Risk Analysis
You probably know how it feels when there are three or five things that could utterly destroy your life right now, and those things all depend on trust. The most disgusting gambit that humanity has invented, one which never lets you un-think it, un-do it, forces you as the days go on to trust. The best thing about life is the ability to forget and the ability for each potential life crushing truth to lessen as one approaches revelation, then subsides, so, sinks to the bottom of your concern, so that as you avert this one danger it is as if there was no danger or ever will be again. They all flow like that, depending on the various configurations of people and situations. I’m being too vague. My job is as a risk assessor for a large investment firm who, lately, have pretty much gone all in for off-shore drilling, which, for a risk analyst, is perhaps the most exciting and lucrative investment possible. Sometimes off-shore drilling rigs just explode, killing all on the platform. That happens, and I need to know what that will mean for our investment and for the general impact it causes.
For example when you hear about one of these things being destroyed, or even have you? Anyway when you do, what company was it that it happened to? You don’t remember, right? That’s part of my job. It gets worse, getting the permits and joint-government approval to actually build one of these monstrosities that will be filled with humans stationed pretty much in the middle of the ocean (think waves, storms, self sufficient food and water and electricity etc, you get the idea. Remote is an understatement. Antarctica is more connected to civilisation…these things are stand-alone danger stations filled with humans who, yes, go mad, they do, weeks at a time with only twenty or so crew mates in the middle of the dark depths of nothing) is almost impossible without certain guarantees, certain assurances, certain profits, and, anonymity and, most importantly, with zero blame. We, at any time, have twenty million dollars ready to go simply to pay wives and families of these men (a sum I argue is insufficient considering the amount of these things there are, but, risk is always calculated to be minimal, especially when your risk assessment is part and parcel of the application process to multiple governments for permission in the first place, you get the idea. We are not legally able to hold more compensation cash in escrow for it demonstrates our readiness to act on potential disasters that we propose are implausible in the first place) so that instantly all potential lawsuits, which, for some reason over the years, have been very minimal anyway, are immediately settled with NDAs and even endorsements (good trick that: give a widow a million dollars and watch her mourning process quicken. It’s horrible to see and also know that that is possible for a human to change so fast like that under such circumstances).
What happens is this type of thinking invades your personal life, and, not just understanding risk like some boring ass accountant, actually wanting to see your life exist on the edge of a blade, actually create risk, hence my latest trouble with managing multiple trust-based relationships, each whom have differing levels of the truth and each who have differing levels of ability to unveil certain versions of their understood truths to one another or to “non playing” entities that have an impact on my personal life. One death we encountered (one of a part of thirteen who died when something as simple as an improperly screwed oil cap built up pressure and blew a hole in the centre of a platform and took half the rig down into the open sea, four survived as they were drinking scotch out on the deck on the opposite side of the rig (which is actually against the rules. Irony was not lost and they’ll tell the story like that every time)) was a twenty to year old boy who was working ships and kept asking and asking to be ‘on rig’ as the parlance goes, begged so much that the duty manager finally let him, years too young, but, he was no slacker, he pulled his weight on board so it was decided to let him advance ahead of the normal progression (you usually need to do five years hard time on the ships before you get the ‘cruisy’ job of working a rig – split four hours shifts with up to 12 hour breaks in between). Two weeks in to his first internment, bang, half the rig blown into the ocean. Mothers are harder to pay than wives. Wives have built up a certain percentage of dislike for their husbands, sure they love them and need them, but there is always a, say, twenty to thirty percent dislike in there somewhere as well, that’s the region that the million dollars stokes, enhances awareness of, it’s a way to accept and move on and pay off their mortgage and in their head justify the risk and reward (their internal-head-words not mine) as if that was the final gesture this husband could have done for the family, as provider. Mothers are harder. They’re dislike for their significant other is minimal (10 percent MAX and that’s if the kid is an asshole, which this one wasn’t), and its more based around that their child has deserted them and “if it wasn’t for us he never would have been there in the first place” and things like that. A million dollars makes no sense to them, it’s not replacing anything, it is not getting them anything thy don’t think they already have, you know, “bring my son back” and all that.
