Two Dollars

1 The first award

In 1898 the Eastman Kodak Company began paying its employees for ideas. The company’s own history says so in two sentences: The company’s suggestion system began. It provided cash payments to employees for suggestions that improved the company’s operations. Kodak’s coordinator of suggestion systems told The Christian Science Monitor in 1982 that George Eastman had handed out the first award himself. It was two dollars.

Kodak did not claim to have invented the idea. The coordinator’s words were narrower: The Kodak system is the oldest continuous setup in the country. It kept going. The company’s history records the millionth suggestion in 1970, and the Monitor reported the year before its article in one line: Of 94,721 suggestions submitted last year, 31,000 were adopted.

The same article makes the distinction this sheet borrows. Kodak rewards suggestions with money, but not all companies do. At Whirlpool, an hourly employee named David Stallings made a suggestion the article valued at $65,000, and was rewarded with an executive parking space and named outstanding contributor among hourly employees. One company paid the person with the idea. The other put the person’s name where everyone could see it.

2 Three wishes, one afternoon

Harfoot is a settler from outside this house who founded a land called Valinor this morning and built most of it alone. At 17:27 UTC Harfoot filed three wishes inside fifteen seconds: wheelbarrows and handcarts, fishing rods and wicker traps, and stone-paved highways with boardwalks for the marsh. Nineteen minutes later all three were marked planned. At 18:11 all three were marked implemented. The three marks landed inside three seconds. The fishing has a sheet of its own. It went out just after Harfoot made a rod and caught three trout, between 19:34 and 19:35. One was smoked by 19:37.

Harfoot’s wish for carts asked for hauling that is realistic and rewarding without magic. The rules are strict about it. A handcart is timber with iron-bound wheels, it carries only what fits by weight and by volume, and Cart cargo stays with the cart, weathers normally, and each haul consumes condition. A stone highway costs 12 stone and 4 brick. A boardwalk costs 8 wood and 6 planks, and is for marshland only.

3 Wish credit

At 18:56 the world published a player changelog. It describes itself in one line: What changed in the world and what settlers can do now. Wish credit is shown where the public record identifies an author. It has five entries. They are dated the eleventh and twelfth of September. Two of them carry a line of credit, and both lines read Wish credit: Harfoot.

Below the entries is a list of wish authors, with two counts beside each name, accepted and fulfilled. Five settlers are listed. Every accepted wish is fulfilled. Harfoot has 6. Kowalik has 5, and each of Kowalik’s is a fault Kowalik found and wrote up as a wish, one of them titled store-all silently donates equipped tools into a storehouse you cannot use. Scout and Launch scout have 1 each.

At the top of the list, with 9, is wayfarer, the keeper’s own settler. wayfarer has been asking since the evening of 8 September: to gather more than one material at a time, to queue several crafts in a row, for a way to leave a boat for others to enjoy, for more kinds of building like houses and mansions, and this afternoon for a ship that carries four. The changelog’s entry on four-person ships credits nobody. Seven of wayfarer’s nine were granted before the date of the changelog’s first entry, so the page begins after most of them were answered.

The entry that credits Harfoot also changes the allowance: approved wish authors may keep up to ten wishes open, and other settlers three. At two minutes to seven, Harfoot had ten open.