By Gregory Hopson
The family restaurant of T-Maître Pierre was a Louisiana institution. The kind of place where generations gathered about steaming mountains of cooked langoest, spicy corn and seasoned potatoes. A place where Louisiana Blues & Zydeco by Clifton Chenier played in the background and the Waitstaff wore white shirts with brightly colored bows. The walls were plastered with faded photos of people who smile. Nobody knew who they were anymore, but they felt like family.
Pierre Thibodeaux, the founder, ensured that every customer was treated as if he were indeed family. So it was a bit ironic that he had no heirs when he died.
Within a week, the restaurant was taken over by the developer of several millions of dollars OB Noxious, who spoke to reporters under a banner who reads:
Make Weelevaart great again
“They call this little crawling trip. Very smart. I like that. We keep that name. Everything else? Outdated. Inefficient. Sad. We are going to take this failing cabin and turn it into the best restaurant the world has ever seen. People will come from everywhere and say: ‘Wow!
To supervise the transformation, Noxious Otto brought in Maladore, a consultant known for running billion dollar companies and mathematics in his head (where he already did his research).
Maladore brought walking through the building for thirty minutes, leaned on it, pressed it on it and stepped back from things while he shook his head. It was not long before he gave his report to the press:
- Excessive work: “Waiting staff, custodian, dishwasher? None of them cooks so we waste money on it. Eliminate all those positions.”
- Menu Simplification: “Cooked crayfish ages everything. Eliminate the other. Eliminate the menu itself. Menus are nothing more than administrative bloat.”
- Decor: “We will have the best of all. Those photos are faded and were of low quality when they were new. Remove them.”
- Modernization: “I still found an IBM 5150 their books. This fascinates me and concerns me so many different levels.”
- Fixed costs: “This place is bleeding due to indirect costs. Forty percent of the income on facilities and administration? That is insane. Ten percent is more than enough for a place like this! But we are much more generous and much more compassionate than people give our credit. So we are not going to control it at 10%.
The changes happened quickly at night.
The next day when customers showed up, they found no music. No waiters. No ambiance. Only folding chairs, an old card table and flickering fluorescent lamps (they were told that the renovation would be done later). The walls were bald, except a plate that read:
T-maître pierre’s langou
Read carefully !!!!!!
- Go to the rear parking space and log in.
You will be assigned a time slot of ten minutes to cook. - You receive:
A. Living Langoest
B. Carried corn
C. Potatoes (with high quality dirt: pH between 6 and 6.5) - Boiling pot preheated to Exact 212 ° F.
Do not add or remove water !!!!!! - Spice levels are set in advance.
- Extra napkins: $ 0.25 each
- Incorrect removal of corn peels: 10% surcharge
- Not removing langest on time results in meal reasons.
No exceptions, no refunds !!!!!
A middle-aged man in a Ragin ‘Cajuns hat read the instructions aloud. Then he looked around at the solemn -looking customers who waited in line behind him. The place was quiet except a few muted sounds from the kitchen. He removed his cap, looked heaven, paused and muttered:
“But that’s not good.” (Man, this is not good.)
Towards the end of the week, two of the three chefs had enough of renting pots and pans and a fight about burner rights. They moved to California, where a Chinese restaurant offered a fully equipped kitchen and covered indirect costs. Within a few weeks they had introduced the langest of Admiraal Pierre, with langoest imported from China thinkers from Louisiana-Langoesten who were accidentally introduced there in the 1930s.
Back in Louisiana the rain came down harder and the only remaining chef was single-deep in a puddle and scolded a water-covered customer because he was thirty seconds late to get his langest in the pot.
The moral
This is what happens when outsiders impose random cost caps in the name of ‘efficiency’.
T-maître Pierre’s did not fail due to bad langing. It failed because it lost the infrastructure so that the meal made potential pots, burners, tongs and the people. The chef, once celebrated for his recipes and skills, is now in the rain, powerless to cook without the tools he depended on. The recipes continue to exist, but customers must now have trouble bridging the holes themselves, so that the joy and convenience of a shared meal are left behind.
NIH’s facilities and administrative (F&A) Cap is no different. It lowers financing for the essentials that make research possible to thrive: laboratory space, equipment, compliance staff and the people who know how to maintain complex machines such as autoclaves. Researchers, once authorized by infrastructure and expertise, are left to see how their innovations fall as good as benefactors to merge what is missing.
At T-Maître Pierre’s you are stranded in the rain and struggles to find out how you can get well. And when you ask for help, the chef answers:
“I am the Uniq that stays, even worse, that’s all I have.”
(I am the only one left and this is all there is.)
Under the cap of 15% of NIH, your research institution tries to finance an autoclave by tearing its bank apart to find a separate change that may have fallen out of the pockets of visitors. And even that source dries up, in Since Paypal and Venmo has no loose change.
Gregory Hopson works at a distance from Baton Rouge, Louisiana as a Business Intelligence developer for Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, GA.
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