The Test Lab

1

 

My arms were tired and of no use.  How useless were they?  Imagine I’m a robot.  The scientists have removed the pins tying the artificial ligaments and tendons to my skeletal structure so there’s no way I can lift my arms; I can’t reach out to type on a keyboard – I can only dictate this story to my portable MP3 player using voice commands.  That’s how tired I felt.  Or at least how useless I looked, draped over my desk like a ragdoll while babbling to myself like an idiot.  In other words, a typical manager.

 

As head of the new Huntsville System Test Lab, my duties were many, including physical construction of lab benches.  I had hoped to have help putting the benches together.  However, at that point in time, I had only one employee, Hugh Rowan.

 

Hugh was an excellent worker while he worked for me at our previous employer, Elextronzia.  Despite first impressions, I had hired Hugh as a temporary subcontractor, working for me as a software test technician.  During the interview, I saw a grossly overweight man wearing a wrinkled dress shirt, his scruffy beard seeming to hide food crumbs from breakfast.  He rarely looked me in the eye.  Overall, his interview skills weren’t the best.  However, I was able to gather from our conversation that he truly had the technical skills outlined in his resume.  The other folks I asked to interview him agreed that Hugh could be what we were looking forward.  He proved us right.  After several months of subcontract work, I asked him if he was interested in become a fulltime employee.  He was thrilled.

 

For the next two years, Hugh never let me down.  Not only did he act as my left-hand man (I already had a right-hand man), covering any technical issues that came up, he was able to squeeze in night classes for a computer science degree while working overtime hours for me.  I was in the process of getting his title changed from software test technician to test engineer when we both found ourselves seeking new employment because Elextronzia had decided to shut down the Elextronzia-Huntsville Design Center.

 

Before the design center was closed, an Elextronzia colleague, Jerome Palermo, had introduced me to the new Huntsville engineering manager at Cumulo-Seven.  Jerome had been talking with Patrick Keating about their good ol’ days at POY/Holywells when Patrick mentioned that he was looking to start up an engineering test lab.  Jerome told me about the lab and asked if I was interested.  Facing certain unemployment, I told Jerome to get me an interview with Patrick.

 

Patrick and I met for lunch at Green Hills Grille, a local business eatery with a Southwestern décor.  I ordered a salmon salad, making sure my lunch appeared expensive, was light on the stomach and wouldn’t drip or make a mess on my clothes.

 

I had never participated in a lunchtime interview as the interviewee so I made sure that I gave all the positive cues and nuances that I expected from the interviewees that had sat across the table from me through the years and had subsequently been hired.

 

I could see Patrick was a sharp individual.  He not only touched on technical issues to make sure I was familiar with the high points on my résumé, he also made sure to avoid the appearance of testing me.  In other words, Patrick was a player.  Subtlety was not a game for him.  It was his M.O.  I appreciated that quality in him and still do.  Others accused him of having no original ideas of his own – stealing ideas from others when he found it convenient and not giving anyone else any credit when Patrick was rewarded for the ideas.  I knew better.  Patrick didn’t waste a lot of public face time with “thank you”s for every idea he presented to upper management, engineering committees or other group of peers.  Instead, Patrick protected those whose ideas were found useful.  Getting an attaboy may give most people the warm fuzzy they’re looking for in their daily work lives but it’s the protection of key management personnel that will help you keep your job or get a new one when needed.  Patrick would never come right out and tell people he was protecting them any more than he was going to tell me that he was verifying both my work skills and people skills during our interview.

 

A few months later, I landed the job at Cumulo-Seven with a promise that Cumulo-Seven’s HR department would at least look into hiring some of my test lab employees at Elextronzia.

 

I was excited about my new job, getting a window office on the top story of the corporate headquarters building.  The only downside was that my first paycheck didn’t get deposited in my bank account.  The accounting department blamed it on the HR department which stated it was the finance department’s responsibility to get me paid.  I was asked to wait until my second pay period when my paycheck would be doubled to compensate for the shortage.

 

In the meantime, I worked on building up my staff.

 

My right-hand man at Elextronzia, Dante Long, decided to take a job at Mahogany Technologies, a company founded by one of Huntsville’s favorite sons, Warren Brown.  Brown had quarterbacked some great teams at Alabama A&M University and enjoyed a good career in professional football so I couldn’t blame Dante for going to Mahogany for a life of fame and fortune.  He had been my first employee at Elextronzia and weathered chunks of changes under my command, having to suffer a lot of frustration while I came up to speed as a full-fledged manager of people.  In the end, despite my becoming a better people manager, I couldn’t protect our jobs at Elextronzia.  At least I made sure that Dante, Hugh and anyone else that was interested was able to advance their education while they worked for me at Elextronzia.

 

Elextronzia gave me the freedom to manage my way.  Therefore, I gave my temporary contract employees a little leeway with their work schedule if they were interested in taking college courses.  Some of them took the leeway offer as an excuse to show up late at work – in return, I gave them the opportunity to pursue this line of reasoning with other companies.  Out the door they went!

 

Not all of the temp employees were problems.  My favorite temp employee at Elextronzia was Wheaton Brand.  He had technical skills out the wazoo and no major quirks.  Well, he was 26 years old, had long hair and black-rimmed glasses, lived at home with his parents, maintained a couple of racks of computers and networking gear in his basement and competed in wireless networking games in the desert.  But he made up for those g33k trademarks by driving a cool old Caprice with a Corvette LT1 engine.

 

Wheaton and Hugh were the perfect tech members of a tech team.  Unfortunately, Wheaton’s previous employer before Elextronzia had been a man who was in the midst of a legal mess with Cumulo-Seven.  For the most part, Wheaton’s interview with Patrick Keating had gone well but Wheaton mentioned he was still friends with his former employer.  RED FLAG alert – Wheaton was a “no hire” – too much of a chance that Wheaton would be an industrial spy.

2

 

I sat in my windowed office and stared at the blueprints for the office.  Something seemed odd.  I had finished building half of the lab benches and then carefully measured the remaining space in the test lab.  The measurements weren’t adding up.

 

I picked up the phone and dialed my boss.  “Patrick, hey, it’s Bruce.”

 

“Yes, Bruce, what can I do for you?  I hope it’s a quick one ‘cause I have a meeting in five minutes.”

 

“Yeah, this is easy.  Are you sure the blueprints you gave me are to scale.”

 

“You’ve got the blueprints?”

 

“Yeah, I met our physical plant manager, Preston Carmichael, earlier today.  He stopped by to admire the progress on the test lab.  When he saw I was building the lab benches, he offered the assistance of Gerard Lay.  I told him that I wasn’t sure I needed any help from Gerard.  He said he understood why I wouldn’t want Gerard to get involved so he gave me a copy of the blueprints and told me I’d figured out how the benches were supposed to go.”

 

“Is there some reason you’re not using Gerard’s help?”

 

“Well, I don’t have a lot to do right now since HR won’t open up another job position for a few weeks so I thought I’d play handyman.  Kinda like a ship’s captain wants to get his hands dirty once in a while to prove to himself he still knows the ship’s layout.”

 

“Hmm…you’ve got a point there.  Even so, I’d use Gerard myself so that if you needed him in the future, he’d know how the benches were built.”

 

“Gerard did stop by afterward and loaned me his power tools.”

 

“He did?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Good.  Look, I’ve got meetings lined up all the rest of today and will be out of town the rest of this week.  Why don’t you build what you think is covered by the blueprints and I’ll get you some help by next week?  After all, there’s no reason to be in a rush to finish the benches.”

 

“Guess you’re right.  There are still a few construction subcontractors finishing up the flooring and air conditioning systems…”

 

“Uh-huh.  Bruce, I’ve really got to go.  If you need anything, send me an email.  I’ll try to respond when I can but I’ve got to fly to Switzerland to solve a problem for Nestle.”  Patrick hung up the phone.

 

I looked down at the blueprints again.  I placed my hand-drawn dimensions on the blueprints and held them up to the window behind me.  Comparing the two, it appeared that the blueprints showed an extra couple of feet of width but only for the back half of the test lab.  On my PC, I pulled up the photographs I had taken of the construction of the lab.  There was nothing obvious in the first few stages of construction.  But as the back half of the lab was being built, the spray-painted footprints for the office walls had been changed at some point.  Maybe the offices were bigger than what was shown on the blueprints.

 

I called Hugh.

 

“Yes, Bruce, what is it?”

 

“How are you coming along on the boilerplates for our test lab reports?”

 

“Pretty good.  I’ve inserted mail merge codes that I can tie to our ASCII reports that’ll be generated and stored on the test lab server.  The server should get here tomorrow and then I’ll be able to test the reports using the fake data I created yesterday.”

 

“That’s fantastic!  You’re going to put yourself out of a job if you’re not careful.”

 

“Not funny.”

 

“Sorry, couldn’t resist.  Hey, do you have a yardstick or ruler?”

 

“There’s a measuring tape in the network cable construction kit.”

 

“It’s not any hurry or anything but when you get a chance, could you measure the dimensions of your office?”

 

“Sure.  Whatcha lookin’ for?”

 

“Oh, I’m just making sure that I’ve measured the spacing between lab benches correctly and the blueprints don’t seem to match.”

 

Hugh laughed. “Obviously, you’ve not been in the construction business very much.  My dad builds houses and I don’t think I ever found a blueprint that matched the final dimensions of the house.”

 

“In that case, never mind.”

 

“No, I’ll get it for you.”

 

 

I checked email and found that HR had figured out what happened to my first few paychecks – they had been deposited in the wrong bank account.  Instead of being issued a new employee number, I had been assigned an employee ID of a former employee.  Our payroll system triggered paycheck deposits according to employee IDs, not social security numbers.  My checks were going to some guy living in Daytona Beach, Florida.  While he was basking in a tropical sun at my expense, my wife and I were adjusting our spending habits to avoid unnecessary credit card charges until our bank account was full again.

 

3

 

After Patrick returned from Switzerland, he sat down with me to review what I’d been spending my time doing in the first three months on the job.  He told me it wasn’t a 90-day review in the formal sense of whether he should keep me – in fact, he was more than pleased with my performance – he was just seeing if I was up to taking on more work.  I didn’t tell him I was bored to tears with practically nothing to do.  Instead, I outlined the variations I had added to the lab operation plan I had given to Patrick my second day on the job.

 

Because the engineering group was divided into geographic regions for customer access and disaster recovery reasons, all engineering projects were spread out according to the skill matrix in each region.  The Redmond, Washington, Engineering Design Center focused mainly on hardware development and testing.  The Sunrise, Florida, Engineering Design Center focused on software development and testing.  The Redmond test lab manager and Sunrise test lab managers had been courting me to try to convince me that their labs needed the most support.

 

Patrick reviewed my plan and decided that because the Huntsville developers were a mix of hardware, firmware and software experts, the Huntsville test lab should be able to accommodate all aspects of the development process.  Because Patrick was working from an older paper copy of the test plan, I showed him the latest copy on my laptop, where I had split our lab into fourths.  One fourth would be dedicated to supporting overflow work from Sunrise, one fourth from Redmond, and one fourth dedicated to Huntsville test projects.

 

“Why fourths?”

 

“I don’t know.  It just worked out that way.”

 

“Interesting.  What’s the other fourth for?”

 

“Nothing at this time.  I figured there would always be a need for extra test space so I reserved that area for ‘special projects.’”

 

“Bruce, that’s perfect.  I actually need a bench reserved for demonstrating new technology to our investors and other special guests.”

 

“Okay, that leaves us two more benches for expansion.”

 

“Make that one.”

 

“You need two benches for demonstrations?”

 

“No, there’s a group I haven’t told you about called Qwerty-Queue.  They have been bugging me for a dedicated test lab and I keep putting them off because I think they have plenty of space in their design lab for testing.”

 

“No problem.”

 

“Thanks.  When you meet them, you’ll find they are very persistent.  If they ask for more than one bench, let me know.”

 

“Will do.”

 

“Say, football season’s starting up this weekend.  Are you planning to attend any Bama games this year?”

 

“Uhh…actually, I’m a UT season football ticket holder.”

 

“Tennessee.  Well, that’s okay.  You think you’ll be needing any time off?”

 

“Not really.  We only attend home games and can pretty much get to Knoxville and back in one weekend.”

 

“Tell you what.  You’ve made such good progress on the test lab that I’m going to give you a couple of days off anyway.  Why don’t you take Thursday and Friday off and make this an extra long Labor Day weekend.”

 

“Uh, okay.  I don’t know if my wife can get off.”

 

“Well, do some work around the house or something.  You deserve a break.”

 

“Okay, thanks.”

 

“No problem.  Oh, one other thing.  One of my employees…well, do you know Constance O’Connell?”

 

“I think I know her.  Is she the Constance who’s always arranging the engineering birthday parties?”

 

“Yes.  Anyway, she’s taken a job with the Sunrise team.  She was performing a job for me called L3 Coordinator.  Based on your work schedule, I think you can handle both test lab manager and L3 coordinator.  What do you say?”

 

“Can I find out more about it and get back to you?”

 

“Absolutely.”  Patrick smiled and leaned back in his chair.  “Just give Constance a call.  I think she has an L3 meeting tomorrow so try to get a hold of her today.  I’d like her to introduce you tomorrow in case you’re interested in the job and decide to take it.”

 

4

 

In my spare time, when I’m not working or watching college football or NASCAR races on TV, I like to garden.  Both my parents grew up on farms so I guess I get my gardening skills from my grandparents.  My mother’s father kept a five-acre farm from which he was able to feed his three children.  He grew corn, green beans, strawberries, grapes, cabbages and potatoes.  He also grew flowers to attract bees, ward off insects and give something for his wife to decorate the table with.  My father lived with his grandparents and helped with his grandparents’ apple farm.  His mother ended up being an award-winning member of the Federated Garden Clubs, creating Japanese-style floral arrangements, built from driftwood and other material near her southern Florida home.

 

My wife and I live on a one-acre wooded lot.  Our subdivision was carved out of the edge between two large farms in eastern Madison County, Alabama.  Counting the rings of the tree stumps around our house when we first moved here and looking at the girth of the variety of trees growing around our house, it appears that these woods are no older than 60 or 70 years, meaning there was a forest fire or clear cut in the first part of the 20^th Century.

 

We moved out to a less densely populated area east of Huntsville so we commute back and forth to our high-tech jobs and not have to drive into the sun going both ways.  Moving west would have meant driving into the sun morning and afternoon and south was already too crowded.  Sure, we could have moved north but our real estate agent didn’t find any houses that matched the square footage and price range we were looking for.  Because of our location, our neighbors are interesting.  Many of them are high-tech workers like my wife and me, cooperating with other highly sociable, team-oriented coworkers to create rockets, missiles, computers and such.  At the same time, they like their privacy.  The woods, even in one-acre tracts, give one a sense of seclusion.

 

As soon as we settled in to our home, I started molding the master design for our yard.  The front yard belonged to my wife and thus I was a yard boy, serving her wishes for the curb appeal of our place.  The middle of the front yard was reserved for a patch of grass that covered the septic tank and field lines, and served as a formal lawn.  Surrounding the lawns were themed islands – one island for irises, one island for azaleas, one island for native plants and one island for hostas.

 

The backyard was mine.  Because we lived on the slope of a hill, I had grand plans for a cascading waterfall starting at the back of our property, trickling through a mountain stream and culminating in a garden pool at the edge of the house.  Finances and a lack of motivation got in the way of those plans.  I built the garden pool but instead of other water features, I set up a series of rock terraces and stone paths to show off the native plants that existed in our yard as well as others I transplanted from the area.

 

In an effort to build a garden to make my family proud, I attended gardening workshops, including ones sponsored by the Huntsville-Madison County Botanical Garden and others in the area.  My all-time favorite workshop lecturer continues to be Felder Rushing.  His attitude has always been to find a gardening style you like and if it pisses off the neighbors, all the better – you now know you’re unique.  He autographed a copy of his book, “Gardening Southern Style,” for me with the statement, “Perennials are the spice of the garden – try a new one and pass a piece along.”

 

Therefore, my rock terraces are not typical straight-edged walls with neatly spaced perennials and annuals flourishing in a symphony of year-round color.  Instead, metal sculptures stick up between the weeds.  You might find a broken off piece of plastic greetings that came with a basket of anniversary flowers that no longer proclaims, “I Love You,” but proudly says, “ve ou,” instead.  A Celtic cross and Buddha head vie for your spiritual attention.

 

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the old worn-out tires from my Alfa Romeo Spider so I shoved them in our garage for while.  Then, after seeing a lecture by Felder Rushing, I sliced up the tires and turned them not into Felder’s favorite flower pot, but into the appearance of a Loch Ness monster, half tires giving the shape of a serpent’s body slithering out of the graveyard vine (periwinkle or Vinca major, a perennial that my mother in-law passed to me) that has overgrown many of the rock terraces.

 

I was digging in the garden during my long Labor Day weekend, attempting to cut a small ditch up into the woods for a buried PVC water line when I hit a big rock.  The rock was only a few inches below the level of the soil so I knew I needed to chop up the rock, cut a V in it or remove it in order to place the PVC pipe at least six inches deep in the ground, below the freeze line.  I hadn’t been exercising much lately so I decided to put my arm muscles to work and dig out the rock.

 

Two hours later, I found myself staring at a dome-shaped object.  At least three feet in diameter, the stone appeared too symmetrical and smooth to have been shaped by water.  But why would a man-made stone be buried in my backyard unless it was part of some other ancient culture?  I had not studied the lives of the native Americans who used to live in this valley but I had learned they once owned the land from just south of here all the way to the Tennessee River, forcing early settlers to have to carry a passport to get from their farms to the river.  But that was little less than 200 years ago.  This stone appeared much older.

 

That night, I had a stranger-than-normal dream.  I was sitting in front of the computer in our front bedroom that I preferred to call my study, typing up some of my old journal entries when I came upon a brittle, yellowed newspaper clipping.

 

The photo at the top of the clipping showed young people wandering through an open field.  The caption read, “Wandervogel, 1926”.   The folks walked out of the photo and hugged me.  I looked over their shoulders to see we were standing in an open grassy area.

 

“We call you ‘Friend,’” the tallest blond youth exclaimed in a German accent.  Everyone nodded.  “Friend, what are you doing?  Will you join us in our quest?”

 

“Umm…I don’t know.  Where are you going?”

 

“We are going nowhere and we are going everywhere.  We are traveling through time to find wandering youth like us.  You look wise, Friend.  Perhaps you know some wandering youth who are located here.”

 

“They are usually found at large rock concerts or sports gatherings like ESPN X-Games.”

 

“I do not know ‘rock concerts’ but we are looking for youth who wander forest and fields like ourselves, not the sports gatherers.”

 

“Then, young fellow, I can only point you to others.  The Alabama outdoor shop is located just over the mountain.  They would be able to point you to the outdoors types you’re looking for.”

 

“Thank you, Friend.  We do not expect commercial establishments to have what we are looking for but perhaps someone in the shop may be able to help us.  Wiedersehen, Friend!”  The young man turned and led the way up the mountain.

 

I turned around and found myself standing in the middle of the study holding the news article.  This startling sensation woke me up.

 

I slipped out of bed and went to the living room to turn on the main house computer.

 

I searched the Internet for “Wandervogel” and discovered the subculture world of hippiedom…

 

5

 

Ask most anyone you know to describe the history of the hippie movement and you’ll get a description of the hippies coming out of the Beatniks from the 1950s.  But I knew, without even researching it, that there is nothing in human history that hasn’t already been tried in one form or another, often in the form of opposites.

 

For every red “Commie” there is a red-blooded “American”.  For every woman, there is a man (statistically speaking, of course).  For every person who’s singing the praises of corporate life on national television, there’s another person who’s quietly teaching the ways of a simple life in the woods.

 

I first encountered the counterculture movement one night when my parents hired a brand-new babysitter to watch my sister and me so they could go square dancing at the local Eagles Club with my father’s management coworkers.  The babysitter took my sister and me to a summer solstice party outside of our hometown of Boone, North Carolina.  There, I met some of my babysitter’s teenage friends but I also saw adult friends of my parents.  They were dancing around a bonfire.  The women’s normally rolled-up hair was loose and woven with ribbons. The men’s conservatively-trimmed beards were adorned with beads and feathers.  Instead of suits and ties, I saw tie-dyed shirts.  Instead of pantsuits, I saw flowing robes.  I wasn’t sure what was going on so I asked the only man I knew by man, Mr. Ehrlichmann, if he could tell me what he was doing.

 

Mr. Ehrlichmann explained that he came from wonderful parents who followed the lebensreform or life reform movement.  His parents had rejected the harsh industrialization of the turn of the century.  He embraced industrialization because of all the good growth that had occurred that gave Germany such strength during the Second World War.  He had not supported the Nazi movement and had survived much harassment, his one blessing being that he was a brilliant engineer.  He moved to the United States in 1941 on the pretense he was going to establish a branch office in New York for the design firm he was working for at the time.  Instead, he came over and found much negativity toward Germans.  He found out about a colony of lebensreform followers hiding in the mountains of North Carolina.

