Imagine you're on a pirate ship. You're having a blast sailing the high seas, meeting new pirates (though suspiciously few female pirates) along the way who teach you cool new pirate ways, finding lots of treasure, inventing better pirate cannons, just living the life. Sure, it annoys you that the first mate, who bought the ship in prefab parts from Ships R Us, has a lot of ship improvement ideas that don't make any sense, but he mostly stays out of the way. Overall things are pretty good. Then one day the captain says "Hey, you know, we're still doing GREAT at pirating and all, but just for now, don't pick up any new pirate friends. Just for now!! Soon you can again! But for now, no one else comes aboard." An hour later he brings aboard a whole group of new "co-captains" who are gonna make the ship SO much better, even though they've never set foot on a ship before, and they require a ton of our treasure in order to sail with us. Okay. The next day you arrive bright and early on the ship, ready to pirate... and a third of the crew is gone. But the captain tells you that we're still doing PERFECTLY fine at pirating. So fine that we'll even bring another co-captain aboard! I mean, he was on the Titanic, so he has LOADS of experience. We're only going to find MORE treasure with a smaller crew. It'll all be fine. No more pirates will have to leave. Totally fine. So you go back to pirating. But, you find, it becomes a little more difficult to do your pirating. Your cannon partner is gone, so you have to clean it and load it and fire it all by yourself, and the cannon safety checker is also gone, so it often just explodes in your face. The cook is gone, so a bunch of people are throwing recipes together haphazardly and wasting food on failed tries and all trying to serve different things for the same dinner. But every week you get a rousing speech from one of the co-captains ASSURING you that things are totally fine and will only get better, even though we've changed our bearing for the sixth time this month. Then one day, upon returning from yet another exhausting solo pirate adventure, you return to the ship to find HALF the crew gone. When you spot the captains, up on the quarterdeck sipping their rum, they promise that everything is FINE: the ship is fine, the treasure is fine, all fine. It's tough times for pirates everywhere, I'm sure you've noticed, so we're just adapting to the new pirate world. Oh and by the way, have you met the new co-captain in charge of sail canvas color? When you ask what the PLAN is, exactly HOW we're going to adapt with a much smaller crew, the captain just waves you off. "You know what would actually be helpful?" he suggests. "If you could all just go down into the galley and man the oars." NOT because it's having trouble sailing, or anything, though. He tells you that you don't need to worry about the condition of the ship, or where it's going, or whether the cannons have fallen off, or anything. The captains will figure it all out, and everything will be fine. Of course, down in the galley, there's no one in charge, so everyone is rowing out of sync and accidentally smacking each other with oars. But even though you can't really know whether the ship is just floating around in circles, it's actually sometimes of preferable to being on deck, where barrels are constantly on fire and sailors are tripping over tangles of ropes that the first mate is rigging to the wrong sails and a bunch of people have developed scurvy. You really think things can't get worse. Until one day, they do. Half the crew, gone again, with no notice or explanation from the captains. This time, the first mate also takes a "step back" and instead becomes one of the ship navigators. Also, we don't need cannons anymore, so just dump them off into the ocean. Oh and by the way, the treasure department THOUGHT they were counting doubloons rather than pieces of eight so we actually have far less treasure than we said we did. But we're going to be FINE. We'll figure out a plan. Soon. We promise. Just go back to rowing for now. So, yeah. If you're NOT down to sail virtually blindfolded on a directionless, crumbling ship with untrustworthy and clueless captains at the helm, maybe avoid.
