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Distillery Skeletons

Skeleton employees of Hard Times

  • Earl

    • Dispatcher. Former beekeeper. Borrowed some used casks to store the hives, and didn’t realize there was interest or how quickly it was accruing.

  • Ruben

    • Shipping. Serial entrepreneur. Got a little underwater on some sketchy accounting, drank to drown his guilt, ended up owing the distillery.

  • Leah

    • Shipping. Doesn’t talk much.

  • Heather

    • Bottling. Former psychotherapist. Went to bars to blow off steam after draining client sessions, couldn’t keep up with her bar tabs.

  • Jermaine

    • Bottling. Former bicycle courier. Misplaced some money orders en route to a boiler maintenance company, and was held liable. Later, Hard Times bought the company and acquired his debt.

  • Cliff

    • Bottling. Was involved in a suspicious accident. The distillery fronted his bail.

  • Pamela

    • Warehouse. Record collector. Borrowed some money from a distillery employee to buy a rare King Tubby dubplate.

  • Connie

  • Vincent

  • Marge

  • Danny

  • Dave

Potential debt predicaments

  • So-and-so paid for a quarter cask for a birthday party by check, but the check got misplaced under a delivery truck seat for a while and wasn’t cached for 3 months. It was fulfilled on an inopportune day and the “biggest check first” policy incurred 2000% of overdraft fees and interest. The distillery agreed to front the bill in exchange for labor.

  • So-and-so continually trespassed on the distillery’s subjacent easement rights after buying a number of pets in a nearby family graveyard, and to avoid legal extinguishment of the easement, the distillery’s hand was forced in imposing a civil suit against so-and-so, who agreed to a pre-court settlement: paying off the violation with labor.

  • While cabrewing down the Echo one day, so-and-so ran into and damaged the distillery’s old water pump. They were held liable for damages but they didn’t have the money to cover it.

  • So-and-so is leasing an old van from the fleet for some mysterious daily art project, in exchange for labor.

  • Owner of a small family-owned logging company accidentally floated a un-inspected log infested with termites to the distillery lumberyard, which caused a batch of caskets to be too porous, causing a warehouse spillage disaster and lost spirits.

  • So-and-so lost in a protracted game of blackjack in some tiki lounge on the Echo River en-route to a delivery destination with a floor manager of the aging warehouse. Floor manager got so-and-so a job to pay off the debt.

  • Distillery fronted the bill for the student loans of a chemist in exchange for an apprenticeship as an assistant master distiller, for an unfortunately precarious duration of time.

  • So-and-so commiserated with a skeleton over bad electrical engineering practices at a bar, and after a couple of rounds of shots, said he could help fix an ailing control room machine at the distillery, which ended up ballooning into various upgrades and hardware swap outs in the pursuit of the ideal electro-hydraulic system, which continues to this day.

  • A patio/deck contractor accepted a job upgrading the aging warehouse racks but didn’t realize the complex aging process used to shift and move the caskets to and from the graveyard over a long period of time. While the initial commission helped them pay off their troubling amount of back taxes, it required them to be present at the distillery for the long haul, reconstructing the latticework lockstep with the aging schedule.