 

Mr. Ehrlichmann introduced me to his teenage daughter, Fausta, so he could go back to the bonfire.  My sister and I sat with Fausta in the back of Mr. Ehrlichmann’s truck.  Fausta explained that her father enjoyed his engineering work at the secret missile factory with my father because he knew that we had to protect ourselves against real enemies of freedom.  At the same time, he knew he didn’t have to spend his after-work hours with his coworkers.  Instead, he wanted to enjoy his freedom, celebrating the life his parents had given him, showing them respect by teaching their rituals to his family and friends.  Fausta rolled her eyes when she repeated the words of her father.  She was not interested in getting the smell of burning wood in her hair and clothes, or scratching at bug bites in the woods because her father refused to let her use insect repellant.

 

We stayed with Fausta until our babysitter found us and took us back home.  We were asleep by the time my parents returned so I don’t know what our babysitter said when my parents asked why we smelled like smoke.  I figured it wasn’t a good answer because we never had her for a babysitter again.

 

The hippie movement had come and gone by the time I grew up so I missed the mass wave of young people who turned on to drugs and turned off to the Establishment.  It wasn’t until my college years that I got to enjoy the hippie movement, after it returned to its quiet, backwoods, grassroots self, hidden from view during the greedy excesses of the 1980s.  But that, as they say, is another story.

6

 

I woke up.  Perhaps one of these subculture groups landed in Big Cove, Alabama, and settled down here for a while.  Would they have had the wherewithal to build the dome-shaped rock?

 

The next morning, I used ropes and pulleys to turn the rock over, just to make sure the rock was in fact smoothed by water and/or wind and not a figment of my imagination.

 

Alas, my imagination won.  Or rather, I was not imagining anything.  Underneath the rock was a large hole about two feet in diameter, which went down for about a foot and then sloped back toward the hill.  I had discovered a secret hideaway of some sort.  I knew that back during the Civil War, on or about 27^th June 1864, during a skirmish in the Big Cove valley, while US forces were chasing some Confederates into the hills near Blevingtons Gap, a stash of weapons had been hidden from the Yankees so the locals could claim they had surrendered all their arms to the Federal Army.  They gave their rusty old rifles to the Federal troops and kept their good guns for themselves.  Perhaps this was the hiding place.

 

I went back to the house and grabbed a florescent bulb camp lantern.  I told my wife I had seen a small cave up in the woods and was checking it out.  She knew I had been looking for the source of bats that flew around our house, hoping to find a cave and not just a hole in a tree somewhere.  She wished me well and told me to be careful.

 

I stepped down into the hole and shone the light into the cave.  Centipedes and cave crickets were all over the place as well as a few very spindly spiders.  But no spider webs.  Very strange.  I debated whether to crawl on my butt and look down between my legs as I slid into the hole, with cave crickets only a few inches from my face or crawl on my stomach and see the centipedes up close and personal.  I went back to the house and grabbed a hat – I was going to slide on my butt and knock the cave crickets off the ceiling with the toes of my boots as I scooted along.  It was what I should have done the summer after 5^th grade when a neighborhood kid, Mike, and I explored a cave in the backside of a hill behind my house.  The opening was small but the two of us convinced each other to slide in, holding a candle up to scare the crickets and spiders away from us.  The spiders were easy to burn if they wouldn’t crawl away.  The crickets just bounced all over the place until they disappeared or made nice smudge marks on our pants.  We explored the first 20 or 30 feet of the five-foot high cave but never got up the nerve to scoot through the 8-inch high hole at the back of the cave because of the dozens of crickets that lined the hole.  I regretted it even more a few years later, after I’d grown too big to climb in the cave.  I was talking to Bobby, one of the community swimming pool lifeguards, whose older sister used to babysit us and sing songs from the latest albums she was listening to.  “I feel the earth move under my feet.  I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling d-o-o-w-w-n.”  She was definitely a hippie.  Anyway, Bobby said that a large room, at least 15 feet high and 50 feet across, was on the other side of that hole.  Sadly, the cave was long ago crushed and filled in to make way for an expansion of our subdivision.  The road above the cave is old, formerly known as Dry Gap Pike, then Sunset Trail and finally changed to Ridgecrest Drive in my father’s youth.  Sometimes I wonder if the people living at 152 Ridgecrest Drive know they’re sitting on top of the remnants of a cave.  Will they one day go to open their front door and find it’s stuck because the hill shifted underneath them after an underground mudslide filled in the rest of the cave during a heavy rainstorm?

 

I’m not afraid of confined spaces.  At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I got deeper and deeper into the cave.  It wasn’t so much the confined space that bothered me. It was the smell of crushed insects that wafted across my nose combined with the rotten smell of some sort of fungus I encountered after there were no more insects about 10 or 15 feet into the cave.  My pants were soaked through and the elbows of my work shirt were dripping wet.  It seemed that the sloping effect of the cave was exaggerated at the entrance.  Once inside, I realized the cave floor had almost a zero slope.  Therefore, a trail of very slow moving water seemed to trickle along the bottom of the cave.

 

After 50 feet of sliding into the cave, I had had enough.  There were no distinguishing features, nothing that defined the cave as either man-made or natural.  My wife did not know where I was exactly and I hadn’t bothered to look at the weather report so a popup rain shower could be hanging overhead, ready to wash me out to who-knows-where.

 

And that was the big question.  Where?  This cave must end up somewhere.  If the cave had been here all along, why hadn’t I noticed water flowing into or out of it during large rain events?  Surely the rock capping the hole wasn’t water tight?  Of course it wasn’t or how else were the insects getting in and out?

 

My neck was tired from holding my head up while I braced the lantern between my chin and my chest.  I rolled over on my side.  In my haste to get as far down the cave as I could before I chickened out, I had stopped paying attention to the cave walls.  Turned to my side, I examined the side of the cave.  There definitely appeared to be a seam.  I rolled over and looked at the other side.  Also a seam.  Hmm…well, there was no way that nature would have carved this cave and left a perfectly straight seam running along.  I was beginning to freak out.

 

I turned over on my hands and knees and scurried out of the cave like a large, frightened rat.  In my rush, I left the lantern behind but I didn’t know about that until much later.

 

7

 

At work on Tuesday, I checked email.  The finance department had a paycheck for me.  I walked down to see the head of Finance, Daisy Speers.  Daisy handed me a check and asked me to look it over.

 

The amount of the check looked wrong.  I was not getting enough money.

 

“Daisy, have withholding taxes gone up?”

 

“Why?”

 

I pointed to the check total.  “I thought I’d be making more than this on a biweekly basis.”

 

Daisy looked at the check and compared the total to the amount on the paycheck stub.  “Well, Bruce, my guess is that we’ve doubled the amount of money we’re supposed to take out for federal and state taxes.  If you’ll give me this check…”

 

I held on to the end of the check and wouldn’t let go.

 

“Bruce, if you’ll just let me have the check…”

 

I pulled on the check to try to get it out of Daisy’s hand.

 

“Bruce, we can issue you a new check by tomorrow.”

 

I got the check out of Daisy’s hand and almost fell to the floor.

“No, Daisy.  Why don’t you issue a check for the difference, instead?  I’ll get this cashed today so I can pay my car insurance.”

 

Daisy laughed.  “That bad, huh?”

 

I tried a weak smile.  “Three months without a check is catching up with me.”

 

Daisy mumbled.  “A problem with MORTIE?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“Never mind.”

 

Not sure what Daisy said or meant, I turned and walked out.

 

 

I stopped by Hugh’s office to see how he was coming along on his assignments.

 

He gave me a puzzled look.

 

“I thought you knew.”

 

“Knew what?”

 

“While you were gone, I was assigned to help the Qwerty-Queue group set up their equipment.”

 

“You were?”

 

“Yeah, Patrick said he’d run it by you before you left.”

 

“Oh yeah,” I replied, knowing that Patrick expected Hugh to tell me what he just said and if I confronted Patrick, he could always claim he forgot to tell me before I left.  I played along.  “So did you guys finish up?”

 

Hugh looked nervous but he could look nervous about a lot of things, especially when I was interrupting something he was doing on his computer that he wasn’t supposed to, like playing Internet games or being engaged in an IM conversation.  Hugh gave me a quick look before he turned back to his computer.  “Well…”

 

I stood there with my hands crossed and didn’t blink an eye.

 

“Well, I guess you better ask them.”

 

“Who?”

 

“The Qwerty-Queue guys.”

 

“Okay.  Who are they?”

 

“The ones I talked with were Kevin Gambizi and Bud Jones.”

 

“Bud Jones?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Short, stocky, red-haired and red-faced, a sly remark or joke every few minutes?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“You’ve got to be kidding.  I didn’t even know he worked here.”

 

Hugh looked me like I’d lost my mind.

 

“Oh, sorry.  I used to work with Bud at A.L. Cohol Environmental Investments.  He was one of our technicians working on a skunk works project.”

 

“That sounds like the same one, then.”

 

“I’ll check in on him.  In the meantime, email your progress before you leave today.  I’ve got to report to Patrick and his boss tomorrow and want to make sure we are on schedule.”

 

“Okay.”

 

 

Back in my office, I looked up Bud’s phone number in our online global employee directory.

 

“Helloooo!”

 

“Bud.”

 

“Yes?” a Southern-fried voice replied.

 

“It’s me, Bruce Colline.”

“Well hello, Bruce Colline,” Bud finished with a snort of a laugh.  “Where have you been?  I was looking for you last week.”

 

“I took a couple of days off.”

 

“You just started working here a few months ago…”

 

“And what are you getting at?”

 

“Well, I’ve been here two years and haven’t had a day off yet.”

 

I laughed, never sure if Bud was pulling my leg.  “Well, we’ve got to keep you out of trouble.”

 

“I’m sure you do.  Hey, I met Hugh.  Great guy.  Where did you get him?”

 

“Under a cabbage leaf.  No seriously, he worked for me at Elextronzia.”

 

“Elextronzia?  I didn’t know you worked with Matthew and those guys.  Isn’t it funny how you never worked for POY or Holywells but somehow you seem to know or work with someone who did?”

 

“Yeah, I know what you mean.  Maybe POY was really a cloning factory and all you guys are engineers and technicians made from the same DNA.”

 

Bud gave a belly laugh that nearly deafened me.  “If you think that Mr. ‘Church of Christ’ Matthew and me are from the same DNA, then you’re out of your mind.  Then again…”

 

We both laughed.

 

“So, Bud, Hugh tells me that you wasted his time doing your work for you.”

 

“Yeah, that’s what I did.  And he was great about it, too – not complaining once while I made him work 20-hour days trying to keep up with all the important work I do.”

 

“I bet.  Look, I just want to make sure you don’t need to borrow him again.  We’re on a tight schedule, what with there only being him and me in the test lab and I need to keep him focused on his assignments.”

 

“You mean, you’re the boss and you’ve only got one person to do the work, don’t you?”  Bud snickered.

 

“Sure, Bud.  That’s why I’m covered with sweat at the end of the day, worrying that he’s not doing my work.”

 

“I thought so.”

 

“Anyway, are you guys done?”

 

“From what I hear, Patrick Keating has got Hugh on a permanent, temporary loan to us.”

 

“That’s what I hear, too.”

 

“So if I was you, I’d take it up with your boss.”

 

“I plan to do that.  But are you guys done for now?”

 

“At least for today.  Or at least I am.  Kevin may have more work for Hugh.”

 

“Thanks. I’ll call Kevin.”

 

“But you really need to talk with Patrick.  I think he’s signed you up for more than you bargained for.”

 

“Well, I don’t think that Huntsville lab manager and L3 coordinator is all that much.”

 

“No, that’s not what I mean.  Have you heard about MORTIE?”  Bud stopped talking and I could hear voices in the background over the phone.  “Look, I’ve got to go.  Let’s get the old A.L. Cohol gang together and go out to eat some day.”

 

“Sounds good.  Bye.”

 

“Seeya.”

 

 

I called Kevin.  “It’s your dime,” shot back a voice in a New England accent of some sort.  I couldn’t tell if he was from Boston or Maine but it was a nasally accent all the same.

 

“Kevin?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Hey, this is Bruce Colline.  How are you doing?”

 

“Fine.  Howyadoin’?” Kevin added, mimicking the beer commercials.

 

“Fine.  I just spoke with Bud Jones and he suggested I call you.”

 

“He did?” Kevin’s voice was wavering a little.  “How ‘bout I come by the lab and talk?”

 

“If you want to, that’s fine.  I’ve got a meeting at 10 I’ve got to attend, though.”

 

“No prob.  I’ll be right over.  Gimme two minutes.”

 

I hung up the phone, walked down the short hallway, nodding at Hugh as I passed his office, and opened the lab door.  I had asked Hugh to use the doorjamb to keep the lab door propped open during working hours but he often forgot and left the door closed.

 

Standing inside the doorway at the other end of the lab was Kevin.  In size, he was about the spitting image of Hugh, rotund in a jolly sort of way.  Whereas Hugh’s hair was more gray than black, Kevin’s hair was jet black.  He was either young or dying his hair.  From across the lab, it was hard to tell.

 

Kevin motioned me to meet him at the other end of the lab.  As I walked across the rough concrete where the floor tiles had been laid and removed twice because of poor alignment, I watched Kevin walk behind the two rows of lab benches.  I changed directions and followed him.  We met at the bench designated for Qwerty-Queue.

 

I reached out and shook Kevin’s hand.  “Kevin, I’m Bruce.  Glad to meet you.”

 

“Likewise.”  Kevin looked around the bench and spread his arms wide.  “All this room!  Can you believe we covered up this whole bench in two days?”

 

I raised an eyebrow.  “Something tells me you’re wanting more space.”

 

“Well-l-l-l…”  Kevin slapped me on the back.  “I bet you have a couple of extra feet to spare.”  He gave me a real big wink.

 

“There is one more bench.”

 

Kevin slapped me on the back again.  “No, I mean don’t you have some extra room you’re not accounting for, some space that no one else is using?”

 

I thought about the blueprints.  Did Hugh or Patrick mention something to Kevin and Kevin was making fun of me?

 

“Yeah, maybe I do.  But who says you get to use it?”

 

Kevin leaned back with a startled look.  “Hmmph.  Says you.”  He leaned in close.  “You guys got the cameras up yet?”

 

I turned him around to face the wall and pointed to the large, red fire warning alarm/light.  “Yeah, and it’s pointed at you right now.”

 

“Fuck!” Kevin hissed.  “Well, look at the time.  I guess you got your meeting to go to.  Hey, me and Bud will be in and out of here for the next few days…”

 

“You think you’ll need the extra bench?”

 

“Bench?  What?  Oh yeah, count us in.  You’re right.  It’s the extra bench that we’ll be needing.”  Kevin patted me on the back and walked out.

 

I turned around and jumped.  Hugh was standing behind me, as if he’d appeared out of thin air.  “Whoa!  Hugh, when did you get here?”

 

“Oh, I heard you talking to Kevin and wanted to ask him a question.  Did he say anything to you about needing extra space?”

 

“Yeah.  I’ve offered him the bench.”

 

Hugh pursed his lips and stroked his beard, a habit I was used to seeing when Hugh was sorting something out in his mind.  “Did he ask for the bench?”

 

“He was rather odd about it but I think he was asking for the bench in a roundabout sort of way.”

 

“I see.  Well, if we…I mean, if he needs the bench, then can I help him set it up?”

 

“Sure.  Be sure you’re on schedule.”

 

“Oh, I’m all caught up.  I worked all weekend.”

 

“You what?”

 

“Yeah, I figured there would be a lot to do and…”

 

“Hugh, wait.  There will be plenty of opportunities for us to work late.  I don’t want to start the overtime habit now or upper management will be expecting me to work you guys overtime all the time.”

 

“You’re my manager.”

 

“So?”

 

“So do you expect me to work overtime all the time?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then I wouldn’t worry about it.  By the way, I missed Dragon Con this year.  It’s the first time I ever missed it, you know.”

 

“Yeah, that’s why I’m surprised you worked all weekend.”

 

“Well, I can honestly say that my work was a lot more interesting than Dragon Con.”

 

It was my turn to look surprised.  “Honestly, Hugh, I don’t see how setting up PCs and networking equipment for the Qwerty-Queue guys could compete with all the stuff you’ve shown me in pictures from Dragon Con.”

 

“Oh yeah…well…never mind.”  Hugh stroked his beard.  “I’ve got to retest those server scripts.  I’ll be sure to send you an update about my progress by close of business.”

 

“Thanks, Hugh.”  He turned and walked away.  I looked at my watch and I realized I was running late.  I ran back to my office, grabbed my laptop and caught up with Constance heading to the Discovery conference room.

 

8

 

“Bruce.”

 

“Yes,” I whispered, catching my breath.

 

“My, my.  Aren’t you in a hurry?  It’s just the L3 meeting, you know.”

 

I could tell Constance was getting short-timer’s disease.  “If you say so.”

 

We sat at the conference table.  Constance grabbed the Polycom SoundStation speakerphone and dialed the conference call number.  After she keyed in her passcode, she waited for the automated voice to ask for her name.

 

“Constance O’Connell…”

 

“…and Bruce Colline,” I blurted before she hit the pound key.

 

“Hello,” several voices said on the speakerphone.

 

“Hello, everybody.  I have Bruce Colline here with me today.  Since I am moving to Sunrise to take on an engineering project management position, Bruce has ‘volunteered’ to take on the L3 coordinator role.”

 

“Like she said, ‘volunteered,’” I added.

 

Several folks laughed, knowing all about corporate volunteerism.

 

“Anyway, we have a long list of L3 items to cover today.  Let’s start with case number 113.”

 

I tried to stay focused on the L3 call, knowing that in a couple of weeks, people would expect me to know as much about the L3 calls as Constance did.  In my short time at the company, I had heard about the good reputation Constance earned as an organized person, a person whose memory seemed infallible.  I tended to mentally doze off during uninteresting conference calls, even ones that I hosted, and doubted I would be able to keep up with the dozens of L3 issues open at any one time.

 

L3 issues.  When I worked as a technical support analyst in a previous lifetime, I learned there are generally three levels that a customer issue can achieve.  The first level, or L1 for short, was a customer issue that could be addressed during the customer’s first contact about the issue.  Sometimes a customer would send a description of the issue via email or by using a company’s Web-based customer problem report.  More often, a customer would call the company to register a complaint about the product he or she was using.  Most problems could be addressed and resolved by a person trained to know the operational details of the company’s products, the technical support analyst (or call center specialist, or highly-trained technician).  The second level, L2, meant the customer’s problem required a bit of research to better understand the customer’s problem, including how the customer was using the product and any special setup the customer had used that was not specifically called out in the owner’s manual.  Resolving an L2 issue could take a few days.  The third level, L3, was an issue that involved a failure of the product to meet design specifications.  In most cases, an L3 issue had to be reviewed by the company’s marketing department to make sure the failure truly exceeded or failed to meet design specifications and if so, then the engineering department had to fix the problem.

 

Cumulo-Seven used these same three levels, adding some subcategories to show whether a customer issue was actively being worked on or on hold.  In addition, Cumulo-Seven used software by FITZ to track customer issues via a CRM database, replacing the old Lotus Notes based customer issue database.

 

“Well, that just about covers it.  Bruce, do you have any questions?”

 

I looked from the phone to Constance.  “Yeah, are you sure you want to give this up?  You’re pretty good at it.”

 

“Thanks, Bruce, but I’m sure you’ll do fine.  Anybody else have any questions?”

 

“Bruce, Hugh Strong here.  I’m the Redmond test lab manager.  We met when you first started.”

 

“Yeah, I remember.  What’s up?”

 

“Well, have you completed your lab yet?”

 

“No.   There’s a problem with the flooring.”

 

“What about cooling?”

 

“What about it?”

 

“I hate to waste everyone’s time here but anyway do you think your cooling unit is sufficient for the size of your lab?”

 

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

 

“Is it located in the lab?”

 

“No, it’s up in the ceiling above the lab.  Why?”

 

“Well, the lab in Sunrise installed some sort of special air cooling unit that they had to put on the lab floor.  The sound it makes is like an airplane taking off.  I just wanted to be sure if you were putting the same unit in, you might consider putting it in a separate room or something.”

 

“Hugh, this is Woody Feathers, the Sunrise test lab manager.  Let’s take this conversation offline.”

 

“Oh hey, Woody.  I didn’t know you were there.  No problem.  I’ll give you a call.”

 

“Thanks, Hugh.  I’d appreciate it.”

