Filed under: Realignments, Regrets, and Rusting Field Vehicles

Ald Firt sat alone in Bar La Vision, the preferred post-meeting refuge of those who’d seen too many frameworks collapse under the weight of their own bullet points. The lighting was dim, the chairs wobbled, and the whisky came in categories: brown, browner, and questionable. It was a favourite haunt of field logisticians and weary coordinators — something about it reminded them of the drinking holes from deployment days, where plans were fuzzy and glasses were full. Ald, ever faithful to his habits, ordered rhum. Questionable, of course — not for its alcohol content, but for the suspicious blend of flavour, provenance, and something that tasted faintly of old conference lanyards.

He was fresh from a second day of a five-day Strategic Reorganisation Workshop, where someone from the Little Johnny Dolittle (LJD) Office had presented a rotating spiral diagram with phrases like “mission fluidity” and “transformative anchoring.” He hadn’t asked what they meant. No one had. That was part of the ritual.

What bothered him wasn’t the jargon — he had long developed a professional tolerance for that. He’d even developed a reflexive nod for when spiral diagrams were introduced, along with a tendency to momentarily doze off as the arrows spun and the buzzwords stacked like mismatched Lego.

It was the memory it dredged up.

One that still left a bitter taste, even stronger than the drink in his glass.

“We’d called it a breakthrough at the time,” he muttered, tracing a ring of condensation on the table.

“Integrated outreach support package. Again.”

He didn’t need to be overheard. The ghosts knew the story already.

Fifteen years. Four cycles. Same locations. Same field kits. Same solar-charged laptops with passwords nobody remembered. Every few years, the project returned from the grave, newly dressed, just long enough to forget the funeral that came before.

And when Ald had inherited it — Generation 4.0 — he hadn’t known. Not at first. The files came later. Floppy disks. Deleted emails. Archived reports from someone whose name no one could pronounce. The deeper he looked, the more it felt like digging up a mass grave of forgotten initiatives.

At one local site, he’d seen two old field vehicles — exact same model as the ones they’d just donated. Only these were rusted, wheel-less, and sinking slowly into the gravel like relics of a past no one wanted to admit.

He’d asked.

“Non réparable,” someone had said, with a shrug so well-practised it may have been part of staff induction.

But Ald knew. They were the remains of Generation 2.0. And still, the same proposal was being rewritten. Same paragraphs, just in a cleaner format with updated branding. He should have stopped it. But the pressure had been to continue, not to question.

“We were the fourth generation of hope,” he said, finishing his drink.

“And the fourth generation of forgetting.”

The donor would’ve funded a continuation. But instead, the mission proposed something shiny elsewhere.

The strategy required it. The sustainability report said it was a journey.

Ald waved down another drink.

“Journeys,” he said, “are lovely. Until you realise you’ve been walking in circles.”