For me, though, now, my wife and kid (two years old) does not know for example that I had a bi-sexual threesome with my best friend and his girlfriend, and yes I sucked his cock and fucked his girlfriend and he sucked my cock while I went down on his girlfriend and all of that stuff, worse, I told my boss (who my best friend also reports to) that my best friend is gay and has slept with Guy in accounts (which is true, that Guy is gay at least) which means that my boss now, whenever he gets drunk at work drinks or functions, makes weird-ass gay jokes to my best friend and looks at me and winks while my friend looks at me thinking “what the fuck?” and we’ve only done that tri-sex shit about four times but it’s enough to fuck a lot of things up. Now, my best friend’s wife is also close friends with my wife (of course) and they always talk about fucking each other when they’ve had too much wine at dinner parties and stuff and they always go and smoke on the balcony and probably kiss or whatever like I give a fuck. Ok so there’s all of that, plus, now, and this is the bad one, at a party just last week at my boss’ house I was walking around upstairs at his house looking for a bathroom (tipsy, sure) and ran into a gorgeous young girl who pretended to show me where to go but we ended up in her room and I used her en suite and when I came out she was playing with herself, I mean open legs playing with herself and she asked me to come over and help her so I pretty much just went down on her while she played with her clit and came like that. Bosses daughter, which some part of me knew, but still, I was fully clothed, rinsed my face in the en suite again and went back downstairs. Didn’t even kiss her (fuck what was she eighteen, nineteen? Jesus). These four or five things depending on who or what you want to think about is pretty much now my day to day, all my interactions are coloured by all this stupid sex shit and interactions and loyalty and trust. Fucking trust which is my job to mitigate. “Please don’t tell” has translated in my professional world to mean, “here is a million dollars” (at least), and sign this NDA and swear to this lawyer you will never disclose any of this under threat of recouped losses as a result (also signed) and all that.
So I have already drawn up documents in my mind and made up sums of money to go along with them to hand to (a) my best friend (b) my best friend’s wife (c) my boss’s daughter (d) my wife (because if she does find out I don’t want her revealing anything to anyone, it must be dealt with internally, amicably i.e. with a pay off) (e) Guy in finance who will be implicated for no reason and, because he is gay, have no recourse to refute any accusation levelled from a company perspective, and finally (f) my boss who will need guarantees that none of this will come out in any publication or in any external source whatsoever. All of that and not to mention the myriad of cases that are on my desk at any one time. I don’t know what trust means anymore. All these people I am trusting to keep their mouths closed with no guarantee that they will. I have given people who are not me and really who do not care about me as much as I care about me the complete power to destroy my actual real life, at any time, on any whim they see fit, all I have is my feeble reasons why they wouldn’t like: (a best friend) doesn’t care about what we did and will not realise I have betrayed his leanings to our boss, (b best friend’s wife) also doesn’t care, does it for fun, will not tell my wife because she doesn’t want to upset her, her own personal motivation for this secrecy, even though we have never discussed anything about keeping this secret, (c bosses daughter) has no reason at all on this earth not to tell her father other than the fact that she is ashamed, or, so promiscuous that she doesn’t actually consider that even anything special at all, just another thing that she did as a naughty experimental girl, which, if I am lucky, will hold out long enough for me to comfortably resign before she is flippant enough to offhandedly tell her father about, (d my wife) for the general reasons any disgraced partner seeks revenge, or at least a levelling of the treatment they have received, (e Guy) not really much to worry about there, low risk, and finally (f my boss) who if he finds out about any of this will pretty much be unable to work with me and will have no other option than to either fire or retrench me, there will be no pay off, agreement or hush money possibly in that last case, he has nothing to lose in these scenarios (except perhaps some personal dignity, but that does not affect the shareholders anyway).
I also don’t like approaching any of these parties with any of my fears and asking for assurances because it alerts them to the power they have, to the potential they have. Perhaps they’ve never even thought on this level, they have pretty much just allowed this behaviour as part of normal reality for them. Like this is nothing new, as if that fact that I would mention any of this is strange. At night when I am lying in bed, working out cases, imagining results, calculating, really, fear makes you imagine the worst solutions. How it would be better if there wasn’t any of this, zero risk means zero whistleblowers, no one who knows anything about anything. You start to, as you are falling asleep and entering a semi-lucid dreamlike state, after hours of calculation and worry, start to imagine ways in which you would get away with eliminating certain pawns in this game, pawns or rooks or bishops or even queens if need be, in order to clear the field, clear your mind. You cold poison your best friend and his wife after you fuck and just leave and say they killed each other or make it so they did kill each other in a planned love act ritual that you could potentially admit to your partner you were a part of or knew they were planning but were too in love with them to stop them or you understood or something like that and that you are so sorry (apologising) to your wife that you got into that and it will never, can never happen again and “they were weird and mesmerising, you know that right honey, you liked Karalee too, didn’t you, you know what they’re like, Christ, I can’t believe that happened, Jesus Christ!”. But the bosses daughter, too young, you are in your late thirties and she is a teenager by all accounts. But of course! She is a party girl, young and rich and stupid. She gets drunk at clubs and staggers out. How to get her away from her friends? Of course she will know you, and she will want you again, right, or at least maybe, she will be drunk wearing her young girl clothes and you will be…yes! In a suit, a nice suit and she will come with you and well, what, strangle her in a an alley near one of the clubs or even take her to a hotel and do it there for fucks sake, no one would suspect you. Her friends will see you. Text her then. At night these things come in to your head and it’s as if you have already done them a you go on then the next day slowly making these things happened, begin putting the pieces in place to make them happen and it’s like you don’t even realise you are doing them in between meetings where you do this type of thing all day anyway.
