Chapter 38

Still Nikki's turn:

We survived the night. Yes, we did see the moon from the back yard. We can do this at night in the winter because the hordes of mosquitoes are gone.

Then we showered. And then we re-established the service of our bed. Our FIRST wedding bed.

We got up in the morning and went up the road for breakfast. No sense in making a mess in the kitchen on this short trip. Besides, the only ingredients we had on hand were the things that would keep well over the long term.

At the little diner we happily answered the inevitable "Where ya been?" and "How're things goin'?". This is our local diner, after all, and we've been in and out of it as a couple ever since they re-opened after the hurricane.

After breakfast, fully dressed for our meeting but with an hour to kill, we did a little tour to see the progress being made in the storm footprint before heading into town for our meeting.

Dan's phone rang. "Hi, Steve, what's up?" Pause. "Yes, we're on the road. I was going to drop Nikki off at the office while you and I did the site visit." Pause. "Really?!? That's great!" He turned to me. "Steve says that the client okayed you to go in with us. You're escorted and all that. Not working."

"Thanks, Mister Steve," I said loudly.

"Steve says 'you're welcome'," Dan said.

So, okay ... First time I've ever been inside one of those petrochemical plants. Had to watch the safety presentation, got a loaner hardhat and safety glasses. Followed a utility cart in through streets lined with towering steel and concrete, all heat and noise. Ended up trooping through a control room that I would have loved to explore.

We sat down in a conference room, me, my Dan, Mister Steve, and a couple of guys, the client engineers.

One of them stood up. "I'm Brian Statler. I'm the senior electrical engineer. Let's go around the table and introduce ourselves."

The guy next to him said, "I'm Sam Niel. maintenance manager."

Mister Steve said, "I'm Steve Oakley. Regional manager for HVS - High Voltage Services."

Dan said, "I'm Dan Granger. Electrical Engineer with 3Sigma Engineering."

All eyes were on me. "I'm Nikki Granger. Engineering student, Auburn University."

Before anybody else could say anything, Mister Steve jumped in. "Nikki says 'engineering student' but she's a master's candidate in electrical engineering."

"And your wife, right, Dan?" Brian said.

"That too," I injected.

"Nikki is interned with us. She works on power studies and I dare you to find somebody better qualified on communications networks for system protection." Dan. Taking up for me.

"Really?" Sam asked. "Master's candidate? You don't look old enough for that."

I smiled, trying my best 'who, me?' look.

"Uh, Nikki got tossed up two grades in high school last year. She's doing things at Auburn that require the Dean of Engineering to work with her. Trust me. Master's."

"We can talk later, if you want," I said.

The talk proceeded into the proposed work scope. Upgrades, taking 1950's and 1960's equipment into the 21st century. Millions of dollars were going to be spent. They wanted Dan to put the packages together, then after the equipment was ordered, to oversee installation, setup and commissioning.

"What's YOUR part of this going to be?" Brian asked. Putting me on a spot. Fortunately, it's a spot I'm prepared for.

"I get to do a lot of the dog work for the power studies, you know, load flows, fault studies, arc-flash studies. I also handle the programming for your protective devices and will work on the design for the communications between your field devices, your DCS (Auth. Note: Distributed Control System – the computers that control and record the operations of industrial processes) and your remote consoles."

"You do all this?" he questioned.

"Of course Dan or one of our other engineers rides herd on me. I work under their supervision." I didn't say that I would be collaborating with Cindy, a year younger, or Susan and Tina.

"You've done this before?"

"I have worked with a utility company in Alabama on their communications. They had some pathway issues. Tried to push too much data over a legacy system. We decided to use some fiber somebody had installed and almost forgotten. Like going from dial-up to broadband when we finished." And then I smiled. "If you're interested in one of my designs, type ThreeSigma dot com into your browser. Click on the logo twice. Type 'guest' at the prompt and you can see if my cat feeder is okay. I did the hardware. My contemporary did the programming."

Brian just stared. Sam tapped on his laptop. His jaw dropped. "This is your cat feeder?" He shoved his laptop to Brian. "Look at this!"

Cindy and I had fully instrumented the cat feeder: hopper level for food, liquid level for water. Cumulative use rates. Logs of the times that Tommi visited. We laughed at it as we built the display. It looked as formidable as a full scale process control, despite the fact that it monitored three pounds of dry cat food and two quarts of water.

"And you did this?" Sam asked.

"Yessir. Cindy and I did this. Design. Construction. Programming. That takes care of a couple of years of engineering labs, too. Tina and Susan, two of my other sisters, did the 3-D printing of parts and some of the hardware. There are four of us." I whipped out my iPad. "This is our crew." It was a picture of the four sisters in front of the business end of the railgun.

"No shit!" Sam said.

Brian looked at the picture and let out a low whistle. "You work with this bunch?" he asked Dan.