 

Constance looked at me.  Although her skin was walnut brown, she had freckles.  She wore her hair long, which with her streaks of white hair, gave her the appearance of an Indian chief’s wife.  She smiled.  I smiled back.  “Okay, folks, thanks for calling in.  Remember that Bruce will be taking this over in a few weeks so get used to calling him instead of me.”  Constance laughed as she hung up the call.

 

I gave her a fake smile.  “Thanks for the reminder.  So when’s your last day?”

 

“Oh, soon.  It depends on how quickly I can get my projects wrapped up.  Why?  Are you ready to get rid of me?”

 

“Not at all.  Just friendly conversation.  I’m not ready to lose you yet – there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t know about L3.”

 

“Phh.  Nothing to worry about.  It’s all organized now.  You just have to make sure the ship doesn’t tip over and sink.  I’ve already done all the patching, all the dirty work.  You just make sure it can ride out the storms when you get hit with a burst of L3 calls.  Well, back to it.  See you in a couple of days.”  Like a good soldier, Constance got up and marched down the hall, leaving me sitting alone in the 25-person conference room.

 

 

While I was sitting there, I decided to call Hugh Strong to make sure the air conditioning capacity I had chosen was correct.

 

The phone rang three times before he picked up.  “Hello.”

 

“Hugh, it’s Bruce.”

 

“Oh, Bruce.  Glad you called.  I’ve got Woody Feathers on the other line.  Let me see if I can conference you in.”  The phone clicked, went dead, and then clicked again.

 

“Bruce, you there?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Woody?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Okay, Woody, continue what you were saying.”

 

“Bruce, as I was telling Hugh, there’s something funny going on.  Despite what you may have been hearing, I was specifically told to order the air cooling unit that we have and the only place they’d put it was on the lab floor because we’re located on the bottom floor of the building and the unit would overheat in a closet.”

 

Hugh cleared his throat.  “Uh-huh.  Bruce, have you heard anything about Woody’s setup?”

 

“Well, yeah.  Before I ordered the lab benches, I emailed Trevor Book, Woody’s assistant, for any information about the lab benches they use.  He mentioned the air conditioning unit and suggested I get headphones as if I was going to order the same unit.  That’s all I know.”

 

“And that’s it?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Okay, so Woody, why do you think they forced you to order that unit?”

 

“I wouldn’t want to wager a guess, Hugh.  There are a lot of things that go on around here that don’t make sense.  No different than any other place I’ve worked, including Eadienne.”

 

“You worked at Eadienne?”

 

“That’s correct.”

 

“Funny, isn’t it?”

 

“How’s that, Hugh?”

 

“Well, it seems that half the people here in Redmond have worked at Microsoft at some point in their career.  Many of the folks I’ve met from Sunrise have either worked for Eadienne or Holywells.”

 

“I suppose it does look funny but they are two of the biggest employers around here, or were.”

 

I jumped in.  “Well, Holywells folks are all over the Huntsville engineering department, too.  By the way, do any of you know anything about a person or program named ‘Mortie’?”

 

The phone was silent for several seconds.  “Hello?”

 

“Oh, sorry, Bruce, I got distracted.  Anyway, thanks for joining the call.  I’ve gotta go.”

 

“Me, too,” Woody curtly added and hung up.

 

I hung up the phone and walked out of the conference room.  Seemed like everywhere I went in this company, people were in a hurry.  Well, except for Bud Jones, he was never in a hurry.

 

 

9

 

A couple of weeks later, I got a paycheck deposit slip that showed the correct amount being deposited in my account.  However, the paycheck stub showed I was getting no vacation pay.  I stopped by Joyce’s office in HR.  Joyce had the look of a librarian to me – petite, past middle-age, single, and thick glasses.  The only way to get through to her was through logic and order.  I showed her the zero vacation pay and told her I hadn’t taken any vacation.

 

Joyce jumped right into the payroll database.  She looked over my electronic timecards to verify I had not submitted any vacation hours.  She struggled to work through the database after that, explaining that the software design was not laid out with the end user in mind.  Finally, she found an entry screen for my personal data.  Apparently, when she corrected the payroll system database to show I had zero dependents, she also zeroed out both the section in the database where my vacation pay was totaled and the field in the database where my vacation pay was calculated.  As our only HR payroll administrator, Joyce was overworked so I didn’t say anything.  I saw no reason to raise my voice or complain in any way that would upset her.  My nonresponse must have triggered something in her because she apologized and promised to get the database programming consultant to fix the error so the vacation pay calculation field could never be zeroed out.  However, she went on, the consultant only worked two days a week because she had an elderly parent named Mortie to take care of.  [That name again…]  Sometimes the consultant didn’t even show up at all and wouldn’t tell HR – it just showed up as a zero on her timesheet.  I told Joyce I sympathized with her problems with the consultants who were hired to work on the database but could she see that I was more concerned about getting the right vacation pay for me.  She promised to look into it.

 

 

Over the next couple of weeks, employee authorizations (EAs) were approved, meaning I could officially start hiring folks with approval from my management, so I quickly ran through job interviews, knowing one or two people I would probably hire and one or two gems I hoped to dig out of the pile of resumes given to me by J.B. Sudermann, HR recruiting manager, as he pulled likely candidates from the postings on the Spotless job recruitment management software.

 

Some of the interviewees were interesting.  One fellow – I’ll call him Otto to protect his name – anyway, Otto had an engineering degree that he had earned about 20 years ago; right after graduating, he got a job and worked for about six months but then his mother got sick so he quit his job to take care of her.  He didn’t return to the workforce until a couple of years ago and was disappointed that no one would hire him as an engineer just because he hadn’t worked in over 15 years.  Our shop floor manager hired Otto as a repair technician, figuring that although his engineering skills may be rusty, he’d still be able to troubleshoot and fix any customer-returned equipment.  Of course, as soon as any engineering position opened on the internal job posting site, Otto would post his resume.  Unfortunately, Otto was like the folks in the insane asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  He had been chewed up by the combine and spit out like chaff.

 

Another fellow, Chilton, I found working as a technician at a local electronics manufacturer.  He had an engineering degree but had decided that office jobs were for people who played politics and he wasn’t into those kind of games so he purposely took a technician’s job so he could work like a real man and not like some sort of puppet of the king’s court that had to dance whenever he was told.  He actually had a great understanding of engineering design and I considered hiring him but my boss was understandably put off by Chilton’s paranoia.

 

After running into the interesting personalities of Otto and Chilton while conducting office interviews, I decided that phone interviews might be an easier way to cut out the non-office types from the office workers I needed.  Now keep in mind that I’m conducting these interviews based on the resumes I received from HR.  I couldn’t even imagine the resumes I didn’t see.  The first phone interview took place with a young man out of southern Mississippi, Trent.  Trent had grown up in Huntsville and wanted to get back to northern Alabama but his mother had suddenly passed away, leaving only him to take care of his grandmother, who lived in a tiny hamlet of southern Mississippi where the only job Trent could get was as an LPN taking care of his grandmother.  He wanted my sympathy because he had earned his LPN from an online degree factory using a slow dial-up modem and ancient computer.  Sympathy, sure, but a job?  It was beginning to look like a trend with these guys.  You know, “sorry, I wanted to live in the office-based work world but family takes precedence.”  No problem, but how is someone like me supposed to figure out if you’re office worker material if you’ve been away for a long time?  The next guy actually called me.  Or rather, he called J.B. and J.B. forwarded the call to me.  Taggott was also from Mississippi, living up north near Iuka.  He was willing to drive to Huntsville for an interview.  I looked at his resume and saw that in the midst of his 40 years of experience, he had worked at POY/Holywells so I asked around the office and found out that several folks in Engineering had worked with him and insisted that Taggott ought to be on the top of my list.  However, folks higher up in Cumulo-Seven had already handed me some resumes for special consideration.  Weighing the skill set of the folks on the special resumes versus ones like Taggott made my job easier.

 

I ended up hiring a former coworker, Gerald Griffith, as a senior software test technician and a Cumulo-Seven employee, Brendan Best, as a software test technician.  That way, I had a small hierarchy to work with – Hugh at the top as the test engineer, Gerald underneath as Hugh’s go-to guy and test setup designer, and Brendan working with Gerald as the one who could build the test setups and run tests as needed.

 

I had just gotten my next set of EAs approved when Kevin came storming into my office.

 

“Bruce!”

 

I swiveled around to see a sweating Kevin leaning on the doorway of my office.

 

I gave him my usual buddy greeting, “Dude, wassup?”

 

“Hey, I don’t have much time.  Have you talked with Patrick about what I asked you about the other day?”

 

“No, Kevin, I haven’t.  Quite frankly, I’ve been too busy going through interviews.  I know, I know, it’s not ‘real’ work but it’s something that has to be…”

 

“In that case, is Hugh around?”

 

“Umm…” I looked at my watch.  “I believe he’s out to lunch.”

 

“Shit.  Well, I’ve got to see him and I can’t go back to my office or leave the building.”

 

I glared at Kevin.

 

“Sorry, I know it sounds dramatic but seriously, can you get in touch with him?”  Kevin dropped into one of my guest chairs.  The chair made a sharp cracking sound.  Kevin didn’t budge or show a sign of worry even though he probably had broken a strut or foot of the chair.

 

“I could call his personal cell number.”

 

“Would you?”

 

“Sure.”  I looked through my personal emails to find Hugh’s cell phone number and dialed it.  I pressed the speakerphone button.

 

A garbled voice came over the speaker.  “Hello?”

 

“Hugh, is that you?”

 

“Hey, Bruce, I’m out to lunch.  Can I call you back?”

 

“Hugh!  This is Kevin.  How soon do you think you’ll be back from lunch?”

 

“Oh hey, Kevin.  I got the bad news.”

 

Kevin locked his eyes on mine.  Sensing he was searching for some sign on my face, I just smiled and nodded for him to continue talking.

 

“Thanks, Hugh.  Look, Bruce doesn’t know about…I mean, those Qwerty-Queue test scripts we showed you.  I really need to go over them with you before I go.  Can you come back to the office?”

 

We heard Hugh speaking to someone and then return to talking with us.  “No problem.  I’ll be there in about five minutes.”

 

“Great!  Bye, Hugh.  I owe you.”

 

I hung up the call and looked at Kevin.  “So, bad news, eh?”

 

“Yeah.  I guess you’ve been holed up in here and missed all the excitement.”

 

I glanced at my email to see if any important news had popped up.  Nothing on the email radar screen so whatever Kevin was talking about wasn’t on the official public company communication channel yet.

 

“Looks like I’ve been canned.”

 

“What?!”

 

“Yeah, it’s a real bummer.  They’ve closed the whole Qwerty-Queue lab.”

 

“So you and Bud…”

 

“Yeah.  Wally and Simon, too.”

 

“Wow.  Sorry to hear it.”

 

“I heard a rumor that others are involved but I don’t dare walk the halls to find out.”

 

I shook my head and started to speak as the phone rang.  I picked it up and looked at Kevin grabbing the arms of the chair as if he was going to get up and run.

 

“This is Bruce.”

 

“Bruce, this is Patrick.  I’ve got to call a quick meeting of the engineering managers in my office.  You think you could stop by in say, five minutes?”

 

“Sure, no problem.  Anything I need to bring?”

 

“No.  I don’t think you’ll need to take any of your extensive notes in this meeting.”

 

“Okay, see you there.”

 

Kevin stood up and leaned over my desk, trying to read the caller ID as I hung up.  “Who was that?”

 

“Patrick Keating.”

 

“Damn.  Was he looking for me?”

 

I decided not to alarm Kevin.  “No.  It’s nothing.  So you wanna wait in Hugh’s office until he gets back?  You can keep the door closed until he arrives.”

 

“Great idea.”  Kevin turned toward the door.

 

“Hey, Kevin,” I called as I stepped around my desk.  I extended my hand.  “Whatever happens, I’ve enjoyed working with you.”

 

Kevin slumped his shoulders and sighed.  He turned back to face me.  “Thanks, Bruce,” he exhaled in a deep voice, “I’m thinking I’m the lucky one.”

 

I gave him a confused look.

 

“Oop…well, what I mean is that I’m the one who gets to enjoy life and not worry about deadlines.”

 

I nodded.  “I know what you mean.  Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.  I can provide a reference if you need it.”

 

“Thanks.  And one last thing.  If you ever get the chance, see the movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension.  It’ll explain a lot.”

 

“A lot about what?”

 

Kevin winked at me.  “I don’t know.  Maybe you’ll find out.  Just don’t ask for MORTIE.”

 

10

 

Patrick closed the door and stood next to his desk.  I looked at my fellow managers, Alan McClelland, hardware design manager, and Mark Crowe, software manager.  They both had a calm but alert look even though we were missing Ray Nielsson, firmware and patent portfolio manager.  Alan was wearing his daily uniform, short-sleeved plaid shirt (varying day-to-day from red to blue to brown) and khaki pants.  Mark tended to wear polo shirts although that day he was wearing a short-sleeved blue dress shirt and blue jeans.

 

“Thanks for coming on such short notice.  I know this is not part of our normal weekly engineering meeting so you must know that something important is up.  First of all, you see that Ray is not here.  Ray is working with HR on a personnel issue that I’ll get to in a minute.”  In his habit of showing his nervousness, Patrick cleared his throat and coughed slightly.  “As you know, we have not been meeting our numbers lately.  As head of global engineering, William Spock promised our CEO that engineering costs would not exceed 10% of our budget.  Right now, because of our low sales, it looks like we’ll hit 12.5% and are aiming for almost 14% next quarter already.  William has asked each of the regional engineering managers to make the tough decisions to cut back.  I have spoken to each of you…”  Sitting behind Alan and Mark, I raised my hand interrupting Patrick briefly.  “…each of you that I thought might have personnel not assigned to any current projects.  Yes, Bruce, I know I didn’t talk with you but my job was easy for your group.  You had three open EAs so I’ve eliminated two of them, meaning that I didn’t have to lay off any current employees but able to reduce the headcount by two.  Sorry.”

 

I shrugged my shoulders, knowing that’s how corporations worked.

 

“Anyway, I believe you know I was going to start inviting Andrew Hale and Paul O’Reilly to the engineering staff meetings but on a biweekly basis.  I have put that off to next week.”

 

Alan sat up from his usually crouched position in conference chairs.  “So, Patrick, do I understand that Ray is the only one who actually had to let someone go?”

 

“Good question.  William asked me to find up to 10 heads to cut out of the budget.  With Bruce’s two and one from Mark’s group, I was left with seven.  I have asked Ray Nielsson to combine his group with Mark’s so that the two of them can share resources.  I know that Ray’s group was only working on software maintenance tasks so…”

 

Alan leaned forward and tapped on the white board next to him.  “Sorry to interrupt you, Patrick, but I thought that Ray’s group was working on the Carnauba project.  Are you saying that project doesn’t exist anymore?”

 

“Alan, I’ll get to that in a minute.”

 

“Now, wait a minute, Patrick.  This reminds me of the episode on The Andy Griffith Show where a court inspector has a problem with Andy and Barney’s procedural policies.  I thought you were supposed to consult us if one of our projects was killed.  This just doesn’t sound like you’re following procedure to me.”

 

“Alan, you’re right and I apologize, but I promise I’ll get to that in a minute.”

 

I nodded at Patrick to get his attention.  “Bruce, can this wait?”

 

“I just wanted to say that Kevin stopped by my office to say he’d been canned so I’m guessing that more than one engineering group in Huntsville has been affected by the layoffs.”

 

“Actually, Bruce, that’s what I was about to get to.  As part of the headcount reduction, there has been a complete reorganization.  Qwerty-Queue now falls under my umbrella.  Therefore, Andrew and Paul completely work for me.  Paul had asked Andrew to submit four names for layoff and instead submitted his own and asked that he be the only one let go.  Andrew doesn’t understand that it’s not a matter of…”  Patrick cleared his throat in an attempt to show that stopping in mid-sentence was a dry throat issue and not his needing to stop what he was about to say.  “As I was saying, we needed a total of 10 removed from our payrolls.  I reviewed the Qwerty-Queue list with Paul and have found the four we needed.  As Bruce indicated, Kevin is one of them.”

 

Mark was the youngest member of our team.  He had started working at Cumulo-Seven as a stockboy when he was 15.  He kept working at Cumulo-Seven throughout his college career, for both his bachelor’s and master’s degree.  We often joked that he was Cumulo-Seven’s first successful cloning experiment.  Because of his youth, he tended to accept what management told him and rarely spoke up in anger.  He laughed.  “And I’m glad you told me about cutting out my EA.”

 

“Thanks, Mark.  I knew you’d understand.  Well, I’ve got to meet with William to finalize some issues.  Any questions before I go?”

 

Alan stood up and looked at the white board, mumbling to himself as he moved his finger down the list of projects on the white board.  “So, what other projects are affected by this reorganization and layoff?  I thought I was going to be able to hire two more people and now it looks like we’re going to be even more short-staffed than before.”  Like a little boy who was upset, Alan put his hands by his side and moped.  “I mean, who exactly did you lay off?”

 

Patrick stood next to Alan.  “Don’t worry about the projects.  We’ve been given a couple of days to reprioritize all work assignments.  With this extra time, I have asked the marketing department to tell us which projects are most important to them.”

 

“But who…”

 

“Okay, okay.  All of Ray Nielsson’s people are gone.  That means that Thomas Praeger, Gene Modell and Anthony Claiburn.”

 

“Gene?  But he was working on the new firmware for me.”

 

“Sorry, Alan, but as you said, the project’s dead.  I’ve got to go.  If you have any questions, stop by my office and I’ll try to address them.”  Patrick opened the door and walked out.

 

Alan looked at me.  “Bruce, I guess you’re lucky.  At least you didn’t have to let any of your new employees go.”

 

“But I don’t get to hire more than one, either.  You weren’t affected at all so I don’t know what you’re upset about.”

 

“Bruce, I’ve been here over 10 years.  In 10 years, we haven’t laid off one engineering employee.  Sure, we’ve fired a few but as far as I know, they had it coming, or should have known it was coming.  Here it’s our first engineering layoff and Patrick’s acting like it’s status quo.  It’s not right.”

 

Mark stood up.  “I agree with Alan.  This sets a precedent that won’t go over well with the rest of the engineering group.”

 

I smiled.  “I guess you guys aren’t used to the environments where Patrick and I came from.  Both Patrick and I were part of engineering design centers that were shut down.  Layoffs are just part of modern engineering teams.”

 

Alan shook his head and walked out.  Mark stared at me, his face blank.  “Okay, I see what you mean.  But if that’s the way things are around here, we’re going to see a completely different ‘team’ attitude.  I hope Patrick knows what he’s doing.”  Like a zombie, Mark turned and slowly walked out.

 

My cell phone had buzzed several times during the meeting.  I unlocked it and saw that Hugh had left me a couple of voice messages and one email.

 

I walked down the hall to Hugh’s office.

 

11

 

I knocked on Hugh’s door.

 

“Come in.”

 

Hugh was sitting at his desk, with the usual guilty look on his face.  I had probably caught him looking at another eBay auction for Star Wars costumes.

 

“Hey, Hugh.  You rang?”

 

“Yeah.  Kevin told me what happened and that you got a call from Patrick.  Is there anything I’m supposed to know?”

 

“Not sure yet.  As they say, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny’ that what you heard is fact.”

 

“Okay, can you tell me if I’ve still got a job?”  Since Hugh and I were less than a year away from a layoff from our last jobs, Hugh was still sensitive about job security.

 

“Yes, I can.  You still have a job.”

 

Hugh smiled over a few loud breaths.  “Well, that’s good.  Assuming that Kevin’s gone…” Hugh held up his hand as I started to speak.  “I know you can’t say anything but I’ve got to figure out what to do with the Qwerty-Queue stuff.  There’s a lot of things about their setup that’s not catalogued.  Do you think they’ll make Kevin leave today?”

 

I shook my head and raised my eyebrows, indicating I wasn’t saying one way or the other.

 

“Okay, do you think you could talk with Patrick and find out?”

 

“That much I can do.  I’ll talk with him later today and find out.”

 

Hugh pushed himself up out of the ‘big man’ office chair.   I had bought him the ‘big man’ office chair so that he didn’t have to try to squeeze his body into a regular office chair.  “Well, I’ve got Kevin in the lab trying to organize his stuff right now.  If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the rest of the day to go over the equipment with him so I know how it all works.”

 

“No problem.”  I stepped out of Hugh’s office and wandered into the lab.  I could hear Hugh shuffling into the lab behind me.

 

I walked over to Gerald’s cubicle and knocked on his cubicle wall, breaking his concentration.

 

Gerald blinked and turned to look up at me.  Gerald was 55 years old and going bald.  He was one of those guys who parted his hair on the side, despite the fact there wasn’t much hair to part.  From a distance, his white hair and white scalp made him look completely bald.  He was fortunate that the shape of his head was symmetrical and not unsightly.  I noticed the top of his head was covered with a lot of freckles.  He must have been hanging out in the sun lately.

