I worked in a pharmacy/convenience shop in the Fisher Building, across the street from what was still the General Motors building. They were incredibly rude, nasty people.
Much later, I worked at a bookstore in the Renaissance Center, where Ford had had its headquarters. They were invariably polite, nice people.
I was still at the Ren Cen when Ford moved out, and GM was preparing to move in. I warned my co-workers and boss that they were mean wretches, but they seemed skeptical. I donât know why.
The day came when the GM creatures began invading my store. The "please"s and "thank you"s and "How are you today?"s from the customers evaporated, and we were exasperated. We were ignored when we werenât being bitched at for no reason. The store was almost empty when one of the girls behind the counter finally spoke up. âGeez, Chris, you werenât kidding about those GM people!â Our boss gaped in an exaggerated fashion, and completely agreed. Like the rest of us, he couldnât believe the rudeness to whomst weâd all been subjected.
Now I think about it, he should have taken us all to a bar after work and bought us drinks.
Seriously, tho⌠the ONLY reason Europeans were able to conquer the Americas was because of lack of immunity from diseases among the local population. Thereâs a reason why europeans did not fully conquer Africa (and frankly, never actually did, because resistance never stopped) until the LATE 19th century - because they had the same immunity to disease that Europeans did, because trade and interactions had been happening on Afro-Eur-Asia forever.
Iâve had the idea for an alternate history story where the Vikings (particularly Icelanders) settled much further south than just LâAnse aux Meadows, made peace with the Iroquoian First Nations, and found common cause with their mutual democratic governments. And by virtue of handwavium, the First Nations developed resistance to the European diseases, so that by the time the rest of Europe sailed across the Atlantic, the First Nations, by way of the Norse, had firearms and a disease resistant population to fight off European invasion.
Makes me think about an Orson Scott Card novel, Pastwatch, which deals with the original sin of European conquest, and in what way could it be âfixedâ⌠We just get a different 15th century that is meant to save the future from ecological collapse in the future⌠Still is too kind Columbus, but itâs OSC, so, thatâs probably to be expected.
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinsonâs The Years of Rice & Salt? In it, a plague almost entirely wiped out Europe.
If I am remembering this right, China wound up being the big bad colonizers, Japan discovered America and allied with them rather than taking it, and the Islamic world and India wound up as major world powers in conflict. All told through the story of a few characters getting reincarnated through multiple lives (well before Cloud Atlas did something similar). Very neat book, I need to figure out where it is in my stash and reread it.
