Somewhere in the Bible, don't remember where, there's an instruction to not piss off those who help you. The King James version has it as "Do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread your grain", meaning that if you have oxen driving your gristmill, don't cover their mouths to keep them from eating any of your grain. They really don't eat that much compared to how much grain you can grind in a mill that's large enough to need two oxen to run it, and you will get a lot more work done with less hassle if they think of your gristmill as a good place to go walk around for awhile.
Those managers who cheat their employees at every possible chance will eventually only have employees who are okay with being cheated. Because, you know, they are even better at cheating the company than their boss is. It's better to have happy employees who will do whatever they can to make their boss look good.
What am I talking about here? Well, my proofreader, who shows me every time he looks at my work that I'm not quite as good a writer as I think I am. If you see my stuff here on SOL and like it, a large part of that is just because I'm such a wonderful writer, right?
I wouldn't look anywhere near as good if I didn't have a really good proofreader backing me up. Tomken rips my work apart even better than I do to the other authors on the Swarm Cycle author's list. So, since I was in such a hurry to post "Fat Chicks" once I had worked through his errata list that I didn't even stop to tip my hat to him at the end of the file, I have to publicly admit here that I'm a jerk who doesn't give credit where credit is due.
Until I get back to that with an update that thanks him for his services, please just imagine that "Fat Chicks" ends with a thank-you note to my proofreader TomKen.
-ZM