 

“Oh hey, Bruce.  What can I do for you?  Do you need a progress update?  I was just wrapping up this first test plan but am stuck on the network diagram.  There seems to be a callout for equipment connections to a room we don’t have.”

 

“Dunno.  Maybe Hugh can help you.  He was talking to the guys in the design lab next door.  Could be the connections are over there.”

 

“Okay.  Is there anything else you need?”

 

I felt like telling Gerald about the layoffs, knowing that as a former manager himself, he’d sympathize with the tough decisions I almost had to make.  I knew that Gerald’s youngest daughter was in college and about to get married so Gerald was facing a large expenditure that I wasn’t sure he could afford.  After all, he was laid off longer than Hugh and me.  In fact, Hugh and I had only one week between our old jobs at Elextronzia and our new ones at Cumulo-Seven.  Gerald was out of work for a month or two, eating into his savings, I’m sure.

 

“Not really.  Just thought I’d stop by and say hello, do the ‘management by walking around’ routine.”

 

“Sure, Bruce.  Well, if you’ll let me get back to work, I might be able to finish this up by my deadline this afternoon.”

 

“No rush,” I mumbled.

 

“What?”

 

“I mean, I won’t be able to review the test plan for a couple of days.  I’m a little behind in my work so if you need tomorrow, don’t try to rush your work today.”

 

“I’ll do what I must.”

 

I nodded at Gerald and let him get back to work.  I was feeling a headache coming on and walked back to my office.

 

I shut the door and leaned my head against the wall.  I thought back to Patrick’s announcement and pictured his white board project list in my head.  Alan had mentioned a “Carnauba” project but there was no project with that name on the board.  I knew that Patrick liked to give us all at least one special project to work on but he tracked all projects on his board, marking the special ones with our names besides the ones assigned to us.  I could feel my blood pressure rising because of my trying to think clearly through the fog of my headache.  I pushed myself away from the wall and stumbled over to my chair, tripping into a sideways sitting position.  After a few minutes, I fell into a meditative trance, hearing the sounds out in the hallway meld with my breathing and heartbeat.  As I slipped into a dream world, I was trying to sort out the reorganization in my head.  Ray no longer worked as a functional manager, Paul was now reporting to Patrick and not directly to William, and Mark was…

 

An hour later, I woke up with a throbbing pain from the crick in my neck.  At least my headache was gone.

 

The phone rang.  It was Joyce.  She told me to look at my next paycheck to make sure the vacation hours were right.  She also asked me to check my 401(k) deduction.  It looked to her like the deduction didn’t line up with what the database said I’d originally requested but Joyce couldn’t be sure.  The paperwork I’d submitted when I first got hired was supposed to be scanned and stored along with my online personnel profile but it was missing, which meant that my W2 withholding document, my 401(k) deduction document and my NDA with Cumulo-Seven would have to be filled out again and resubmitted.  Therefore, Joyce had to rely on the information in my personnel profile as the correct data.  She said it was odd that someone in my position would only be taking out 1% of my pretax pay for 401(k).  I agreed, thinking it was more like 15% and would get that documentation to her as soon as I had time.  I could hear Joyce sigh as she hung up the phone.  I bet that time was something she wished she had, too.

 

12

 

I called Patrick’s office and got no answer.  Since William worked just around the corner, I decided to stop by William’s office and see if Patrick was still there.

 

William’s door was slightly cracked open.  I started to knock but decided to eavesdrop for a few seconds.  I could hear Patrick talking.

 

“…and it all appears to have gone smoothly.”

 

“Patrick, I think you did a fine job.  Just keep in mind that I never had to lay anyone off when I was in charge of the Huntsville engineers.  Therefore, I’m guessing you’re going to get some passive resistance if you try to push things in the next few weeks.  That’s why you’ve got a few days to sort things out.  Even if Marketing says that some tiny project is high priority, I’d take it off the list.  With this reorganization, we’ve probably only got two or three major projects we can handle right now.”

 

“What about…”

 

“What about what?”

 

“Well, I had hoped to complete the data dump from the Qwerty-Queue team.  A key component of their work has to be verified AND validated, if we’re to avoid any wrath from MORTIE.  I need Bruce’s team to be completely up-to-speed on what the Qwerty-Queue team is doing.”

 

“So Bruce’s team is not up-to-speed.  I thought you said…”

 

“No, I’ve…well, in fact, you’re the one who’s been taking so long to approve the EAs.  If we’d…well, it doesn’t matter.  I chose to eliminate the EAs myself.  I can’t afford to lose any more design engineers.”

 

“Patrick, it was the CEO, Robert Kerns himself, who fully approved the Huntsville test lab.  Are you saying that you eliminated some of the positions that Robert approved?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“In that case, I can’t help you.  If Robert asks, I’ll have to tell him that you didn’t consult with me before you short-changed his pet project.”

 

It was odd but I detected a smile in William’s voice, as if he wasn’t being serious with Patrick but Patrick’s response was less jovial.

 

“If you want to be that way, that’s fine with me.  Unless we get Bruce’s current team on board, I won’t promise Robert that we’ll complete his project.”

 

William laughed.  “Patrick, it’s your call.  I’m going to step back on this on and tell Robert you’re in charge of his project now.  I’ve got enough on my plate that it won’t matter anyway.”

 

I stuck my head in the crack and caught William’s attention.  “Oh hey, Bruce!  Come on in.”  I pushed the door open and stepped in.  “Patrick and I were just discussing how well you handled losing some job positions.  While you’re here, I wanted to congratulate you.  Our president, Cyrill Carr, looked at your lab the other day and was quite impressed.  He couldn’t believe that you set the whole thing up yourself.”

 

I blushed, softened up by William’s obvious attempt to snowball me with compliments.  “Well, I…”

 

“No need to say anything else.  Anyway, I hope that you and Patrick will be able to sort out the change in testing priorities.”  William stood up.  “And as always, my door is open.  If there’s ever anything you have to say or need, just stop by.”

 

Patrick stood up and turned toward the door.

 

I stepped toward him.  “Patrick, before you go.  I have a question from one of my employees.”

 

Patrick looked at William and then at me.  “Have you already mentioned the layoff?”

 

“Not officially.  But as I said, Kevin had mentioned to me that he was being laid off.  He also told Hugh.”

 

“Hmm…sounds like Kevin could be a problem.  You think we should escort him out now?”

 

“Well, that’s why I’m here.  Hugh needs Kevin to stay at least through today so he can get Kevin to write down instructions for how everything works.”

 

“Oh, really?  Well, that sounds reasonable.  William, you think it’s all right for Kevin to stick around through the end of the day?”

 

William walked up beside me.  “Bruce, do you think Kevin will be a problem?”

 

“No.”

 

“Okay, Patrick, let’s just play this by ear.  Make sure the guards are available in the morning.  We’ll let Kevin come back tomorrow to help Bruce’s team.  If there’s any sign of trouble, we can act quickly.  Bruce, that means you’ll need to stay around the lab tomorrow.  Is that okay with you?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“And Patrick, that means you’ll need to get all of Bruce’s team on board with this.”

 

Patrick nodded heavily.  “Absolutely.  Bruce, why don’t you have your team meet me in the morning, say at 8:15?”

 

“Will do.”

 

William motioned us toward the door.  “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got an important phone call coming up.  Let me know if you need any assistance tomorrow.  Otherwise, I’ll assume everything is under control.”

 

13

 

That evening, I stood on the front deck, ten feet above the weedy, overgrown lawn, rocking a bottle of beer on the railing.  The air was toasty – the temperature had reached 101 deg F and had only dropped to 90 deg F by 7 p.m.  The older neighbors drove by in their SUVs and large trucks.  The midlife-crisis ones stood out like a pair of silicone breasts at a nudist colony, driving Harley Davidson motorcycles or expensive convertibles.  Young kids announced their impending presence a quarter mile away, rattling windows and pounding the air with their 3000-pound boomboxes.

 

I watched the evening sky perform the daily rainbow light show, fading from blue and yellow…have you ever noticed the green shadows in the late afternoon?  Grab a white shirt and stand in the shade.  Hold the shirt up to a group of trees and the shirt will look green.  I sipped the beer and looked up at the sky.  The golden haze washed over me like a 200-dollar body rub.  I closed my eyes and smiled, the tension dripping off my body with my sweat and staining the old pine slats of the deck.  I opened my eyes and the sky was rusting, or dying like an old piece of meat on a cutting board in the kitchen, withering from pink to rust to dark gray.  The crickets and cicadas called the evening to order.  No tree frog croaking that night – just too hot and dry for mating.

 

Absent-mindedly I swatted mosquitoes away and kicked the carpenter ants from my shoes.  I concentrated on nothing in particular, meditating in my suburban Garden of Eden, with only tiny clouds of worry creeping into my consciousness, little voices asking questions, “Carpenter ants?  Doesn’t that mean you should spray insecticide or something?”, “Is West Nile virus prevalent in northern Alabama this year?”, “What brand of cigarette butts are most often slung into the ditch in my front yard?”  I knew how to keep my mind off work.  Oh, I could grab my Treo and skim emails on the deck if I wanted.

 

I felt like I was caught in a bad detective movie or TV show, an episode of CSI: Suburban Victims Unit.

 

“So, officer, give me a rundown of the situation.”

 

“Detective Bensen, we found him like this, frozen in that very position.  It’s unusual so we called you.”

 

“You were right to contact us.  We have exclusive TV rights to all irregular deaths in this area.  If you could stand to one side, officer, it will allow the TV crew to get a good closeup of my partner and me staring at the victim.”

 

“Oh, sorry.”

 

“No problem.  And if you could sign a waiver form for us to be able to use your real name, we’d appreciate it.  It saves us from having to spend extra time in the editing room clipping your on-screen shots to hide your ID tag.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“Thank you.  What do you think, Detective Stabler?”

 

“Well, look at this mark on his leg. Apparently, from the quick onset of rigor mortis and the particular way the flesh has swelled up around the wound on his leg, I’d say this man was bitten by the Alabama variant of the African tsetse fly.  He probably never knew what bit him.  One moment, he was standing here enjoying the view of the…well, I can’t quite see what he was seeing except a lot of trees and vine…but anyway, a moment later his mind was shutting down and he was in a coma state within two minutes.  With no one to see his condition and administer the antidote, he was a goner in say…oh, I don’t know…probably 10 minutes, tops.  Based on the temperature of the beer in his hand, I’d say he’s been dead at least two hours.”

 

“You’re right.  Officer, you can bag him.  There’s no crime here.  We’ll not be able to use this on our highly popular Special Victims Unit show on NBC but regulate all of tonight’s footage to our lower-rated Suburban Victims Unit show on Discovery Channel.  Stabler, can you take the body to the lab and grab some shots of his blood?”

 

“Sure thing, Bensen.”

 

 

I stepped back into the house, pushing hard on the front door.  The house swelled up in the summer so all the doors had to shoved hard to close and be latched.

 

I winked at my wife.

 

She smiled.  “Honey, while you were outside, you got a call from Hugh.  I figured you didn’t want to be disturbed so I told him to talk with you tomorrow.”

 

“Thanks.”  I wondered why he called.  Hugh had never called our house before.  I checked the Treo but there was no email from Hugh, only emails from Henry Sun, a sales engineer in Singapore who treated every customer issue as if his life depended on it.  I had quickly learned that his crisis mode of operation was typical of Eastern technical troubleshooting – although customers did not expect a problem to be solved right away, they wanted an immediate response.  I emailed Henry telling him that his customer problems were of utmost importance to me and I would get an engineer or technician to look at it first thing in the morning.  Henry emailed me a “thank you” as I shut down the Treo.  No more emails for me that night.  I needed to spend time with family.

 

I called my parents.  “Hey, Mom.  Is Dad around?”

 

“Sure, dear.  He’s playing solitaire on the computer.  Let me get him for you.”

 

While I waited for my father to come to the phone, I noted my wife was watching one of her favorite home and garden porn shows.  You know, where decorators have an unlimited budget and two days to change a couple’s house from “ordinary to extraordinary!”

 

“Yes, son.”

 

“Oh, hey, Dad.  Sorry to bother you.”

 

“No problem.  I had just finished painting a balsa wood model of the F6F Hellcat.  Do you remember the Hellcat you and I built when you were a kid?  Well, I think I’ve recreated it down to the last stroke of paint.”

 

“That’s great.  Guess you won’t be winding up the rubber band on that one and letting it rip, eh?”

 

“No, I guess not.”

 

“I still have the scraps of the old one in a box in the study.  I’ve thought about rebuilding it.”

 

My father laughed.  “And I thought your grandmother was a pack rat!”

 

“Yes, well, anyway…Dad, I need your advice on something.”

 

“Is it work-related?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I’ll do what I can.  You know it’s been years since I was wrapped up in office politics.  I really prefer this university teaching job I have.  Have you thought about teaching?”

 

“Not really.”

 

“You’ve always enjoyed watching your employees grow.  Watching college students become adults is even more rewarding.  Why, just last night, I was…”

 

“Dad.”

 

My father cleared his throat, irritated that I was interrupting him. “Yes, son.”

 

“I have an early morning meeting tomorrow and wondered if you had any thoughts on the matter.”

 

“Early morning meetings?  Gosh, son, when I was working at Sperry…”

 

“You mean, on the Redstone rocket?”

 

“…we had to be in the office at 6:30 a.m. six days a week for our daily briefings.  There was no wandering in at 8 or 9 o’clock like you kids do today.”

 

“Yes, well, times have changed.  Anyway, I get the feeling something’s going on that I don’t know about.  Do you think I should ask my boss what’s going on?”

 

“Son, in my day, we didn’t ask the boss anything.  He gave orders and we followed them.  That was that.  Oh sure, some guys would talk big at the water fountain but we knew we’d never talk back to the boss.  But there was always that one guy someone had known or had heard about who had stood up to the boss.  Funny, I never actually met that guy.  Of course, the way you guys dress these days, wearing casual shirts all the time, I’m sure you talk back to your boss all the time.”

 

“Not really.”

 

“Do you even have respect for the officers of the company anymore?  Why, I remember we’d walk in the front door and there would be the pictures of all the executives, past and present, right next to the bowling champion trophy case.  We all dreamed of having our pictures on the wall.  That was so long ago.  Some of us did get our names engraved on the bowling trophies, though...”

 

“I didn’t know you bowled.”

 

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, son, things that you may never know and some things I’ll carry to my grave.  ‘Loose lips sink ships.’”

 

“Sure, Dad.  Just like all the stuff you did in the Army you can’t talk about.  I know.  Anyway, thanks for the advice.”

 

“You’re welcome.  Let me know how the meeting goes tomorrow.”

 

“Will do.”

 

“You wanna talk with your mother?”

 

“That’s all right.  I’ve got to get to bed early.”

 

“You know, when I was your age, I was sharing the house duties with your mother, staying up late with you kids when you got sick.  And I still had to be at work at 6:30!  You’ve got it lucky, son, you know that?”

 

“Thanks, Dad.  Yes, I do.  I’ll talk with you soon.”

 

“Love you, son.  Good night.”

 

“Love you, too.”

 

14

 

On my way to work the next morning, I read an email sent by Patrick at 6 a.m.  “Plans have changed.  Cancel my meeting with your team and send my apologies.  I’ll be traveling the rest of the week.  We can catch up first thing Monday.”

 

I clipped the Treo back on my belt and drove through the light 6:15 a.m. traffic to work.  The majority of the commuters looked like factory line workers, their faces hardened by years of cigarette smoking as well as the suntans they enjoyed on their early afternoon exits from work.  The other commuters appeared to be doctors pulling off into the medical district in downtown Huntsville or high-level, highly-caffeinated executives driving their Jaguars and Porsches to work.

 

At the office parking lot, I ran into Brendan.  We walked toward the office building while we talked.

 

“Bruce, what’s this meeting all about?”

 

“Looks like it’s been cancelled.  Patrick’s been called out-of-town on another task.”

 

“That figures.  He always jetsetting to some part of the globe or other.  You know what that meeting was going to be about, anyway?”

 

“No.  I can only guess that it had something to do with Kevin and his group.”

 

“Yeah, I figured as much.  Anyway, you ready for football season to start?”  I nodded.  “I reckon everybody’s got their sights set on taking down Saban.  If we don’t lose more than three or four games this year, I’ll be happy.  But you know how us Bama fans are – if he don’t win the national championship in the next couple of years, his head will roll like Shula’s.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“You got UT season tickets again this year?”

 

“Oh yeah.  Like always.”

 

“I guess the Bama game will be huge, won’t it?”

 

“I suppose.  I haven’t looked at the schedule yet.”

 

“Third week in October!”

 

“Of course, I know the Bama game.  I just don’t know if our players will have been beaten up by the time we play you guys.  You got any tickets for the game?”

 

“Not yet.  Of course, if you wanna sell yours…”

 

“Maybe…NOT!  Haha!”  We both laughed as we entered the front lobby.  I nodded at the guard seated behind the receptionist desk as I talked to Brendan. “Well, I’ve got to check on a couple of things.  I’ll see you in the lab later today.  By the way, Kevin’s supposed to be around the lab today – I may not be able to help him out so if you could work with Hugh to help Kevin, I’d appreciate it.  And if there’s anything that comes up, feel free to give me a holler on my cell phone.”

 

“Sure thing, boss. ‘I’m just shaking the bushes,’” Brendan exclaimed, making one of his occasional references to his all-time favorite movie, Cool Hand Luke.

 

I walked to the break room and pressed a button to order one of the artificially flavored drinks from the coffee machine.  Although the flavors were interesting, none of them evoked an image of coffee beans maturing on coffee bushes or roasting over an open flame.  I stood and sipped the drink for a minute or two, making sure that Brendan had left the front lobby.  I returned to the lobby and talked to the guard.

 

“Hi there, are you here on special duty today?”

 

“Yes, sir.  What can I do for you?”

 

“Well, I’m Bruce Colline.  I’m in charge of the…”  I stopped talking because the guard stepped away from me to retrieve a piece of paper.

 

“Hmm…Bruce Colline.  Oh yeah, here you are.  Continue.”

 

“I understand you’ll be helping us today.”

 

“Well, sir, we’re kind of hoping we don’t have to help you, if you get my drift.  But we will be here and around the building, if you need our assistance.”

 

“Oh, of course.  Have a good day, then.”  I snapped around and walked to the elevator.

 

“And you, too, sir,” the guard spoke to my back.

 

The phone buzzed while I was in the elevator.  It was Constance calling me from Sunrise.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Bruce, is that you?”

 

“Yes.  Is this Constance?”

 

“Duh.  Of course.  Are you in your office?”

 

“No, I’m on the elevator.”

 

“Okay.  So you can talk, then.  I hear that there’s a big layoff in Huntsville today and it’s going to affect Engineering.”

 

“If that’s what you heard…” I started to say more but the elevator door opened and Cyrill Carr, company president was standing in front of me.  “Hey, Cyrill.”  Cyrill was a couple of inches shorter than me, wore thin, gold-rimmed glasses and walked and talked like a Southern farmer.

 

“Good mornin’, Bruce.  You’re in early this morning.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Are you catching up on a project?”

 

“No, I was supposed to have a meeting with Patrick and my team but Patrick had to cancel.”

 

“Yes, I heard he had to travel on short notice.  You know how our customers are.  So, how are things with your new lab?  Coming along nicely?”

 

Although he didn’t look at all like the character, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance of Cyrill’s tone of voice to the truancy officer from the movie, A Clockwork Orange.  I felt like Cyrill was checking in on me because I had performed an action unbecoming of a company manager.  Was I going to have to go to some sort of version of juvenile delinquency school?

 

“Oh, yes.”

 

“I see.  And do you anticipate any problems today?”

 

“I hope not.”

 

“That’s good to hear.  Well, I can see I’ve stepped into the middle of a phone conversation.  Please apologize to your friend for me.”  Cyrill and I exchanged positions.  We nodded at each other as the elevator door closed.

 

“Bruce, are you there?” a voice crackled on the phone.

 

“Oh, hey Constance, sorry.  That was Cyrill.”

 

“So he’s seen you?  Hmm…”

 

“What?”

 

“Oh, nothing.  Look, a while back, I had planned an L3 conference here in Sunrise for the rest of this week and I’m here with several folks and it looks like we completely forgot to invite you.  Is there any chance you could fly down this afternoon for a meeting tomorrow?”

 

“Uh…”

 

“It’s very important.  I’m sure your guys can handle the lab duties while you’re gone.  I’m sure you’ll have your Treo tethered to you like the rest of us so it’s not like you can’t keep in touch.”

 

I thought about telling Constance what was going on.  Even though I would trust her with my life, I didn’t think I needed to tell her the minor details of my work day, details that seemed very important to me but didn’t directly affect her.

 

“I’ll see what I can do.”

 

“Great!  I’ll tell the team.”

