Chapter 17

It was about the middle of the morning when Brenda escorted a very timid looking Tina into my office.

"Hi Tina," I said with a big smile. "I see you've met Brenda."

"Yes, she was kind enough to help me find you."

"So, did you get the job?" I asked.

Tina's smile would have lighted Michigan. "He wants me to start tomorrow. I'm not sure I can, though. I don't know what to do about the kids."

"Is Mom keeping them for you now?"

"Yes, and I'm sure she'll do it for a few days, but if I'm going to move over here, I'll need to find someone in the area."

"Brenda, do you know what any of the other women do about their kids?" I asked.

"No, but I'll find out," Brenda said. "Welcome to Belding, Tina."

Tina gave her a smile and said, "Thank you, Brenda. Things are going to be confusing for a while for me, I guess."

"Missy's furniture is all still in her apartment. I'm sure she wouldn't mind if you use it for a while. We were just going to put it in storage. This'll save us some money."

"She said you'd have to renew the lease on her apartment. Do you know if she's done that?"

"No, we were waiting to see if you got the job or not. I'll talk to her at lunch and have her do that. I'll also ask her about the furniture at the same time. Do you have furniture that needs to be moved?"

"No. We're in a furnished apartment right now. About all we have is our clothes."

"Then, if Brenda can find you some daycare for the kids, you can move right over. Is your car good enough to get you back and forth until you move?"

Tina laughed. "Dad spends a lot of time on that car. It isn't much, but I think it'll make it for a week or so."

"Let me know if you have any trouble with it, and we'll work something out," I told her.

We talked for a few more minutes, and then Tina said she should get home and get things ready for coming to work, in the morning.

Missy said she didn't mind for Tina to use her furniture for a while. She even said she might give most of it to Tina when we got married.

"So, when are you thinking we should get married?" I asked.

Missy grinned and said, "Probably before we ever went to bed together. I don't have anything new to entice you with now."

"I don't know about that," I said. "You still owe me something over eighteen thousand times."

Missy giggled and Brenda looked puzzled. "Private joke," I told her.

"How about the first of June in Muncie?" Missy asked.

"That sounds good to me," I grinned. "Mom and Dad are going to want to be there. Tina probably will want to be there, too."

"My husband and I will be there," Brenda said.

I had no idea at the time, but those weren't the only people from Belding who decided they just couldn't pass up the chance to see two of their own get married.

Jason seemed really happy to see us when we walked into his hospital room. They had given him a single room, so he had some privacy. He seemed to be in good spirits, considering all that had happened to him.

Week 9 - Wednesday

Missy, Brenda and I had breakfast together in the cafeteria again. When we were about half way through we were joined by Marty.

"The slot controller boards are due in today," Missy told him. "I'll get started building them as soon as they arrive."

"I can't imagine what you'd be thinking about building," Marty said with a grin.

"What do you mean?" Missy asked.

"The boards will be fully populated when we get them," Marty told her. "All you have to do is set the address switches, load the EPROMS and pop them in their cases. It shouldn't take you more than an hour."

"Very nice," Missy grinned. "How did you manage that?"

"It's amazing what a little incentive will get for you. I'm negotiating with the company for quite a bit of business with them. I can almost guarantee these boards will be perfect."

"That's fantastic. Bob and I have come up with a program for testing them. Is there any possibility of getting five people to help with the testing? I'm afraid that if I try to do it with one or two people, they'll make mistakes."

"Not a problem. You can have all of the support people for as long as you need them. This could be big for us, Missy. I talked with Charley Timmons and showed him the new spec sheet and he says he can guarantee us five systems with from 4,000 to 12,000 slots without even trying. One of the big problems with the old system was that we were limited to 4096 slots. With your design, we'll be able to hit 32,000 with one computer and Bob says he can come up with a multiple computer system that will give us a system that is virtually unlimited."

"Are we talking a profitable system here, Marty?"

"Timmons gave me some figures and I believe he's being honest as to what he says he can sell the systems for. Based on the projected costs that Missy came up with and on the negotiations I've been doing with the companies who are building them, we'll clear over five million on these five systems alone. Timmons says there is a huge market."

"I'll have to quote my future wife here and say, 'very nice'."

"Isn't it though," Marty grinned.

I talked with Mike for a few minutes and updated him on Jason's condition. Then I told him what Marty had told me about the order picker systems and the potential profit from them.

"Pete Welsh told me it was a dead market," he said. "I wonder why he did that?"

