The other day, I was approached by a friendly-looking orc and given a pamphlet. Apparently his organization was offering free trips to Kalimdor – the only catch was one had to do some work in a lumber mill while there to qualify. Well, it was a good chance to see a distant land, and the work part didn’t sound so bad – I wanted to see how the Orcish industrial system functions, anyway, and if it’s really based on pounding chunks of flint together like Mother says (it turns out that it isn’t.)
I sign a few papers and before I know it I’m being pushed out into a room that smells of sawdust and sweat, with a bunch of other “mill workers” I’ve never seen before. It’s only after the cross-continental portal has closed that they explain that the REAL reason we’re there is that the mill is under near-constant attack by saboteurs. And we’re there to stop them – or failing that, give them some expendable targets so the people who actually know how to run the machines don’t get hurt.
Well, I don’t really appreciate being tricked like that, but the situation wasn’t the fault of the workers, and they DID need our help. It’s an ugly business to cut down sections of forest, but it’s just plain silly to expect a population as large as the orcs not to make any sort of ecological footprint – if the Kaldorei really wanted to cut down on logging in Ashenvale, putting a few Teldrassil-sized trees in the Barrens would provide for the orcs’ lumber needs for decades. So I can only conclude the decision to go the “attack” route was motivated by the same old zero-sum childishness that seems to be so common these days.
Unfortunately, my fellow sawmill-defenders were, for the most part, not the sharpest fish in the barrel. Some seemed drugged or brain-damaged, others ran and hid at the slightest sign of danger but still agitated for payment. I guess that’s what you get when your security force is made up of random people pulled off the street. I tried my best to keep us standing, but by the end of the day I was so sore I could barely move from the repeated pummellings and the stumblings-into-the-sawblade and whatnot.
Still, it IS a good way to observe the orcish work environment. Conclusion: the orcish work environment isn’t especially litigious.
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