 

“Hold on.  I don’t have permission from Patrick yet.”

 

“Patrick?  Oh, he’s right here.  He’s already given you permission.  He would have called you himself but he’s on a conference call with Ireland this morning.”

 

“In that case, I’ll get the travel agent to get things booked.”

 

Constance gently laughed.  “Bruce, I hate to say it but I’ve already booked your flight and got you a hotel.  You’ll have to get the rental car, though.  You’re at the Hilton.”

 

I snorted.  “Oh, well, thanks for telling me so soon.  What if I had refused to come?”

 

Constance laughed again.  “As if!”

 

15

 

I left a note on Hugh’s door to call me when he got in and walked back out of the office, instructing the guard to coordinate any activities with Hugh.  The guard was satisfied that Hugh’s name was on the approved employee list and agreed to work with Hugh.

 

I rushed home to pack a suitcase.  My wife was not happy but accepted the abrupt change of plans.  It wouldn’t interfere with our upcoming anniversary and college football season hadn’t started so there wasn’t a home game I was going to miss.

 

When I arrived at Ft. Lauderdale Airport, I turned on my Treo and got a larger-than-normal barrage of emails.  About half of the emails were emails from Hugh that he had forwarded from Kevin and Bud describing step-by-step instructions for setting up the Qwerty-Queue test equipment.  I skipped over those and looked for any marked Urgent.  There were two, one from Joyce in HR and one from David Katzenberg.

 

Joyce informed me that she’d gotten my payroll documentation scanned in using the new automated OCR software module that had just been installed.  The module reported that my dental and medical insurance premiums had been miscalculated and I had been underpaying my monthly insurance by $1.00.  Because of this underpayment, my insurance was being cancelled.

 

I quickly called Joyce and asked her about the email.  She didn’t know what I was talking about so I forwarded the email back to her.  Joyce’s normally quiet voice got even quieter when she let me know that the new company-wide FITZ software upgrade had included a new email module that automatically completed internal company processes and generated emails to indicate the end results, thus increasing company efficiency.  Joyce lamented that it soon meant she’d be out of a job.  I reminded her that increased efficiency meant she had time to concentrate on important tasks and not repetitive menial ones.  In this case, her important task was making sure that my insurance shouldn’t be cancelled over a software error.  Joyce agreed and promised to manually fix the error for me.

 

David Katzenberg had asked me to call him as soon as I landed.  I hung up the phone with Joyce and called David.

 

“Hello?”  The crisp, clear South African accent stirred with just a twist of Israel.

 

“David, it’s Bruce Colline.”

 

“Ah, Bruce.  Glad you could come to Florida on such short notice.  We’re having a dinner at Bonefish Grill tonight and would like you to join us.  Where are you?”

 

“We’re still taxiing to the terminal.”

 

“Ah.  Well, do you plan to check in to the hotel?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Very good.  I’ll have someone email you instructions for how to get to the restaurant.  Come as soon as you can.  We’ll be leaving the office in about 30 minutes.  We’ll just sit and have hors d’œuvres and drinks until you come.”

 

“Okay.”

 

As luck would have it, traffic was not heavy so I was able to get from the airport to the hotel in 15 minutes and to the restaurant in another 10 minutes.  I stood outside the restaurant and waited for David, Patrick or Constance to arrive.

 

A few minutes later, I saw Nathaniel O’Sullivan pull up in a Honda CR-V.  Nathaniel was the engineering manager from the Cumulo-Seven office in Shannon, Ireland.  What was he doing here?  He didn’t seem to be part of the L3 process that I knew of.  I waved at Nathaniel.  He looked shocked but got out of the car and walked over to me.

 

“A bit of a surprise to see you here, Bruce.”

 

“Same to you.”

 

“What brings you to the sweltering swamps of southern Florida?”

 

“Well, I was about to ask you the same question.”  I saw that sweat was pouring off Nathaniel’s pale, round face.  Nathaniel had the complexion of what I expected an Irish person to look like, light pink flesh and rosy red cheeks.  His dark-amber bushy eyebrows contrasted with the thinning light-brown hair.  He was wearing a heavy, long-sleeved dress shirt and a T-shirt underneath.  He was obviously not used to the heat.

 

“I suppose we’re both here to discuss the current problems with the L3 process.”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Very good.  Oh look, there’s Greg Walters.”

 

I had not yet met Greg Walters but had heard he was tall.  I turned to see a man about two inches taller than me.  He had a long stride and waved at both of us as he quickly approached.  His long, gray hair was pulled back in place by a large paper clip, barely hiding a bald spot.

 

“Nathaniel!  Long time no see.  Who’s this?”

 

“Hey, Greg.  This is Bruce Colline.”

 

I shook hands with Greg.  “Hi.  I’ve heard a lot about you, Greg.”

 

“And I’m sure some of it is good but don’t believe it.  I hope the bad parts were juicy.  And of course, all of them are true.”  Greg snickered.

 

I nodded.  Over Greg’s shoulder I could see Constance, Patrick and David walking toward us, along with another individual.  His pale complexion and long-sleeved shirt gave me a hint he was from Ireland.

 

David reached me first and patted me on the back.  “Bruce, thanks again for getting here so soon.  Let’s go inside.”

 

 

At the dinner table, David introduced all of us as we received our drinks.  The only person I hadn’t met was the other Irishman, Samuel Purcell.  Samuel seemed shier than the rest of us, looking down when someone spoke his name and not speaking unless spoken to.  However, his responses always sounded wise and well thought out.  I assumed he was a lead engineer or scientist.

 

Nathaniel raised his glass.  “To the L3 process!”

 

“To the L3 process!” everyone responded, raising their glasses and taking a drink.

 

Constance sat across the table from me.  She seemed quieter than normal.  I couldn’t tell if it was because of the combination of Cumulo-Seven employees, the restaurant or just a mood she was in.

 

I raised my glass again.  “To Constance, for creating the L3 process.”

 

Everyone looked at me but didn’t raise a glass.

 

Greg cleared his throat.  “Actually, Bruce, I created the L3 process.  Constance was kind enough to actually take the process and put it into action.”

 

With my glass still help up, I smiled.  “To Greg and Constance, for making our customers happy!”

 

“Cheers.”

 

“Agreed.”

 

“Ditto.”

 

We gulped down our drinks.

 

Patrick stood up.  “I’m sorry to have to do this but I’ve got to go.  Bruce, I’ll see you next week and will catch up on all the good work you’ll all get accomplished over the next couple of days.”

 

Couple of days?  I thought it was only a one-day deal.  “Sure thing.”

 

After Patrick left, I ordered a bottle of wine.  Nathaniel ordered one, too.  Constance asked for a refill of her water.

 

By the time the main course arrived, I was feeling pretty good.  Constance and Samuel were deeply engaged in a conversation I couldn’t hear.  Greg, David and Nathaniel were arguing about the strengths and weaknesses of rugby and American football.  I grabbed a couple of napkins and took notes.  I thought about turning the notes into a short story.  Unfortunately, while eating my fish, I spilled sauce on the napkins and ruined my writing.  After another bottle of wine, I forgot about the napkins and didn’t remember them until the middle of the night at the hotel, when I had to get up to pee and tripped over a piece of bed linen.

 

16

 

The L3 meeting was supposed to start at 8:30 a.m.  Everyone showed up, including Geoffrey McCabe, head of the Shannon office.  Everyone except Constance, that is.  She dragged in at 9 a.m.

 

“Sorry I’m late.”

 

I laughed.  “And you’re the one on Eastern Time.”

 

“Actually, I think I’m early.  I thought the meeting was supposed to start at 8:30 Central Time, so I’ve still got 30 minutes.”

 

“You might want to check your Outlook calendar.”

 

“No, look.”  Constance held her cell phone up for me to see.  “My Treo says it’s supposed to start in 30 minutes.”

 

“And didn’t you know that the IT department sent out a general software update to all handheld devices and in so doing, they screwed up all the calendars?”

 

“No.  When did that email go out?”

 

“About 15 minutes after the updates were made.”

 

“That figures.”

 

David stood up.  “All right.  All right.  We can discuss these issues at our first break.  Since we are already behind, let’s skip introductions and jump right into the agenda.  Constance, Greg, which one of you wants to go over the L3 process?”

 

Constance looked at Greg, who was looking down at his tablet PC.  Greg sipped his coffee and spoke up.  “I’ll go first.  As many of you know, before Cumulo-Seven was formed after the merger of the Windsor and Tudor companies, there was only a handful of people handling customer calls.  We didn’t have very many products so it was relatively easy for our technical support personnel to be familiar with the operation of our products.  Thus, they could answer most of the questions posed to them by customers.  After the merger, the number of products they had to support increased dramatically and with the increase in products came an increase in complexity as interoperability issues came into play.  Customers just assumed because the product had Cumulo-Seven, Windsor or Tudor on the label that it would plug up to another switch with one of those names.  I don’t think we fully comprehended what our customer base would try to do with our products.

 

“Fortunately, at that time, we were in the process of opening an office in Shannon, Ireland.  I discussed the possibility of expanding the Cumulo-Seven technical support department so that we not only had personnel in our three key U.S. locations, Huntsville, Sunrise, and Redmond, but we could support the European customer base with a technical support group in Ireland.

 

“Geoffrey accepted this challenge gladly.  The only concern he had was the lack of working instructions or procedures that he, as head of Quality at the time, could submit for ISO 9000 certification.

 

“I assigned Constance to use the skeletal structure I had created for technical support workflow and modify it to encompass all the technical support groups in the world, including some of the satellite offices in Russia, India and AsiaPac.  David, if you’ll hand me that plug, I’ll hook my tablet to the projector and show you some of the flowcharts I’m talking about.”  Greg took the video cable from David and plugged it into the side of his tablet PC.

 

“As you can see, we currently accept technical support issues from several sources, with telephone support being the one we’re most familiar with.  We also accept emails, Web submittals and field visits.

 

“In the old days of Windsor, we pretty much only had telephone support although emails were catching on in popularity.

 

“In any case, Constance and I worked closely with Geoffrey’s group to make sure everything was fully documented.  Of course, documenting the process is only half the battle.  We then had to go on a road tour to convince the various technical support groups to accept this new formal method for tracking customer issues.  Needless to say, there was a lot of resistance.”

 

Everyone laughed but me.  I just smiled, having not been at Cumulo-Seven during the “old days.”

 

“After we got the buy-in from the groups, our next task was to figure out how to record the information from these calls.  Just because we had merged into one company didn’t mean that we were all using the same software.  We settled on Lotus Notes, since at that time we were using Lotus Notes for our email service.  I’m sure several of you can agree that going to Lotus Notes improved our customer service tremendously.”

 

There were several nods around the room.

 

“Even with a consolidated database of technical support issues, we still were not where we needed to be.  We were in the ‘good enough’ stage but nowhere near the excellence stage.  That’s when Geoffrey came up with a brilliant idea.  Geoffrey, you want to elaborate?”

 

Geoffrey stood up.  “Greg, if you’ll hand me that cord…”  Greg unplugged the video cable and handed the end to Geoffrey.  “Thanks.”

 

“I had just attended the biennial EU convention on ISO process improvement and had learned several new ‘tools of the trade’ for improving customer service.  On this first slide, you’ll see some of the seminar titles I attended.

 

“’Avoiding Red Tape in the Red Square – Getting Repaired Equipment through Russian Customs.’”

 

“’How to Write Off Your Trip to the Bahamas as an Educational Trip’ – hmm, don’t know how that one got in there.  I don’t remember attending that seminar.”

 

“’Digging for Gold – Mine Your Data for Hidden Trends.’  Now that’s the one where I figured out what we were doing wrong.  I returned from the convention and called on my two computer experts, Nathaniel O’Sullivan and Samuel Purcell.”

 

“On this next slide, you’ll see the conclusions we reached.  Number one, ‘Don’t disrupt the current technical support process.’  Nathaniel believed that the process seemed to be working well at the time, with most of our customers in synch with our process, so he didn’t want to give the impression that we were making drastic changes.

 

“Number two, ‘Leave the driving to us.’  Nathaniel and I felt that we truly understood how a global technical support department should be run and that was to give the technical support personnel on the frontline the feeling they were in charge.  That is, they should be allowed to make some judgment calls and feel empowered.  In actuality, they were on a short leash and were being controlled and directed from one location.  Naturally, that location was Shannon, central to all world markets.”

 

I looked at Geoffrey to make sure I was hearing him correctly.  He almost sounded like he believed himself.  I looked at the other faces in the room, expecting a little skepticism but the looks I saw told me they were in complete agreement with Geoffrey.  I had never thought of Ireland as the center of the universe – it didn’t mean it was but it didn’t mean it wasn’t, either.

 

I raised my hand.

 

“Yes, Bruce, what is it?”

 

“Excuse me for my ignorance here but…”

 

“Bruce, I know where you’re going with your question and I’ll answer here in a moment.  Just bear with me.”

 

Geoffrey looked back up at the projector screen.  “And finally, number three, ‘Good luck is made, not found.’  Nathaniel and Samuel presented to me a plan to write a computer program that would scour the technical support database to find the hidden gems, the trends in our customer problem reports that revealed a need for a greater product.  In other words, our customers would be telling us what they wanted by what was not working with the current product lines.  By using this new computer program, we’d be able to hit the marketplace with brand-new products that seemed to come out of nowhere because we wouldn’t have to reveal our hand with market surveys, test marketing and product beta testing.  Well, David, that about covers what I was going to talk about.  Bruce, did that answer your question?”

 

I started to speak, wanting to know more about why Ireland was picked for this project but decided it wasn’t worth asking.  I nodded.

 

“Thanks, Geoffrey.  Well, that wraps up the central part of our discussion for this morning’s session.  Are there any questions?”

 

Constance raised her hand.

 

“Yes, Constance?”

 

“I had sent out a list of recent technical support issues before this meeting but I don’t see on the agenda where we’re going to discuss these.  I could swear there was an agenda item for this list.”

 

“Thanks for bringing that up, Constance.  Team, she brings up a good point.  I’d like to block off an hour this afternoon…”

 

Constance interrupted.  “Do you think an hour’s enough?”

 

“Well, Constance, if you feel there needs to be more time devoted to this list, I suggest you get in touch with Ray Cowen downstairs and call a separate meeting to discuss tactical issues.  This is a strategy meeting and I don’t want to get too wrapped up in day-to-day issues that we lose focus on why we’re here.  Lloyd, is that okay with you?”

 

Lloyd Philton was the head of Technical Support, at least in title.  He acted as a laissez-faire, hands-off type manager, allowing his regional technical support supervisors to run their shows independently.  Lloyd looked like a Mafia don.  He was about 5’6”, smoked cigarettes as often as the ‘no smoking’ policy at work would allow him to get outside and light up.  He always wore silk dress shirts, dark slacks with heavy creases and a dark-blue blazer.  His leather dress shoes were tasseled.

 

Lloyd cleared his throat and coughed with a smoker’s rattle.  “Yes, that’s fine with me, but I had thought we’d agreed to leave current issues out of this meeting altogether.  With the number of issues that come in every day, we could be here for the rest of our work lives talking about ‘important’ customer issues.”

 

“Agreed.  Constance, why don’t you wait until later this week and have a conference call with the regional L3 coordinators and technical support supervisors?”

 

Constance looked at me.  “Bruce, I guess I’m stepping on your toes here.  Do you want to hold this conference call?  I think it’s really important.”

 

I flipped through the papers in front of me, looking for the latest agenda.  I had printed it off at the hotel that morning and had thrown it in with my other stuff.

 

“Well…we’ve got the regular L3 meeting coming up in a couple of days.  Is there anything on your list that we won’t be covering then?”

 

“Not really.  I just wanted to see if there was anything we could do to categorize these issues.  The way the spreadsheet is laid out now, I can’t tell what’s what.”

 

I could sense a lot of unease and impatience.  I looked around the room and noticed everyone squirming in their seats.

 

“David, why don’t we take our break now?  I’ll consult with Constance and get this off our agenda.”

 

“Sounds good to me.  Team?”

 

Everyone nodded.

 

 

Constance and I stayed in the conference room.  I walked around the table and sat next to her.

 

“So, what’s the problem?”

 

“Bruce, I know you’re the new L3 coordinator but I still feel it’s my responsibility.  I really apologize for dominating the L3 process so much. It’s just…”

 

Constance reached down into her purse and grabbed a cellophane-wrapped snack.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“This?  Oh, I’m on a low-carb diet so I’m eating these diet bars instead of munching on the doughnuts over there.”

 

Doughnuts?  How did I miss the doughnuts when I walked in?  I’m not exactly Homer Simpson but I do love my doughnuts.  I prefer cake doughnuts but agree that fresh, hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts are hard to beat.  In south Florida, though, there was a Dunkin Donuts shop on every corner.  Thus, the doughnuts in the conference room were from Dunkin Donuts.  Maybe subconsciously I noted the difference and wrote them off.

 

“That’s good discipline of you.  I can resist anything but temptation, myself?”

 

“Hnnh?” Constance mumbled while biting into her bar.

 

“Nothing.  Just a pun.”

 

I liked and respected Constance tremendously, and would like to have become a friend of hers, sharing funny stories and acting as props for each other during tough times at work.  But there was something between us that just didn’t jive at times.  I wrote it off as the difference between her undying belief in her faith and her devotion to family and my jovial nature, where nothing was off-limits for a good joke, not even my family.  I could crack some off-color jokes but even my tame ones seemed to ruffle Constance’s feathers.

 

“I don’t get it.  Never mind.  Anyway, this spreadsheet you created.  It’s not like mine.”

 

“Yeah, I know.  I took an informal survey from those who actually look at the spreadsheet on a weekly basis and I found out that there’s a bunch of people outside Technical Support who review this, including Sales, Marketing and upper management.”

 

“So?  That’s nothing new.”

 

“Well, when I asked Buster Kergycki, the U.S. Sales VP, what he thought of the spreadsheet, he told me he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.  I asked him what he wanted so he called his sales guys in the field about it.  Turns out they had a bunch of suggestions that they thought no one was ever going to listen to.  I took the suggestions that made the most sense and reworked the spreadsheet for Sales.  I passed it by Marketing and they said it looked okay.”

 

“Well, it looks strange to me.  You’ve highlighted the names of the customers and shortened the description of the actual problem.  How am supposed to figure out what the problem is?”

 

“Well, those who need to know details about the problem can look it up in the database.”

 

“But not everyone has access to the database.  I know for a fact that we didn’t allow Sales to…”

 

“But the folks in Sales don’t care about the problem details.  They just need to know the customers’ names so they can call them up or visit them and schmooze a little, praising the wonders of Cumulo-Seven technical support and how soon we’re going to fix their problems.”

 

“I see.”

 

“I know it will take getting used to.”

 

“Very well.  I’ve got to take a break.  I’ll be right back.”

 

As Constance left the room, Nathaniel O’Sullivan walked in.

 

“Bruce, good to see you again.  I guess you made it back to the hotel room all right last night.”

 

“Me?  I thought you were the one you kept ordering rounds of drinks.”

 

“That’s right.  But I also called a cab to take me back to the hotel.  David arranged for someone to drive the rental car back for me.  You really should have done the same thing.”

 

“I hadn’t thought of it.”

 

“I suppose it’s a little more common in Europe for that sort of thing.”

 

I nodded, not sure why Europe would have cornered the market in cab rides back to hotels.

 

“Speaking of Europe, do you have any plans for visiting Ireland?”

 

“Oh, I’d love to, but I don’t see a reason why.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Well, I’ve got the lab in Huntsville to run, in addition to my L3 duties.”

 

“But that seems like a perfect reason for visiting the Cumulo-Seven office in Shannon.  You’d really understand why our test lab is considered a world-class operation.”

 

“Sorry, I didn’t know it had that reputation.”

 

“You didn’t.  Well, then, shame on us for not advertising it better in the States.  Yes, we’ve won a few awards.  You really ought to see it.  Let’s see.  You work for Patrick Keating, don’t you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I give Patrick a ring this evening and see if we can’t arrange a trip for you to Ireland.  I think it would really open your eyes to what you can do with that lab of yours in Huntsville.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

“No worries.”

 

“By the way, since it’s just the two of us here, have you heard of a program called ‘Mortie’?  Do you know if anyone in Shannon is working on it?  I mean…”

 

“Bruce, I wouldn’t go around askin’ about that program.  As far as I know, it’s a dead one.  And besides…oh, look, folks are coming back for the meeting now.  Maybe we can talk about it some other time.”

 

 

The rest of day was spent reviewing the input parameters for the computer program that Nathaniel and Samuel had outlined.  I laughed to myself seeing that the definition of strategic was relative.  It seemed like nailing down specifications for a computer program fell into a tactical category of some sort.  I shrugged it off.  Since my feedback was not asked for, I spent most of the time on my laptop PC going through emails and surfing the Web.