"Those four started at Auburn last June. In a year and a half every one of them will be degreed electrical engineers. Nikki and that little redhead will be presenting for their master's. Me, I curl up in a dark corner and shake sometimes."

"Tell 'em about the railgun," Steve encouraged.

"Railgun?" Sam asked.

"Yeah."

Sam looked at me. "What do you know about a railgun?"

"We, the girls in that picture, built and tested one. We don't have it any more. The government bought it and classified some of our research."

"Nikki's on the government payroll," Steve said.

"Well not exactly," I corrected. "We got paid for our railgun. We get a stipend for working with the research project."

"And HOW old are you again?" Sam asked.

"Sixteen, sir," I said. "Crazy, isn't it?"

Sam gazed at Brian. "We've pretty much decided that we want Steve's company to have this project. They're our approved vendor. And Brian says that the reason they've been our approved vendor is that Dan has been doing the work."

Brian grinned. "Not exactly. HVS has been providing good technical support on our maintenance and troubleshooting and installation, but we know that when it comes to the hard engineering, the deep stuff, the forensics, that's been Dan."

"So we got the job?" Steve asked.

"Do you have Dan?" Brian tossed back.

"We've talked about engineering rates. Basically, 3Sigma is subcontracted through us to you. You get Dan at cost plus fifteen percent," Steve replied.

"And 3Sigma may include hours by the other engineers and Nikki?"

"Is that a problem?" Dan asked.

"Not as long as YOU stand behind it."

"Then it's a done deal," Steve said.

"You're gonna be here when the equipment starts going in, right?" Brian asked.

"As needed," Dan replied. "Same during commissioning and testing."

The conversation degenerated to timelines and deliverables, then it was "Let's go to lunch", which Dan informs me is a common reason for face to face meetings in the first place. The five of us ended up at a mid-scale restaurant.

"It's a shame you're not eighteen, Nikki," Sam said. "You could bring a lot of work to a standstill just by showing up."

"Oh, I doubt that," I said. "Surely I'm not the first female engineer you've had here."

"You're the cutest, though," he said.

I blushed. "Thank you! But if Cindy showed up, they'd have an evacuation."

"Cindy?"

"The little redhead."

"Or Susan. She's the voluptuous blonde." I thought for a second. "And Susan's nineteen!"

Brian wanted details of my college experience. I told him about the math interviews.

"Interviews. Hmmph! I struggled and sweated through semesters of classes and you INTERVIEWED?"

"Just about the worst two days of my life," I said. "I didn't know what I was supposed to know. I didn't know what college math looked like except for what Cindy told me."

"Who's Cindy?" he asked.

"That little redhead. She was fourteen when she hit Auburn."

"Fourteen? You're kidding?"

Dan shook his head. "That's what I said. But when she and Nikki were talking, Cindy was an eighth-grader helping her teacher work on master's level math."

"How do you do math at that level when you're fourteen?" Sam queried.

"Or fifteen. I was fifteen."

Dan spread his hands, palms up. "You ask and you get 'it's like two plus two equals four. What else could it be?' I don't know. I watched. I was amazed."

"And the other courses?" Brian asked.

I described the books and the interviews and the written tests and the essays and papers. "And every now and then I walk in and the department head, Doctor Stebbins, is there with the professor. Makes sure I'm not taking shortcuts."

Brian laughed. You're doing four or five years of college in two. There's a shortcut somewhere."

"Railgun, Brian," Dan said. "Four teenaged girls built a railgun."

"And it worked?" Sam asked.

"Thirty-eight hundred feet per second with off the shelf and salvaged components. We could've gone higher but we only had a commercial bullet trap."

"What was your senior project, Brian?" Steve asked.

"Ain't fair," Brian snorted. "You know I didn't do the power option. I did some signal processing."

"Really???" I squealed. "Tell me about it!"

When we finally left, I asked, "Did I do okay?"

"You were spectacular. Ol' Brian may go hang hisself when he thinks about some of what he found out about you, but you did just fine."

"Good," I said. "I want to be a help."

"You're more than just a help, baby."

"Good. Now if we can go by the florist's..." I had another goal. Grandma's grave.

"I don't mean to be morbid, but I need to visit her grave, baby," I said.

"I understand completely, little one, and no, it's not morbid. It's respectful."

The florist provided me with a small spray of chrysanthemums, a flower that Grandma loved. The cemetery was adjacent to the church where she said I was baptized. We pulled into the cemetery. I knew where I was heading. We parked and I took Dan by the hand until we found a simple grave, no small feat in south Louisiana where custom sometimes expresses itself in some ornate tombs.

The headstone was simple. Grandma's name and two years.

I put the flowers in the little stone vase. Taking Dan's hand for support, because I was starting to tear up, I said, "Grandma, I know this is not where you really are, but it's where we came to talk. This is Dan, my husband. I wish you could have met him. He's who you taught me I should marry. There's not a day that passes that I don't thank God for the time you spent teaching me right from wrong, teaching me how to be an adult, how to be a lady."