally designed the machinery that would mass-produce the sugar based alloy products. The Minister re-trained all of The Ministry's staff to forget about analysis, statistics and alien worlds, instead they became engineers, production line packers and store people.
Initially The Minister faced resistance from his colleagues in cabinet but the Prime Minister pointed out, "It will be a nice change to have one of my departments doing something useful." This kept the other Ministers quiet and out of the way, pretending to attend to their portfolios, until the Prime Minister headed back to the golf course. Meanwhile The Minister had free reign over his project and its budget.
These were exciting times. Re was often left in charge while The Minister scoured the country for suitable shop-front locations. Vast tracts of land were purchased in each state to build warehouses so that supply to the public would be fast. The Minister believed that a new age of consumerism was upon them - the people were desperate to buy cheap toasters and kettles, bar fridges and blenders. After a quiet dinner with a visiting foreign dignitary The Minister soon realised that this need wasn’t exclusive to Australia, the rest of the world was going to want to buy his products too. He needed to expand the plan. Not only would he take the Sugar Brand to the nation, he would take it to the world!
Creating the infrastructure to distribute the appliances was an incredibly slow process, thankfully the underground facility was large enough to store the growing numbers of stock. No more the overnight sensation as first conceived by The Minister, The Sugar Brand, if it was to succeed, would need time and planning. Train lines and freeways had to be built from the Facility to all of the major cities in the country. Egg-heads worked day and night on a cashless point of sales system so that purchases would be efficient and sales assistants wouldn't be slowed by counting coins and notes. Others worked on computers and financial transaction hubs to process virtual money at the speed of light. Even with all of this technology there would still have to be provisions for the old and the old fashioned who would insist on using cash. The Minister lobbied to have the 1 and 2 cent coins abolished. He led the push convert the one and two dollar notes into coins. And he introduced the change from easily torn paper money to strong, resilient plastic notes. Decades of preparation were required and all the while Re's stockpile of appliances continued to grow, down in the perfectly sealed, underground facility out beyond The Black Stump.
For Re the nineteen sixties and seventies whirled by in a frenzy of invention and creation but for The Minister the time dragged on as he aged into a body of breaks and aches. Eventually, half way through the nineteen-eighties, the final high-speed modem had been tested, the final data storage and overnight processing systems had been signed off - everything was ready.
It had taken thirty years of the Minister’s life, the re-education of four new Prime Ministers, billions of the tax payer's dollars and a revolutionary educational and technological turn-around for the entire country. The borrowings from other nations to cover the shortfall in the set-up costs were phenomenal and the shortage of sugar for tea and cake had almost destroyed some regional centres, but it was all worth it. With the projected income from the global sales of Sugar Brand products the country could rise into the Nineties and the millennium beyond. Instead of being some minor colony adrift between the Indian and Pacific oceans Australia would be great, she would rule the world!
Tomorrow The Minister would meet the press and launch his grand scheme, but tonight he needed to take his weary old body to bed, to rest. Only moments after settling his head on the pillow he lurched back up and into a sitting position, hands clutching at his chest, and screamed, "Not now!” before his body fell back to the bed, dead from a heart attack. The only complete set of plans for his secret project, the only passwords, schedules and profiles were all safely locked away, deep inside his poor, dead brain.
There was a general election shortly after The Minister's death and a new Prime Minister was voted into government to lead the indebted nation. He took one look at the country's finances and, wondering what his misguided predecessors had been thinking, closed down any operations relating to the preposterous Sugar Brand then set about getting the country on the right course and once again riding firmly on the sheep's back.
Re had been forgotten. His workforce had been transferred back to the spy industry or retrenched into retirement. The sugar supply was stopped and he could make no more toasters. Nights and days came and went. He wandered around his lonely underground storage facility trying to work out what to do next. With The Minister and his workforce gone there was no-one and nothing to keep him out there, beyond The Black Stump, so he decided it was time to go back to the Beige Bummjob and see his old friends. Packing a couple of kettles as presents he took the lift to the surface and set off, on foot, in the direction that he hoped would take him to Sydney.
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