 

That evening, I excused myself from attending another group dinner.  There was a play at the Broward Performing Arts Center I wanted to see.  Called Casting My Line, the play involved the changing relationship between a father and son highlighted in their annual fishing trip to a Canadian lake.  The play reminded me that I missed some of the moments in my youth that I could have spent with my father.  We had gone fishing a couple of times when I was a little kid but I was not the outdoors fishing type at that age and my father didn’t have the patience to turn me into one.  Instead, he took me to more local car races than fishing holes.  We later found that attending motorsports events were in line with both our tastes, so when I became an adult we got together every few years at a race track or vintage car event.

 

At the end of the play, the son went back to his father’s favorite lake in Canada and spread his father’s ashes across the water.  He set the urn down in the bottom of the boat.  He turned around.  With one arm, he lifted his son out of a baby carrier.  He picked up a lure with the other hand.  “Son,” he said.  “Your grandfather made this lure for me when I was five years.  He cast my first line for me.”  He stopped for a moment and caught his breath.  “I’ve thrown your father in the water today.  I’m going to bring you back when you’re five years old and we’re going to cast your first line so your grandfather can see how much you’ve grown up.”  The man set the lure back down and wiped away a tear.  The stage lights faded.

 

With tears flowing down my face, I headed out of the theater and back to the hotel room.  I called my parents to tell them what a great time I was having in Florida.

 

 

17

 

Back in Huntsville, I made sure that Hugh, Gerald and Brendan were able to keep things going.  Hugh showed me that the upcoming slate of projects to be tested meant that our lab would soon have a backlog of eight weeks, well outside the two-week schedule slip that Patrick had allowed me to put into my master project plan.

 

I emailed Patrick and told him about the backlog.  He responded that I would just have to make do until he could review the plan more carefully.  In the meantime, Patrick was going to be on the road for a while so he expected me to work with the other engineering managers to keep the projects on schedule as much as possible.

 

I stopped by Alan’s office later that week.

 

“Hey, Alan.”

 

“Bruce!  Come on in.  Take a load off.  Have a seat.”  Alan was wearing a peach-colored plaid shirt that day.

 

I sat in his guest chair and propped my feet on a cardboard box leaning against his desk.

 

“So, what brings you here?” he asked while he continued to work on his computer, answering emails at the speed of light.

 

“Well, I guess you saw where Patrick’s out of the office for a few weeks.”

 

“Yeah, I saw that.  I figure he’s got his hands full, coming up-to-speed on all those companies we just acquired.  We’ll be lucky if we see him in the next year.”

 

“What companies?”

 

“Oh, I don’t know.  It’s in the company press releases, I’m sure.  You know I don’t keep up with that sort of thing too much.”

 

“You know more than I do.”

 

“I shouldn’t.  It was in one of those company announcements the other day.”

 

Oh yeah.  I had forgotten that I had set up a filter for official company emails from Cumulo-Seven.  Those emails were stored in a separate folder from the rest of my incoming email.  “Yeah, you’re right.  Guess I ought to pay more attention.”

 

“So what do you need from Patrick that you think you can get out of me today?”

 

“Nothing in particular.  I just wanted to tell you that the way things look right now, there may be an eight-week delay in getting some of the test reports for your projects.”

 

Alan took his hands off the keyboard and leaned back in his chair.  “Eight weeks.  Eight weeks.  Bruce, that doesn’t mean anything to me right now.  Is there a specific date that you’re talking about?”

 

“Not at this time.  I’m just giving you a heads-up that unless project priorities shuffled around, I won’t be able to test all the products in the timeframe that was originally allotted.  I’ve only got three guys and the headcount load on my project list requires at least seven or eight.”

 

Alan pulled his gaze away from the computer screen and looked at me.  “Well, Bruce, I don’t see how this is my problem.  As Andy Taylor once said, ‘When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he’s getting might really be fear. So I don’t carry a gun because I don’t want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I’d rather they respect me.’  Sounds to me like you’re trying to scare me with this eight-week delay and what I’m telling you is that I’d rather hear you come to me with a solution to that problem so I can respect you.  Know what I mean?”

 

I nodded.  “Yep, Alan, I do.  I hate having a problem without a solution but I thought I could bounce this off of you for some ideas for a solution.  You’ve been here for a while so I thought…well, I thought you’d have seen something like this before.  I’d rather implement a solution that flows with the Cumulo-Seven culture than try to force something down everyone’s throat and get a lot of resistance.”

 

Alan folded his hands across his chest.  “You know, Bruce, you make more sense than I give you credit for.  Maybe there is a solution out there that neither one of us has thought of.  I think Barney Fife said it best.  ‘All I’m saying is that there are some things beyond the ken of mortal man that shouldn’t be tampered with. We don’t know everything, Andy. There’s plenty going on right now in the Twilight Zone that we don’t know anything about and I think we ought to stay clear.’  It could be that the solution we find is something totally brand-new and has never been tried at Cumulo-Seven before.  You know, we have been known to try new things.”  Alan grinned.

 

I have a short staccato laugh.  I shot it out at Alan.  “Alan, you’re right.  And I think the solution is right under my nose.  You think I could borrow one of your lab technicians for about a week or two?  I know your guys have completed most of the engineering work.  Think they’d be willing to do a little software testing for me?”

 

“See, Bruce, that’s what I’m talking about.”  Alan tapped his temple. “Respect.  You have come up with a solution that’s both old and new.  In the Windsor days, we had to borrow PCs from our engineers in order to run some of our full-scale lab simulations.  Here you’re doing the same thing, only you’re borrowing our engineers because you’ve already got a boatload of new PCs in your test lab.  You’re thinking outside the box inside the box.”

 

I nodded.  I paused a second before speaking in case Alan had another pearl of wisdom to share from The Andy Griffith Show.  “Thanks, Alan.  So does that mean I can borrow one of your technicians?”

 

Alan leaned forward and put his hands on the edge of his desk.  “Now, Bruce, you know perfectly well that I can’t see from here what my technicians are doing in the locked-up lab across the hall.”  He pushed himself away from the desk and stood up.  “Let’s just go see what they’re up to.  If someone hasn’t already grabbed them for some other piece of important company business then I’ll be more than glad to loan them to you for a few days, keeping in mind that it’s not a permanent loan, and subject to change at a moment’s notice.”

 

“But of course.”

 

18

 

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, by using two electronic technicians and one engineering co-op from Alan’s group, I was able to give Hugh and his team the breathing room they needed to develop robust software test plans.  I also gave Hugh some spare time in the evening to work on a couple of automated test software scripts he was interested in adding to our suite of test programs.

 

Gerald took Hugh’s programs and worked out details of the test plans.  Gerald was the key to Hugh’s success.  Gerald’s detailed planning allowed Hugh to focus on the big picture.  I was glad to see Hugh recognize his strengths and weaknesses.  I knew he had the potential for being a good team leader but was stymied by Hugh’s insistence on doing all the work himself, instead of learning to delegate the work to others.  By setting up the hierarchical project team, I hoped that Hugh would be forced to trust Gerald and Brendan to do some of the work Hugh was doing, especially since Gerald and Brendan were more than capable of planning and executing the work.

 

Brendan stopped by my office one morning, just as I was settling in to check emails.  He always arrived around 7 a.m. and because I wanted to be the boss who was always available, I rearranged my lifestyle so that I could arrive at work around 7:00 or 7:15.

 

Brendan knocked on the door.

 

“Hey, Bruce, sorry to bother you so early in the morning.”

 

I had placed my computer against the opposite wall from the door so passers-by could see what I was working on.  I maintained an open door policy and that included not hiding my computer screen from visitors.

 

I suppressed a yawn and turned to face Brendan.  “No problem.”

 

“Looks like you need a cup of coffee, boss.”

 

“Yeah, maybe.  What’s up?”

 

“Well, I was talking with some of the guys down on the manufacturing floor.  They usually have a pretty good idea how well our company is doing just by the number of switches they have to produce in a day.  If the number goes up or down by a whole lot, then they’ve got a pretty good idea something big’s been happening at work.”

 

I nodded.  I knew that it didn’t take a quarterly videoconference from our CEO for many of the longtime Cumulo-Seven employees to know how well or how poorly we’d been doing.

 

“Well, anyway, Scott’s been noticing that his production line…”

 

“The production line that makes some of our new products?”

 

“Yeah.  Well, Scott says we’ve practically cut back to zero.  I figured that ain’t good.  With you being a manager and all, I thought you might know the reason why.”

 

Several scenarios popped up in my mind.  We had oversold the new IrisFocus switches in the previous quarter and were having to burn through inventory this quarter, or we had misjudged the market and either introduced the product too early or too late or our CEO was changing the U.S.-only factory policy due to fluctuating values in the dollar or it was one of those freak quarters when older products were just selling better than the newer ones so our operations VP was moving personnel around on the factory floor to grab as much revenue as he could from the older products, knowing it would also increase our profit margins and give him a nice little bonus.

 

“And if I do?”

 

“Well, I know how you are.  If there’s something really important about to happen, I know’d you wouldn’t keep it from us.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Fer instance, if I was about to buy a brand-new truck for my after-hours landscaping business and you knew there was going to be a layoff or something, you’d probably tell me, wouldn’t you?”

 

“You make a good point, Brendan.  Not that there is anything about to happen, but what if there was and I couldn’t tell you?  What if I was forced or made not to say anything, even though you know I’d want to?”

 

“Well, you’d find a way or if you couldn’t, you’d find some way or other of getting the word to me.”

 

“So your guy downstairs.  Has he seen this type of production slowdown before every layoff?”

 

“Well, there ain’t been many layoffs, at least not up here.”

 

“I know.  But on the factory floor…I mean, are the operations team members let go during a slowdown?”

 

“Shoot, yeah.  All the time.”

 

“I see. And has anyone downstairs been let go yet?”

 

“Nope.  In fact, they’ve brought in some temps to work on another line.”

 

“Well, my guess, and it’s only a guess, is that one of the other product lines is being ramped up to meet an unusual demand and that your buddy Scott’s products are not worth the lower profit margin to keep making this quarter.  It could be that we’re trying to change our production mix to meet a certain target before quarterly announcements.  In other words, I have nothing concrete that tells me the company is doing badly.”

 

“Okay.  But you’d tell me if anything bad was about to happen?  I mean, before I bought my truck and all?”

 

“I’d do what I could.  How soon are you going to buy the truck?”

 

“Well, I figured I wait until my next paycheck or two, so I could put a good chunk down on the down payment.  Why?”

 

“Tell you what.  If you can put it off, why don’t you wait a couple of weeks until I can double-check what’s going on.”

 

Brendan slapped the glass top on my desk, making a wet popping sound, as if his hand had been sweating.  “You see, that’s what I like about you.  You’re not afraid to take a chance on your employees.  I mean, any other boss and I wouldn’t even be having this conversation with ya.  Like I’d not be able to mention problems with MORTIE or nothin’.”

 

I raised an eyebrow.

 

“Oops, sorry, boss.  Guess I better get back to work.”

 

“Sure thing, Brendan.”

 

I turned back to the computer as Brendan walked out.  Brendan thought I was doing him a favor by checking on the condition of the company.  He did me a bigger favor by keeping his ears to the ground and passing even the most outlandish rumor to me.  Most of the time the rumors were just idle gossip but even then I was able to use the gossip to let my fellow managers know that being a boss didn’t just mean issuing commands and sympathizing with your employees’ problems.  It also meant making sure they were covering your back by keeping rumors in check.  And there was that Mortie program again.  I couldn’t let Brendan know I was ignorant of its significance.  That is, if it had any more significance.

 

I looked over emails.  HR had sent out an announcement that we could now review our paychecks and payroll information online, without having to go through HR personnel.  I clicked on the website link in the email and looked over my paycheck stub data.  Information for our upcoming paycheck was available.  For once, all my deductions looked right but my total pay was wrong.  I double-checked the paycheck stub and saw that my travel expense money was going to be split across two bank accounts.  Just as I was about to curse an unknown person waxing his surfboard in Daytona Beach, I realized that the two bank accounts belonged to me.  One of them was my personal bank account, which was set up to handle travel expenses.  The other bank account was the one I shared with my wife, where my regular paycheck was deposited.  For some strange reason, instead of my travel expenses going to my personal account, $75 of it was going to my personal account, $1200 was going to my joint account and a “remainder” was being put in my personal account, although the remainder was zero.

 

I called Joyce and asked her about the odd deposits for my travel expenses.  Joyce told me she was pulling up a screen in the payroll system that employees still couldn’t see.  The screen showed the original scanned documents we had submitted on our first day on the job.  I reminded Joyce that my original documentation had been lost.  Joyce didn’t remember anything about that but she could see that the date next to my signature on the scanned documents lined up with my start date.  That meant to Joyce that my original documentation had not been lost.  She pulled up the section where I had requested my travel expenses be deposited in an account different than my regular paycheck.  Joyce explained that when I had made that request, the payroll software module couldn’t accommodate my request so it had stored my request into a software feature request database and assigned my software request item number 751200.  Apparently, whenever the database programmer had updated the new module and processed my request, the new module could handle up to two different accounts for travel expense deposits.  Since my original request did not have a “No” in the field for the second bank account, my software request item number was used to distinguish the amount of money to deposit in the two accounts.  Why it was split $75/$1200, Joyce didn’t know but she promised to get to the bottom of it.

 

I called my wife and warned her that an extra $1200 was going to show up in our joint account and I would transfer it to my personal account.  My wife reminded me what a mess it had been for her at my last job when my American Express travel expenses were deposited in our joint account and my wife couldn’t keep our checking account balanced because she’d see the extra cash, think it was a bonus from my company, record the amount and then write checks against the amount, only to find our banking account had bounced because I had written a check to American Express and zeroed out the bonus.

 

19

 

Patrick finally returned from his trip.  He emailed me from the airport and told me he wanted to meet me in his office as soon as he got in.  I gave him 15 minutes to get from the airport to Cumulo-Seven and then walked over to his office.

 

Patrick was sitting behind his desk thumbing through a magazine.

 

“Bruce, close the door.”

 

I closed the door behind me.  To allay my nervousness, I reverted to a humorous opening line for our conversation.

 

“Not exactly around the world in 80 days, was it?”

 

“No, it was more like 30 days, I’m afraid.”  He sounded weary but somewhat refreshed.

 

“I bet you’re tired.”

 

“I should be.  With trips like these, though, there’s a sense of newness that helps you overcome the jet lab.”

 

“I heard you were visiting some of our new engineering offices.”

 

“Yes, I was.”  Patrick sat upright in his chair and motioned for me to move closer.  “Grab one of the chairs in the corner and have a seat.  I’ve got to talk with you about an important matter…”

 

“Important enough that I’ve got to sit down?”

 

“Precisely.”

 

I swallowed several times, trying to wet my throat as I pulled the chair up to the front of his desk.  Unexpectedly, I grunted as I sat down.

 

Patrick cleared his throat and coughed.  “Are you all right?”

 

I crossed my legs and placed the toe of my shoe under the lip of Patrick’s desk.

 

“Yep.  Sorry, don’t know what that was.”

 

“No problems.  I think there’s a bug going around.  Anyway, I know you’re wondering why you’re in here.”

 

“I figured it had something to do with your trip.”

 

“Actually, no.  At least I don’t think so.”

 

“So how was your trip?”

 

“It was good.  I got to meet a lot of new Cumulo-Seven employees who are not sure why the VP of engineering was swooping down on them so soon after their company was acquired.  You can be sure there was a lot of uncertainty.”

 

“At least the head of HR wasn’t with you.  I’ve heard that there’s worse fear when Whitney and J.B. visit an office.”

 

“I’m sure there is.  I’ve told them they should go on a visit when they’re not laying off anybody or shutting a division down.  But as busy as they are hiring and letting people go, it’s hard for them just to make casual visits.  Anyway…”

 

“Yeah, I’ve said the same thing to J.B..”  I shut my mouth when I saw that Patrick raised his eyebrows and kept his mouth open to speak, making it as clear as possible that he had the floor, not me.

 

“Anyway, I’ll be glad to talk to you about my observations at another time.  Right now, I’ve got a more important manner.”

 

I swallowed again, almost gulping for air, turning my attention from the minute changes in Patrick’s facial expressions to his bookshelf to see if he had added any new books to his collection of college engineering texts and management how-tos.  Nothing new.  I looked back at Patrick and nodded.

 

Patrick looked at the computer screen on the side table and then looked at his watch.  “Hmm…this is taking longer than I thought.  Unfortunately, Bruce, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes.  I hate to rush things so I’ll get right down to facts.  It looks like we’re not going to meet our numbers again.”

 

I gripped the arms of the chair, noticing that a hangnail on my left forefinger was bothering me.  I lifted my finger and looked at the hangnail, which was begging to be chewed off.  I ignored the pleas and looked up at Patrick again.

 

“Meaning?”

 

“Bruce, I’ve run the numbers several times and no matter how I look at it, the addition of engineering groups from these new companies we’ve bought is taking a toll on our group.”

 

I let out my breath.  “You mean more layoffs, then?”

 

“I even created a chart that clearly showed our group in Huntsville is the most productive of all the other groups.  We not only create the most number of products but we also create the most profitable products for the company.  AND we have the lowest cost basis for any group in the company except the one in Shannon and the one in our India office.”

 

“So I’m guessing that since I’m your only Huntsville manager in here that the layoffs are coming from my group.  You know, I only have three employees.”

 

“Don’t forget you have one open EA.”

 

“Still…”

 

“Bruce, I’m sorry to say but we’re closing down your lab.”

 

I tensed up but smiled.  I couldn’t say a word.  I thought about Gerald and his family situation.  I wondered if I would be able to face Brendan again.  I knew that Hugh and his wife depended solely on Hugh’s income.  I knew my wife would be hard hit by this.

 

“Bruce, I’ve done the best I can but this is out of my hands.  If I could have changed this, I would.  I looked at the other engineering groups and saw plenty of room for headcount reduction…there’s more redundancy than normal...but I was clearly told we had to give those groups an opportunity of at least a year to prove themselves.”

 

A year?  How long had my group been together?

 

“Umm…well…Patrick…how long do you think we have?”

 

“I know what you’re thinking.  You’ve got all these projects lined up and you’re worried you won’t get them tested before we close down the lab.  At this point, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

 

I burped from the bottom of my throat.  A little croak.  “Well, it’s not that I’m worried but…”

 

“Bruce, I’m as shocked as you are.  I know you’ve hardly had time to get your feet wet and now this.  But I’m serious, I’ll give your team a few weeks to get all the test projects documented and in place for the other labs to absorb.”

 

“So this isn’t immediate?”

 

“Oh no, Bruce, I wouldn’t do that to you.  I know your professional concern.  You want what’s right and I’m going to make sure you get it.  Of course, by telling you this so soon, I expect you’ll not tell any of your employees what’s going on.  If we’re going to transition your projects smoothly, I don’t want HR looking over our shoulders to see if any of your employees are planning something suspicious.  And speaking of suspicious, you don’t think there’s anyone in your group who would react negatively if word of this got out?”

 

I craned my head to the right and looked up at the ceiling.  I thought about Hugh and knew that he didn’t have a single thought of “going postal” – if he knew he was going to be laid off, he’d just work with his wife on their science fiction hobbies.  Gerald was too much of a family man to want to do anything vindictive.  Brendan…I liked Brendan but I hadn’t worked with him that long.  I didn’t suspect him of anything but neither did I have enough information about his life to judge his character when faced with adversity.

 

“I’m not sure.  I know Hugh and Gerald wouldn’t do anything.  After all, they just went through a layoff and were just fine.”

 

“Yes, I thought you’d know about them.”

 

“But Brendan…”

 

“Yes?  Is there something you know about him?”

 

“Well, no.  It’s just that I don’t know him.  The only program that concerns me is one called ‘Mortie.’”

 

“Really?”  Patrick cleared his throat.  “I don’t think there’s any program called ‘Mortie’ for you to worry about.  Anyway, I’ll ask around and see if anyone else might know something.  In the meantime, keep this under wraps.”

 

“And there’s nothing we can do to stop this?”

 

Patrick looked at his watch.  “No.  But there is something you can do.  I think all of your team members are qualified employees or I wouldn’t have approved you hiring them.  Talk to some of the other managers outside Engineering.  If there’s a position available, I’d like to see if we can get your guys into those positions.”

 

My tension eased, seeing that Patrick really was trying his best.

 

“Thanks, Patrick.  I appreciate it.”

 

“Not a problem at all.  I know this is none of your fault.  Your team continues to operate beyond full capacity without complaining one iota.  If all of the engineering teams were like yours, we’d be climbing to heights beyond our wildest imaginations.  Anyway, I really have to be going.  Let’s get together later today to discuss some of the details.”

 

I knew Patrick was telling me he had to meet with HR before he could talk with me again.

 

“Sure thing.”

