Word: firm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Businessmen are always talking about ways to end that chronic corporate ailment, the time-wasting conference. Now Danish Engineer Søren T. Lyngsø 46, head of a Copenhagen-based industrial instrument firm, has come forward with a conference-room conversation stopper: a sort of electronic tote board that reminds company staffers that talk is far from cheap...
...tinkerer who started out in a small basement shop 16 years ago, Lyngsø credits the gadget with cutting down the proliferation of meetings that have come with the growth of his own firm, Søren T. Lyngsø, Dansk Servo Teknik, to two plants and 160 employees. He finds that the machine starts saving money even before conferences start: nowadays his managers whenever possible skip calling meetings rather than watch the machine add up the cost...
Thinking Weed. Durrell's representation of the cultural climate is Merlin otherwise known as The Firm, an international syndicate with tentacles in all the world's major markets. It is the embodiment of 20th century scientism, an emotionally neutral, self-perpetuating system of techniques that can be used for good or evil. Drawn into The Firm's cushy embrace is Inventor Felix Charlock, who sees himself as a "thinking weed," a pun on Pascal's definition of man as a "thinking reed." The Firm wants Charlock for his new recording device, which leads to the development...
...plot unfolds, Charlock marries Benedicta, the boss's daughter and the lady of the shotgun. Having become a key man in The Firm, with access to its inexhaustible assets, Charlock discovers the paradox of freedom: when all things are possible, nothing is possible. Denied the abrasive stimulation of uncertainty and risk, his creativity grows sluggish. A trip to the gambling tables owned by The Firm proves to be an exercise in boredom. Life for Charlock is reduced to a finite game that, like ticktacktoe, is impossible to lose once the rules have been learned...
...length, Charlock tumbles on an inexpensive way of turning a few cents worth of salt into a revolutionary washday product, and wants to donate the discovery to the betterment of mankind, but The Firm opposes him. His last attempt to exercise free will has been thwarted, and now he learns that his idea of freedom was illusory: he needed The Firm as much as it needed him. Charlock's most important discovery is that the slave is born with his chains. He retires to perfect Abel as an engine of revenge. There is a Hitchcock ending that is best...