Letter of Assurance

No, this isn't a post to assure you I am alive. Well, maybe in a way it is. I haven't posted on here in so long and I have to apologise for that - not that I'm assuming I have regular readers, but I figure anyone who knows me and was hoping to use this as a way of telling double-you-tee-eff I'm up to must be either screaming at the computer saying "Blog, you white bastard!", or have given up hope and have compiled messages for my eulogy. Hey, free to dream.

But I think that if I apologise now, I'm just going to do it again, and apologise again, and then the integrity of my remorse will slowly become dented until even grovelling at the feet of strangers I bump into on the footpath isn't going to be taken seriously. Not that that would in the first place.
My point is, would you mind if I just jump back in and write something random, pretending I'm just picking up where I left off, and you can somehow fill in the blanks by giving me a call, or searching for me on wikipedia (NB: I'm under the alias "Minamoto Yoshitsune". Its a name suppression thing).
Would you do that for me?

Thanks, you're a pal. And no, I didn't wait for you answer before I typed this.

Anywhooo, the motivation behind my sudden desire to blog is really quite basic, but I thought it was worth a laugh and to tell the world about, or at least MY world (You hear that? You're my world). I received a mail today from a material company directed to a factory we are using (for those of you who just tuned in, I work for a mid-level Japanese plastic manufacturer). The mail content was generally uneventful, but the last paragraph, defining the point of this "Letter of Assurance", went like this:

Assurance for the end use
We will use the goods for civil use only. We will never use them for the development or the manufacture of weapons for mass destruction such as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and missiles.

This is how I read it:

We will only use our powers for good. We will never use them for the development or manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (see appended list of potential WMDs we could make with this), or for assisting in the evil schemes of bad guys or their efforts to take over the world.

I mean, its only plastic!? What are they going to do, make explosive Barbie & Ken dolls? I hardly see terrorists flooding the switchboard with calls demanding plastic outer casings for long range missles. The best we could do is manufacture the switches. Hmm. We may well be a high level agent in the axis of evil. Good thing we signed this letter of assurance. Now noone will know we secretly make official Al Qaeda lunchboxes.

I'm off to China next Monday, for a 6 month business trip (I don't think that really counts as a "trip" though, more like a "business live". Should be interesting - I'd love to say that I'll post all sorts of crazy stuff that goes down in industrial China (I'm sure its a barrel of deep-fried monkeys). But sadly, more likely than not I will spend all my time working, getting drunk and procrastinating, like I did with the seamonkeys - and look where it got them: dead. Would you like to be dead as a result of relying too heavily on my blogging? I don't think so. Then may I suggest you don't sit up by the computer waiting for the next instalment. I mean it. Turn off the monitor and go to bed now. You heard me.