 

“And let’s wait to say anything to the other engineering managers.  I know if I said something to them right now, so soon after I returned from my trip, that they’d suspect they’re next.  And there’s nothing that leads me to believe that is so.”

 

“Okay.”

 

I returned to my office and closed the door.  I wanted to call my wife and tell her about the layoff but with so few scant details, it would only confuse her and make us both upset.  I thought about the details I had – a few more weeks of work, the whole lab being shut down…which from my previous experience meant taking an inventory of the lab equipment and creating a list of all projects in progress, including test reports to be run and software test programs to be backed up, packing up my office and performing the “dead man walking” parade out of the building with my employees.

 

I had been with Cumulo-Seven for under a year so could I or should I keep the Cumulo-Seven job off of my resume?  So many questions and so little energy to look for answers.

20

 

Patrick gave me the details about the layoff – three more weeks of work, 10 weeks of severance pay for Brendan for his years of services to Cumulo-Seven, and eight weeks of severance pay for Hugh and Gerald, since Cumulo-Seven had brought them on and let them go in such a short timeframe.  Patrick gave me no details about me because HR was still finalizing the details.  Patrick told me not to worry about it but just to concentrate on the job at hand.

 

I negotiated a permanent temporary loan of Alan’s employees, getting Hugh to cross-train them to able to perform Hugh’s, Gerald’s or Brendan’s jobs as a part of the disaster recovery plan that J.B. in HR had promoted a couple of months before.  During the cross-training exercises, I got Brendan to take an inventory of all of our equipment and Gerald to create an intranet website containing all the software test program and test reports for the Huntsville test lab.

 

I got permission from Patrick to let Woody Feathers down in Sunrise know about the lab shutdown so I could get Woody to make sure that the intranet site contained all the information he needed to take over the testing.

 

Woody reviewed the intranet site and recommended I get the Shannon test lab involved because Woody was not prepared to test the Qwerty-Queue equipment.

 

I contacted the Shannon test lab and shared the intranet site with them.  They agreed to test the Qwerty-Queue equipment as long as I was personally willing to maintain the remote link between Huntsville and Shannon.  Being short-handed, I agreed.  I assigned Hugh the task of setting up the remote link and made sure he gave me all the setup parameters.

 

The day of the layoff ranks in the top 5 worst days of my life, right up there with the day I graduated from high school, knowing my free ride days on my parent’s nickel were over, and the day I signed the loan agreement on my first house, knowing I was resigning myself to 30 years of secured debt before I’d be a free man again.  I was helpless, out of control of the situation.

 

Patrick asked me to meet with William and Whitney at 7 in the morning.  We gathered at a small conference room near the test lab.  In the conference room, which served as the main HR conference, I noticed there was no glass wall and the door had a special push-button keyed lock.  Whitney unlocked the door and let us in.  Patrick stepped in to join us after we had sat down.

 

Whitney looked down at the set of blue folders next to her on the conference table.

 

“Bruce, I expect you’re a little nervous.”

 

“A little, sure.”

 

“Well, if you don’t want to be with us when we announce the layoff to your employees, you don’t have to.”

 

I shook my head.  “Oh, I want to be there and be able to face each one of them.  I have let them down and want to let them know…”

 

Whitney frowned.  “Bruce, you have not let them down.  This is a matter of economic downturn, not something you did or didn’t do.”

 

I looked at Patrick, then William and back at Whitney.  “Economic downturn?”

 

William sniffed and rubbed his nose with a knuckle.  “A turn of phrase, Bruce.”  William sniffed again and sneezed.  “Sorry about that – I’ve got this annoying cold.”  William grabbed a tissue from a tissue box on a corner table and blew his nose.  “ You see, we couldn’t bring G&A and R&D costs under control and without the ability to increase revenue to make up for it…well, in the current business climate, there’s just not enough room to hide our R&D costs.”

 

I wanted to ask him if “economic downturn” was really the phrase we wanted to use with my employees but rolled my eyes, instead.  Now was not the time for a semantics argument.

 

Whitney handed me a piece of paper.  “Bruce, make sure the names on this list are correct.”

 

I saw the names of my three employees as well as some other names that were striked through in black.  My name was not on the list.

 

“It looks right.  I don’t see my name, though.”

 

Whitney looked at William.  “Why would you see your name?”

 

I looked at Patrick.  “Well, if the lab is being shut down…”

 

Patrick looked at William.  “William?”

 

William looked from Whitney to Patrick to me.  “Bruce, I thought you knew.  We’re keeping you on.  At least as long as it takes to complete the lab closure. And then…”

 

Patrick interrupted.  “Bruce, what William is trying to say is that you’re an important part of Cumulo-Seven management.  We want you to stay with the company but don’t have a position for you right now.  We thought that if we kept you on board as the lab transition manager, it would give us time to find a meaningful job for you within the company.”

 

I was stunned.  I looked at Whitney.  “In that case, I guess the list is okay.”

 

Whitney took the paper back from me.  I stored away in the back of my mind that there were other people being laid off today but I was not being told.

 

Whitney looked at her watch.  “This has gone faster than I expected.  Bruce, you have any questions?”

 

“Not at this time.”

 

“Good.  William?  Patrick?”

 

They both shook their heads.

 

“Very well, I guess the ball’s in your court, Bruce.  When do you want to tell your employees?”

 

“I’ve got one assignment I need Brendan to wrap up.  He should have a report done by 9.”

 

“Then let’s meet with your employees in the lab at 9:30.  Is that enough time?”

 

I nodded.

 

21

 

My team stood at attention when I walked into the lab with Whitney, William and Patrick.  J.B. was already standing in the back corner of the lab, chatting amiably with one of the guards, as if they’d just happened to run into each other while taking a shortcut to another part of the building.

 

Patrick started talking to the test team before we were completely stopped in front of them.

 

“Thanks to you for getting together.”  We faced my team.  It reminded me of chess pieces, the image reinforced by the alternate beige and tan color of the floor tiles.  Patrick looked at William and William nodded for Patrick to continue.  “I believe that William was going to say a few words but he has a cold this morning.  I’m all too glad to address you in his place.  As you can see, this is an important meeting…”

 

I watched the faces in front of me.  None of my guys would look me in the eye.  They all had the “I know what’s coming next” look on their faces.  Hugh and Brendan seemed to be pretty accepting but Gerald was sweating, his face was bright red and he didn’t look happy.

 

“…and that’s why Whitney is here with us.  It’s my sad duty to inform you that the Huntsville Test Lab is being shut down.”

 

Brendan grunted, choked back a cough and licked his lips.  “Shut down?  What does that mean exactly?”

 

“What it means is that we’re going to have to let all of you go.”

 

Brendan laughed.  “Let go?  Hell, I just came up here from Technical Support a few months ago.  You can’t let me go.  Surely, you could transfer me back to Technical Support or something?”

 

Whitney shoved three blue folders under her arm.  “Brendan, I know this is a shock to you.  To all of you.  Patrick, you want to finish up so I can address some of the questions like Brendan’s?”

 

Patrick nodded.  “Anyway, as you know, the Cumulo-Seven engineering group has been tasked with bringing costs under control.  After several go-rounds with our finance department, we figured out that the only surefire way to align our costs with management targets was to trim back on some of the hiring we’d been doing in the last year.  It became painfully obvious that the highest percentage of new hires was concentrated here in the lab.  Believe me, it was not an easy decision.  I had hoped to give you more time to prove yourselves as a team before there was any consideration of cutbacks.  Unfortunately, economic conditions didn’t agree with my plans.  Do you have any questions?”

 

Hugh, Gerald and Brendan were just looking at the floor, dumbstruck.

 

“In that case, Whitney, I guess it’s all yours.”

 

“Thanks, Patrick.”  Whitney pulled the folders from under her arms.  “These folders summarize the benefits and insurance packages available to you as part of an involuntary layoff.  In addition, I’ve provided some common questions and answers that you will want to read tonight after you’ve had a little while to consider your options.”

 

Whitney read the typed-up names on the labels on the front of the folders and handed the folders to each recipient.

 

“Now, we’re going to have to ask you to grab what you can and come back here in five minutes.  J.B. will help you, if you need it.”

 

J.B. walked up to the group, leaving the guard in the corner.  Because Hugh, Gerald and Brendan were facing away from that corner of the lab, they were not conscious of the presence of security in the room.  They also weren’t aware that I had asked them to gather on the side of the lab under the security camera.  I didn’t want to make my guys any more nervous than I knew they would be.  I knew there would be no trouble but I also knew that the security team needed as many assurances as possible that all would go well.  I hoped that the guard in the room was all that we needed but just in case, the security camera gave Security the opportunity to remotely watch the actions of the team and bring in more guards at a moment’s notice.

22

 

  Brendan emailed me from his home later that day.  He had failed to ask me what my plans were.  I asked for his home or cell phone number so I could talk with him personally.  I stepped outside of the office and called him on my personal cell phone.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Brendan, it’s Bruce.”

 

“You sorry son of a bitch.  Didn’t I ask you to warn me?”

 

“Sorry, man.  I couldn’t.”

 

“Well, you’re just lucky I hadn’t bought that truck yet or I might actually be mad.”

 

“I kinda figured.  And hey, I really am sorry.”

 

“Tell me about it.  You’re a Tennessee fan and you’re in the unemployment line with me first thing tomorrow.  How much more sorrier can you get?”

 

“Mmm, actually I’m not.”

 

“You’re not what?  Have you changed allegiances and started cheering for a real football team?”

 

“No, I mean, I’m not in the unemployment line.  I’m still with Cumulo-Seven.”

 

“But Patrick said he was closing down…”

 

“Yeah, I know what he said.  And he is.  He’s keeping me on to finish up all the details of the shutdown.”

 

“Well, why didn’t he keep me, instead?  I’m cheaper than you and I sure know a lot more about the equipment in that lab than you do.”

 

“I dunno, Brendan.  It’s just what happened.  Until this morning, I thought I was joining you guys.”

 

“You sure about that?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Well, all right.  So how long do you think you got?”

 

“I don’t know, exactly.  I think Patrick’s just playing it by ear, making sure the other test labs can absorb the equipment without setting them back too far.”

 

“Yeah?  That’s the only thing that gets me.”

 

I braced myself for Brendan to finally let me have it.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“I mean, we didn’t do nuthin wrong and it’s like we’re getting punished for it.”

 

I laughed, knowing full well that’s probably what everyone felt.  “Brendan, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

 

“Then if that’s the truth, why don’t you go to Patrick and tell him about it?  Maybe he’ll feel guilty enough to hire us back.”

 

“It doesn’t work that way.  This is a corporation.  There’s nothing personal about this.”

 

“That’s what you think.  I think that somebody had it out for us because we were a pet project of the CEO and they wanted to show the CEO who had the real power.”

 

“I see what you mean, Brendan, but in the big scheme of things, the Huntsville lab was really small potatoes.  I mean, sure, we did important work, but our cost to the company was not all that great.”

 

“That’s not the way I see it.  I did what you said and figured up the cost of the equipment in the lab this morning.  Between the lab benches, PCs, test equipment and the heating and air conditioning unit, I estimated the total around a million bucks.  That ain’t no pocket change.”

 

“A million dollars?  Wow.  In the rush this morning, I forgot to look at the spreadsheet.”

 

Brendan guffawed.  “Would it have made any difference if you had looked at it before they kicked us out the door?”

 

I laughed with him.  “To be frank, not really.  But I could have at least shown William and Patrick the cost of their decision.”

 

“Well, you still can, unless they’ve cut off your email, too.”

 

“I will.”

 

“Hey, speaking of email, can you do me a big favor?”

 

“Let’s see…for an insulting Bama fan?  Maybe.  What is it?”

 

“If I give you the password for my work PC, can you archive all my personal emails and give me a copy?  And can you answer all my unopened emails with something goody-two-shoes that says I’ve left the company and to address all future emails to my home email address?”

 

“I’ll see what I can do.”

 

“Cool.  If you caint, I understand, but let me know so I can bug J.B. to let me come back to the office and copy them off under his supervision.”

 

“Don’t call J.B. just yet.”

 

“I got to.  He told us to call him back to arrange getting our personal items.”

 

“I see.  Well, in that case, why don’t you just get the personal files yourself while you’re here.”

 

“Caint.  J.B. said all network access was completely off-limits, even if our user ID and passwords had already been cut off.”

 

“Okay, we’ll work something out.”

 

“That’s why you’re the boss, boss.”

 

“If you say so.  Hey, before I forget, can you tell me more about your part in the ‘Mortie’ program?  I haven’t gotten the chance to talk with the other engineering managers to see what you were working on.”

 

“Boss, you ain’t gonna get anything from them other managers about MORTIE.  Hell, I thought you knew that.  Well, I gotta go.  I can’t trust my severance check to show up on time so I better go mow some lawns in order to make some money before the rent comes due.”

 

“Sounds good to me.  At least you’ve got a good outdoors job to fall back on.”

 

“Outdoors?  Hell, you go out there and mow grass in this heat.  It ain’t no picnic.  Anyways, I’ll call you when I’m coming back.  If you could get me a disk of all my personal files, I’d owe you one.”

 

“What about your passwords?”

 

“Oh, I thought you already knew.  It’s just Cumulo-Seven spelled backwards with an 0-3 at the end.”

 

“Is that Cumulo-Seven-0-3 spelled backwards?”

 

“No, it’s like I said.  It’s Cumulo-Seven spelled backwards with an 0-3 at the end.”

 

“So, it’s 3-0 and then Cumulo-Seven spelled backwards?”

 

“Look, I fergot you spell Tennessee 10-E-C.  Why don’t I just email my password to you?”

 

“Okay, send it to my home email account.”

 

“Roger, boss.  Just keep shakin’ them bushes.  Talk at you later.”

 

23

 

After all the issues were settled with my former employees, Patrick decided to keep the lab open on a very limited basis.  He didn’t know that I had worked with my team to make our lab access transparent so that all the equipment could be operated remotely.  Therefore, there was no need to completely break down the lab.  All I had to do was maintain the lab equipment as it was set up, making sure there was not any downtime.

 

I showed Patrick the inventory list that Brendan had put together.  Patrick was impressed that we were able to spend so much money in so short amount of time without anyone questioning the expenditures.  I reminded Patrick that my approval was for only $1000 so I approved a lot of miscellaneous purchases.  For most of the small purchases, I had gotten Patrick to sign off, since he could approve up to $5000.  I had to go to William when the requests were for purchases up to $10,000 and to Cyrill for purchases above that.  Thus, no one person in management had the opportunity to make a mental count of the money I’d spent.  It was a happy accident that the request levels bounced around the three approval levels while the total reached $1,000,000.

 

Patrick approved me to purchase anything I needed to make the lab’s network connection faster and more robust since I was the only one running it but no other purchases were to be made unless it was to replace faulty equipment.  Even at that, since everything was less than a year old, Patrick assumed that warranties were still valid so I shouldn’t have to spend very much on replacement equipment.

 

I kept in touch with my former team via email to make sure they were not getting depressed and avoiding contact with the outside world.  They surprised me by the number of job interviews they were having.  Gerald had a line on a job with a company where a work colleague of ours had gone after Elextronzia let us go.  Brendan was busy with his landscape company, and squeezing interviews in where he could.  Hugh was working the online employment agencies.

 

They also surprised me by their willingness to help me figure out the lab setup when I would get stumped by the assumptions built into their network diagrams and work instructions.  Since Hugh was staying at home for the most part, he would work with me on the phone to sort through the inner working of the network server, which routed all the Internet/intranet traffic through our lab.

 

One day, I ran a software program called Nettrapfic that scanned the network traffic for any hiccups in the system.  The program pointed to two other software programs, NOTINFER and PRISMAGORIC, that were tagged as hidden.  I jumped on my computer and searched the Internet for the names of the programs but got no hits.  I called Hugh’s house and in an artificially pleasant voice, his wife said he was unavailable the rest of the afternoon.  I didn’t know if Hugh wasn’t available or his wife just didn’t want him to be available.  I knew this meant I was on my own.

 

I went back to the small side room in the lab we called the network closet, where the rack with the network server and interconnected network cables was installed.  While I had been gone from the room, Nettrapfic had popped up a message that the two hidden programs had been putting the network server under almost full capacity.

 

It didn’t make sense.  Nettrapfic showed a running history of program usage and the two hidden programs had never used that much bandwidth before.

 

I noted the IP address of the remote computer that was interfacing with NOTINFER and PRISMAGORIC.  I called our IT department and asked them if the IP address looked familiar.  They told me the IP address belonged to the laptop computer of Paul O’Reilly.

 

I called Paul from the phone in the network closet.

 

“This is Paul.  How may I be of service?”

 

“Paul, hey, this is Bruce Colline.”

 

“Bruce Colline.  Are you the Bruce Colline who’s the test lab wunderkind, the one-man band, the Jack-of-no-trades who’s trying to run a lab by himself that he’s completely clueless about?”

 

“That’s the one.”

 

“So what can I do for you?  Or better yet, let me guess what you want.  You’ve got a bunch of Qwerty-Queue equipment in your lab and you’re wondering if you could clear it all out to make space for a bingo parlor.”

 

“How did you guess?”

 

“Well, if you’re like everyone else in this company, you’re wanting to push all the Qwerty-Queue knowledge out the back door and straight into the garbage.”

 

Paul was playing my game, keeping the conversation on a topic of his interest and away from what I wanted to talk about.  I played along to keep him thinking he was winning the game.

 

“Why would I want to do that?”

 

“You tell me.  I’ve never worked on a project that had so much promise but was thwarted at every point when success was just in reach.  In fact, I was just talking to William about the equipment in your lab and he was telling me how important the equipment is and…”

 

I decided to stop playing his game.  Paul could take this topic and make anyone bored enough to want to get off the phone and leave Paul alone to do whatever it was he wanted to do when he played this phone game.

 

“And I’m sure William is right.  However, that’s not why I called.”

 

“Well, then if that’s not why you called, then you probably meant to call someone else because the Qwerty-Queue program is the only reason you should be calling me.  Why don’t you figure out who you meant to call and get on with your life?”

 

“Funny.  Seriously, I meant to call you.”

 

“You did?  Why are you calling me?”

 

I noticed the bandwidth percentage of the two hidden programs had dropped to zero.  Paul had been stalling me in order to shut down his connection.

 

“Well, Patrick had asked me to increase the efficiency of the network server in the lab.  I have been able to sort out all of the programs running on the server and shut down the nonessential services.  However, there are two programs that have been running that I can’t figure out and I don’t want to shut them down until I do.”

 

“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full.  You’re a smart guy.  I’m sure you can surf the Net the rest of the day and figure it out.  I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes or I’d love to be able to help you.”

 

“Well, Paul, you’ve already helped me.  With the assistance of IT today, I was able to figure out that you’re the only one who’s been using those programs.”

 

“That’s interesting, Bruce, but knowing how IT is, I bet they’ve given you the wrong information.”

 

“I don’t think so.  I tracked the IP address to your laptop.”

 

“Are you sure?  You know that IP addresses are not permanently assigned.  I bet there’s a high probability that an IP address I was assigned yesterday lost its lease overnight and that IP address is being used by someone else in the company.  IT just thinks it still belongs to me because they’re looking at a report that was generated sometime before they left the office yesterday and were just too lazy to run a new report today.”

 

“Maybe.  Or it could be that it’s really your IP address.  Or I could ask IT to check again, if it’ll make you happy.”

 

“No need to bother.  It was me.”

 

A chill ran down my spine.  Paul was too quick to admit defeat so he must have something else in mind.

 

“Okay.  Well, can you cut back on the usage of those programs, then?”

 

“Tell you what.  Why don’t I stop by the lab and show you what I was doing, instead?”

 

“Works for me.”

 

I hung the phone with Paul. I saved a backup of the Nettrapfic history file, which showed the high bandwidth and Paul’s IP address.  I pulled a USB flash drive out of my pocket, plugged it up to the network server and copied the backup file to the USB drive.  I changed the name of the file on the USB drive to AOL-download.bmp to make it look like a personal file.  I then deleted the history file and the backup from the network server and put the USB flash drive in my pocket.

 

I turned to open the network closet door and it opened toward me, with Paul holding the door handle.

 

“Bruce, you’re slow.  I thought you’d at least meet me at the main lab door.”

 

“Sorry, I was checking to see if there were any other programs that I should be monitoring.”

 

“Oh, there’s not.”  Paul stepped in and closed the door.  “I’ve made sure of that.”

 

“You have?”

 

Paul smiled.  “Yeah, I knew you’d be so busy with just keeping the lab from breaking down that you’d miss the little things like the main server for the lab.  It’s an easy thing to do.”

 

“So you say.”

 

“Anyway, I needed some CPU cycles to run a simulation and figured if you weren’t using the server in your lab, I’d put it to good use.”

 

“Well, that seems logical but maybe you could have asked me first?”

