Of Calavera’s Management

It comes from one of the last LucasArts’ great adventure games, Grim Fandango, (though keyboard movements suck). It has a fantastic storyline and a great atmosphere mixing the noir with Mexican culture of the day of the dead. The story is about a character called Manny Calavera, basically traveling through the world of the dead.

The interesting part of this game is that it always happens on the day of the dead, so there’s always a one-year jump between the stages. When we leave Manny in Rubacava, he’s around this forsaken restaurant. When we meet him next year, he had it transformed into a successful casino. And then when there’s the next jump we find him making another miracle in terms of management.

This is the inspiring idea of taking control of some business and making it go from bankruptcy or some stagnated state of profit to a successful one by the means of your competence and talent. There was no change in the demands of the market, it was just the person being so incredibly talented in dealing with the logistics.

And the most interesting aspect of this is that Calavera was just spending his life in a job that never made this talent of his to be noticed, probably because it was never needed of him. It’s actually something almost disturbing when I think of these talents that we might have and that we haven’t had the opportunity to let them flourish (flourishing is bad news for Manny, though).