"I've been told that Jim Shear told our sales people to quit selling the system because he could no longer get some of the parts for it. This is just an assumption on my part, but I just don't think Shear wanted to work on designing a replacement system."

Mike nodded. "I was wondering about that. It seems like our new firebrands in R&D didn't even let that slow them down. You did well in what you have done with R&D."

"There are going to be a lot more changes in that department, Mike. Ninety percent of the people in that department think the way Shear thought. We're going to have to replace most of the people."

"Your call, Ed. I can't argue with results."

"For the most part I'm going to let Marty make his own decisions on this. Missy is a go-getter in electronics. We could probably use another one just like her. I think we also need a couple of mechanical engineers with the same attitude. I haven't talked with Marty about this. I want to see what conclusions he comes to on his own."

"Oh. By the way," Mike said, "our attorney called me yesterday and said our friend Abdul has filed a lawsuit against us for wrongfully terminating him. The attorney says it's crap and not to worry about it."

"Well, I don't see how he could claim discrimination or anything like that. He was fired for cause. It so states in his termination papers."

"That's exactly what he's claiming. I don't think it'll go anywhere."

When Missy joined Brenda and me for lunch, she said, "The testing is in progress. We'll have at least a hundred iterations on each controller by the end of the day. We haven't had a failure yet."

"Very good," I said. "You know, I'm not the only one who thinks highly of you around here. Mike Severt was talking about you today."

Missy didn't say anything, but her grin was a mile wide.

That afternoon, Brenda and I put the final touches on our new engineering directive for spending while traveling. I was sure there would be some grumbling about it, but it was something I felt had to be done.

Week 9 - Thursday

"June first, huh?" I said, as Missy and I were having coffee the next morning. "Is that going to give you enough time to get things set up?"

"It gives me three weeks. Mom will take care of a lot of things, so I don't have to worry about most of it. I called her last night and she's tickled to death. She said to give you a big kiss for her."

I had to smile. "Are you thinking of inviting anyone from work?" I asked.

"Yeah, we should invite a few people. Since it's so far away I doubt that many of them will come. Brenda and Marty should be invited for sure."

"Well, we should invite Mike Severt and the other engineering managers too. They probably won't come, but at least they can't feel left out that we didn't invite them."

"I guess you're right. I'll see if Mom can reserve a block of rooms at the Holiday Inn in case they do want to come."

"I'm sure my parents and Tina are going to want to be there," I said.

"Good. Now let's get into work. I need to start working on some other ideas I've had for the order picker."

Marty called me right after I got in my office and asked if we could get together sometime next week and go over their proposal for switching to fiberoptics. I told him that would be fine and set aside a couple of hours on Tuesday.

It wasn't long after that when Gene and Mel came in looking as white as ghosts. Brenda noticed and followed them into my office. I waved everyone to seats and asked, "What's up?"

"Something very bad has happened, Ed," Mel said.

"Larry Steinhelm and Bart Maven are at Consolidated Grocers, in Los Angeles," Gene said. "Their sort controller was giving them problems, and Larry and Bart went out to see if they could find what's causing it."

"Okay."

"Do you know what a Pick Car is, Ed?" Mel wanted to know.

"Vaguely. We don't make them any more, do we?"

"No, we don't. A Pick Car is basically a platform that moves back and forth on railroad rails. It has a conveyor on it that moves boxes along and drops them down on another conveyor that runs between the rails. The picker moves the car along to a pick slot where pallets of product are stored. He picks up the correct number of boxes, slaps a label on each of them and drops them on the conveyor. Then, he moves on to the next slot where he is to pick up cartons."

"Okay. That is basically what I remember about them."

"These things move along at a pretty good clip and they weigh a ton... actually, they weigh several tons. We've put in all kinds of safety devices to protect the operator and to protect anyone who might wander onto the tracks. The driver has to stand on two separate footplates. He has to grip a lever with his left hand and he uses his right hand on a control that is like the accelerator on a motorcycle to get the car to move."

"That sounds reasonable."

"Well, the driver of one of the Pick Cars at Consolidated found a way to get around all of that. He put weights on both of the footplates, and taped the lever closed. He then used his left hand to control the cart, so he could stand anywhere while he drove it," Gene said.

"He'd lean out of the car as he was coming to the proper slot and grab a box before the car stopped rolling. He was working on piece rate, and he could pick a lot more boxes that way in a day. Today he made a mistake. He leaned out too soon. His body was pinched between the Pick Car and a building column."