 

Paul slapped me on the back.  “Oh, it’s much more fun to ask for forgiveness.  You know that.”

 

I looked at the computer screen and saw that the two programs were up and running again, hogging about 20% of the network bandwidth and almost 90% of the CPU bandwidth.  I looked back at Paul and he was staring at the screen, too.

 

“So, Paul, what are you doing right now?”

 

“What am I doing?  Well, it looks like I’m running a simulation again, doesn’t it?”

 

“I don’t know.  If you say so, I’ll believe you, but you haven’t said.”

 

“Hmm…good point.”  Paul looked up at the ceiling and back at the computer screen.  “You know, I hadn’t really been paying attention to how much of the network server I’ve been using.”  He seemed to be thinking out loud.  “There’s almost no storage on the local hard drive that I’ve taken up…and I know that I’ve throttled back the RAM space so what am I doing that’s heating up this thing?”

 

Paul looked at me and shrugged.

 

“So, Paul, are you going to tell me what those programs are?”

 

“Should I?”

 

“Nothing says you have to.  But nothing says I have to keep them on this server.  I could cut off read-write access to the hard drive and force you to run these simulations of yours on your laptop.”

 

Paul frowned and shook his head.  “Don’t do that.  My laptop is way too slow.  I wouldn’t be able to get any results for weeks and William needs…”  Paul went quiet and gave me a fake smile.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me William was asking you to run these simulations?”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

“But you…”

 

“Bruce, has Patrick told you about any organizational changes coming up?”

 

“The only thing he told me is that he hoped to have me in a new position before too long.”

 

Paul rocked his head back and forth, in a sideways nod.  “Yes, I could see him telling you that way.  Well, in the next couple of days, it’s going to be official so I don’t think telling you now is going to do any harm.  William has been promoted to head of Corporate Research.  His new title is CTO, which means that he’ll also be taking charge of the IT department.”

 

“Wow.  Guess that means William has a big organization under him now – Engineering, IT, and…”

 

“That’s not the only change.  William is moving out of Engineering.  Patrick has been informally running the global engineering structure for some time now while William negotiated this move.  With William’s promotion, Patrick is being promoted to Senior VP of Engineering.  All regional engineering offices report to him now.”

 

“That’s great for Patrick.  I guess I won’t be working for him anymore.  Do you know who’s taking over the Huntsville engineering group?”

 

“No idea.  But I can tell you that William offered me a job in his organization.  I accepted the job a couple of days ago.  From what I understand, the Qwerty-Queue group will be moved under Nathaniel O’Sullivan’s organization and will be based out of Shannon.”

 

I watched the computer screen.  I wasn’t sure if Paul was using this time for more delaying tactics.  I knew he was telling the truth but I also knew he had ways of using the truth to his advantage.  He hadn’t made his millions by waiting for things to happen to him.  I saw no change in the computer usage patterns.

 

“Sounds like even better news for you.  But what you still haven’t told me is what these programs are doing and why you have to use my network server.”

 

“You’re right.  And you can probably guess that I won’t tell you anything about them.  What I will tell you, since it’s not a secret anymore, is that, yes, I am running these programs for William.  You might call it a skunk works project or pure research or whatever but I’m pretty sure you have plenty of things to do in the lab than sit here and watch numbers go up and down.  Unless there’s an urgent reason why you have to delete these programs, why don’t you let them run for a couple of more days and then I’ll have them off of here without any reason to trouble you further?”

 

I grabbed the computer mouse and shut down Nettrapfic.  “Paul, you’ve made it clear.  I’ll tell Patrick that the server is as efficient as I can make it if you’ll tell me about a program called ‘Mortie.’”

 

“Perfect.”  Paul shook his head.  “Wait, what did you say?”

 

“So you know something about the ‘Mortie’ program?”

 

Paul laughed.  “Well, if you want to call MORTIE a program, then that’s your choice.  I don’t know that I would.  By the way, do you know much about RDP?”

 

“Sure.  Remote Desktop Protocol.  I’ve read about it.  It’s Microsoft’s way of competing with our remote access switches just like VNC or VMWare.”

 

“In a way, yes.  Do you think you could set up a remote desktop connection for me to play with on this server?”

 

“Right now?”

 

“No, just anytime before you leave would be fine.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Good.  And I wouldn’t bother telling anyone about the reorganization just yet.  You know how fluid these things are until they’re announced.  It’s…it’s…well, I guess you could say it’s somewhat associated with MORTIE.”

 

I nodded.

 

Paul slapped me on the back and opened the door.  “I give you credit for finding those programs.  I figured I’d be done and out of your way before you knew anything had happened.  Thanks for contacting me directly about it.”

 

I nodded again, letting silence speak for itself.

 

 

24

 

Patrick sent out an email that afternoon, calling for a general engineering meeting at 9:00 a.m. in the engineering design lab the next morning.  He asked the engineering managers to meet him in his office at 8:45 for a quick briefing beforehand.

 

We filed into his office.  Patrick sat behind his desk and wore a big smile on his face.

 

“Sit down.”

 

Knowing the meeting was going to be short, we avoided our usual playful arguments about who got which chair closest to the window and who got stuck with the chair with the broken arm, grabbed the nearest chairs and plopped down.

 

“Thanks.”

 

Patrick stood up and walked over to the window.  For a few seconds, he watched a hawk or buzzard circling in the distance.  He slowly turned to face us.

 

“Some of you are aware that changes have been taking place within the Cumulo-Seven organization, changes that, I might add, are quite beneficial to the long-term success of the company.  Some of these changes will affect you more than others.”

 

Patrick turned back to the window.

 

Mark spoke up.  “What kind of changes are you talking about?  Do you mean more layoffs?”

 

Patrick quickly spun around.

 

“As a matter of fact, no.  We’re actually going to be hiring more people.  One of the changes I made was to correct a previous error.  Bruce is back in charge of the test lab and will be able to hire a couple of folks.”

 

Mark patted me on the back.  “Way to go, Bruce!”

 

“And, I’ve put Alan in charge of the Huntsville engineering group.”

 

We looked at Alan.  He nodded to us in a form of taking a small bow.

 

“And I know you wonder what this means about me.  I have taken over the position of head of global engineering.  This is an exciting time for all of us in Huntsville and I’m excited for those of you taking on more responsibility.”

 

Mark furrowed his brow.  “So if you’ve moved into William’s old position, then…?”

 

“Ah yes.  Well, William is moving into the role of CTO.  He is now in charge of IT and a new department called Corporate Research.  With the important role that corporate research will take in our company, William wanted to avoid any distractions.  I offered to take some of the engineering management responsibilities from William and ended up with the whole global engineering team.  I’m sure you all can see this means the Huntsville group will be heavily involved in the evolution of changes for Engineering.  That’s why I called you here today.  I’ll help Alan learn the ropes of his new job.  I’ll also be depending on you guys to step up and accept more responsibility as well.  I expect you to be looking at new ways for Engineering to add value to our company.”

 

Patrick turned to look back out the window.

 

“Are there any questions?”

 

Mark looked at me.  “I guess Bruce already knows what’s ahead for him.  Do you have similar expectations for the rest of us?  I mean, have you already thought about our next quarterly goals and what we should be shooting for?”

 

“No, Mark.  I haven’t.  This is all very new and we’ll need to work these details out together.”

 

“Do you think there will be management advancement opportunities for the rest of us?”

 

“Mark, certainly there will be opportunities ahead.  Whether they involve job title changes or what, I cannot tell you.  In the near-term, we have to focus on keeping our numbers in line.  Anybody else?”

 

The only response was the sound of creaking chairs as we shifted in our seats.

 

“Okay, then, let’s meet the rest of the team in the lab in five minutes.  I have a quick call to make and then I’ll be right in there with you.”

 

25

 

 

After the news of the reorganization was announced, I worked with Patrick and J.B. to open up two EAs.  As soon as the EAs were approved, I called Hugh to see if he was still available.  He told me that he had not yet found a job but Gerald had.  I called Gerald to see if his job was good or if he was interested in returning to Cumulo-Seven.  I could tell Gerald tried not to laugh in my face.  He assured me that his new job was very good and very secure.  He was not interested in coming back to Cumulo-Seven.  He suggested I call Brendan to see if he had found a job.

 

Brendan was sitting at home emailing some friends when I got in touch with him.  He wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that Cumulo-Seven had reopened the test lab.  Since his severance was running short, he was all too glad to come back to work for me.  He still didn’t blame me for the layoff.  He blamed himself for not shaking the bushes a little harder.

 

I pushed the final paperwork through the approval process, completing the hiring of Hugh and Brendan in a record two weeks.

 

While I was working the signatures through flattery and bribery (“sign this while I’m here and I’ll make sure you’re nominated for the next ‘employee of the month’ bonus”), I inquired about the status of the Qwerty-Queue equipment.  I knew what Paul had told me about the Shannon engineering team absorbing what was left of the Qwerty-Queue group, but Patrick had not officially announced it and it did not show up in the org chart that was emailed to engineering distribution list.

 

Patrick suggested I contact Nathaniel O’Sullivan to see if the folks in Shannon were interested in helping me get the Qwerty-Queue equipment tested while I was still short-handed in the lab.

 

I emailed Nathaniel and summarized what I officially knew about the changes taking place within the organization.  Even though it was 11 in the evening over there, Nathaniel responded back and told me to call him as soon as I got in the office the next day.

 

I called Nathaniel at 7:00 a.m.

 

“Cumulo-Seven International.  This is Nathaniel.”

 

“Nathaniel, it’s Bruce Colline.”

 

“Very good of you to call me so promptly.  What time is it over there?”

 

“7:00 a.m.”

 

“Well, that’s certainly earlier than most folks arrive in Huntsville, from what I’ve seen on my visits there.”

 

“’The early bird gets the worm,’ I suppose.”

 

“Yes, indeed.  So I’ve got your email here in front of me, Bruce.  What is it about the Qwerty-Queue equipment that I can help you with?  Are you having trouble with a network collision or something?”

 

“No.  I just wanted to make sure that the equipment didn’t get lost in the shuffle.  I’ve got a bunch of new tests to be run on the new ‘Alleycat’ project and I may need the lab bench space.  In other words, I think I’ll need to box up the Qwerty-Queue equipment since there doesn’t appear to be a need to run any tests on it anytime soon.”

 

“Bruce, hold on minute.  Let me see if I can conference in our head of Marketing, Donnagan Garrykennedy.  I think he’s got some new information about a customer feature that may need to be implemented on Qwerty-Queue.”

 

The phone clicked and went dead.  I looked at the LCD display and saw I was sitting on CONF, a dead zone of sorts where calls were parked while a person was trying to make a three-way call.  If the third party was unavailable, the caller often made the mistake of hanging up the phone.  The phone clicked again and I thought that Nathaniel may have hung us up.

 

“Bruce, are you there?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Donnagan?”

 

“Yes, Nathaniel, I’m here,” came a voice that sounded like the “Lucky Charms” cartoon character from some breakfast cereal commercials of my youth.

 

“Okay, good.  I’ve got both of you on the phone.  Donnagan, Bruce is the head of the Huntsville Test Lab.  He’s run into a conflict with the use of his lab space and is wanting to push the Qwerty-Queue equipment out of the way.  Bruce, Donnagan is our head of Marketing here in Shannon.  He’s responsible for the TINZ, Qwerty-Queue and our new DUNZ product line.  Donnagan, have you any update for Bruce about Qwerty-Queue?”

 

“Bruce, glad to meet ya, or should I say, ‘Howdy, partner,’ like that great U.S. actor of yours, John Wayne, would say?”  Donnagan mimicked John Wayne’s voice.  “’I’ve heard an awful lot of good things about you, pilgrim.’”

 

“Howdy to you, too, Donnagan.”

 

“So you’re running into a little problem with our equipment?”

 

“Well, not really.  It’s just that the ‘Alleycat’ project requires about 64 server and client PCs to be hooked up at once and I’m running out of benches to stack up the computers.  I could really use those Qwerty-Queue benches.”

 

“’Alleycat’?  Well, I certainly know how those’ll get out of hand.  They say the plague was caused by rats but I say there weren’t enough cat reproduction going on to keep the rat population under control.  Sounds like you’ve got the opposite problem now, eh?”

 

I saw that Donnagan had a keen sense of humor, even if it was a bit odd-sounding to my American ears.

 

“I suppose.  Nathaniel said that you might need to use the Qwerty-Queue equipment, though?”

 

“He did, did he?  Nathaniel, are you trying to put words in my mouth?”

 

“What was that?”  Nathaniel sounded distracted.

 

“Bruce, Nathaniel’s always multitasking.  What he probably was trying to say for me was that I’ve gotten a request from one of our customers to see if we can add a feature or two to the next release of Qwerty-Queue firmware.  I haven’t decided if we’re going to update the firmware for that old product line or just make sure that the first release of DUNZ has those features in it.  Right, Nathaniel?”

 

“Mmm-huh,” Nathaniel mumbled.

 

I appreciated Donnagan’s straightforward answer but he wasn’t giving me the information I needed. 

 

“That’s fine, Donnagan.  Have you established a timeline for these decisions?”

 

“Timeline?”

 

“Yes, do you know when you’ll have decided which release you’re going to pursue?”

 

“Well, no.  It’s not a matter of timing, at this juncture.  Nathaniel, shall I elaborate?”

 

“What’s that?  Oh, I know what you were saying.  Bruce, I think we need to get you over to Shannon to meet our lab team over here.  Then, you could decide how you want to handle a situation like this.”

 

“I’m not sure I’ve got the time.  Right now, it’s just me running the lab and…”

 

“But Patrick assured us you had your full complement of lab personnel.”

 

“I will but I haven’t actually got them in here yet.”

 

“Bruce, hang on a second.”

 

Nathaniel put me on mute.  About 30 seconds later, he talked to me again.

 

“Bruce, it looks like Donnagan and I will be visiting Huntsville early next week.  Why don’t instead of you coming to Shannon, we visit with you first, see what it is you’re talking about and then we’ll work with you and Patrick to arrange a visit to Shannon for you?”

 

“Okay but I anticipate my team coming back to work for me on Monday.  I’ll have to work around my schedule with them to meet with you.”

 

Donnagan laughed.  “Monday?  Oh no, Bruce, we wouldn’t try to impose on you on the first day of the week.  Let’s say we’ll stop by your office sometime Tuesday.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Nathaniel sighed heavily over the phone.  “You won’t be needing to move the Qwerty-Queue equipment until then, will you?”

 

“Not if you are planning to visit.”

 

“Good deal.  Tuesday, it is.  Talk to you then, Bruce.”

 

26

 

 

Nathaniel knocked on my office door.

 

“Bruce, good morning to you!”

 

I yawned.  I hadn’t slept well the night before.  Between the harmonious snoring of my wife, me and our cats, I had probably woken up at least a dozen times.  Around 4 a.m., I went into the living room and curled up under an afghan on the sofa.  As usual, the cats joined me, thinking I was going to rest a few minutes before getting up to feed them or play with them.  We slept until the alarm went off at 5:30 in the bedroom.

 

“Oh, good morning, Nathaniel.  Come in.”

 

Nathaniel stepped in and shook my hand.  He gestured to the person who had stepped in with him.

 

“Bruce, this is Donnagan Garrykennedy.  Donnagan, Bruce Colline.”

 

Donnagan looked to be about 5’4” tall, had a slim build, black hair with a few white hairs thrown in for good measure to highlight the wrinkles around his eyes.  I guessed he was in his mid-30s.  Donnagan’s striped dress shirt was pressed, as was his ultralight wool blue slacks.  He looked European.

 

Donnagan grinned and stuck out his hand.  “At last, we meet, Bruce.”

 

“Same to you, Donnagan.”

 

We shook hands.  Donnagan sat down in the spare guest chair and I returned to my perch behind my L-shaped, “manager level” desk, with the bottom of the L up against the wall and serving as a place for my computer.

 

I turned to Nathaniel.

 

“Well, what brings you guys to Huntsville?”

 

“Oh, we have several projects to follow up on.  And I’ve got to get right back to them after this meeting.  First of all, Bruce…” Nathaniel nodded at Donnagan.  Donnagan leaned over and pushed my office door shut.  Nathaniel turned back to me after the door closed.  “…we need to know how much you’ve been involved in the Qwerty-Queue projects.”

 

“Not much.  I pretty much leave the testing to my guys.  Why?”

 

“Well, you’ve probably heard that the Qwerty-Queue group is being broken up.”

 

“No, I hadn’t.  Sorry to hear it.”

 

“It’s not a problem, Bruce, but thanks for saying it.  However, I’ve got a problem.  You see, I can’t run the Qwerty-Queue programs right now as it is and with the expected resignations of the Qwerty-Queue management team, I’ll have even more to worry about.”

 

“Yes, I can see that.  Does this mean you want me to hold off shipping the equipment to you?”

 

Nathaniel looked at Donnagan.

 

Donnagan leaned toward me.  “Well, Bruce, how would you like to be in charge of the Qwerty-Queue group?”

 

“Well, I don’t know.  I’ve still got the lab to run.”

 

“Oh, I don’t mean the whole thing.  Right now, Carol Stone is running the AaBbC cable program for the Qwerty-Queue team.  We were wonderin’ if you’d like to run the AaBbC cable program so that Carol can be freed up for some other programs she’s running.”

 

“How much work is involved?”

 

“You’ll have to keep track of the design and production of a few computer cables, that’s all.”

 

Nathaniel nodded.  “And if you’re concerned about Patrick’s approval, I’ve already spoken with him.  He’d be glad to let you get involved with this.  Thinks it’s a great opportunity for you to get your feet wet, as he said.”

 

I crossed my arms and looked up at the ceiling.  Was this what Patrick wanted me to do or was it just a coincidence that this job came up and Patrick took advantage of it?  It seemed like an interesting job.  I had called into a Qwerty-Queue weekly conference call one time when Hugh couldn’t attend.  I didn’t announce my name on the call and just sat quietly listening to what was said, in case any testing needs arose.  The only thing that was discussed was an AaBbC cable that Carol had gotten made at a local contract manufacturer.  The length of the cable was a few millimeters too short and Carol was going back and forth with the engineers to determine if the original design was wrong or if the contract manufacturer had cut the cable to the wrong length.  If that’s all I had to do, then the job couldn’t be too demanding.

 

“Sure.  I’ll give it a try.”

 

“Good.  Then you’ll need to call Carol and get all the information she has.  I suggest you call into a couple of the weekly meetings before you completely take over the position.”

 

“I’ve called into the meeting before.”

 

“Very well.  You should probably talk with Patrick, too.  Although he granted me permission to talk with you, I think he wanted to talk to you before you started.”

 

“Of course.”

 

“And if you do take this job, I’d encourage you to visit us in Shannon.  If the Qwerty-Queue equipment is moved over there, you’ll want to see what the setup looks like.”

 

“I’d like to.”

 

Nathaniel stood up.  “I assume you know not to mention the shutdown of the Qwerty-Queue engineering team.  We’re working on the details while we’re here.  We assume you’ll want to be part of the new team.”

 

It was becoming obvious to me that Nathaniel knew something I didn’t.  Was Patrick shutting down the lab again?

 

 

After Nathaniel and Donnagan left, I sauntered over to Patrick’s office.  He was typing an email as I walked into his office.

 

“Oh hey, Bruce.  How’s it going?”

 

“Fine.  You got a moment?”

 

Patrick pushed away from his computer desk.  “Sure.  What can I do for you?”

 

“Well, I just talked with Nathaniel O’Sullivan and Donnagan Garrykennedy.”

 

“You did?  That’s great.  Were you able to work out anything about your lab equipment?”

 

“Yes and no.  It looks like I won’t be able to ship the Qwerty-Queue equipment to Shannon for a few weeks.”

 

“Uh-huh.  And how does that affect your test schedule?”

 

“I don’t know yet.”

 

“Any hunches?”

 

“I’d guess that we’re still pretty tight.”

 

“Well, there’s not much I can do right now.  We’re still watching the headcount.”

 

“Yeah, I know.  Anyway, I came over here for another reason.”

 

I looked out Patrick’s window.  Being so close to the door, my view out the window was only the tops of trees.  No chance to see birds flying overhead or the comings and goings of Cumulo-Seven employees’ vehicles down in the parking lot below.

 

“Go on.”

 

I shook my head.

 

“Sorry.  Well, it looks like Nathaniel wants me to manage one of his Qwerty-Queue programs.”

 

“Yes, he mentioned that.  So what are your thoughts?  Are you interested?”

 

“I think so.”

 

“I’m glad to hear it.  This’ll be good for you.  Of course, if you think it’ll affect the lab, then don’t take it.”

 

“I don’t know yet.  Let me get with Carol Stone and see how much work is involved.”

 

“Good plan.”  Patrick looked at the computer screen.  “Well, Bruce, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes and need to fire off a few emails beforehand.  If you run into any problems, let me know.”

 

“Will do.”