The Best-Laid Plans

[sasha]

(Another true (mostly) story from the annals of Science...)


Before their sale to Imaje Inkjet sometime in the 2000s, Markem Corporation of Keene, NH, was a privately-held company, and one of the last bastions of the flinty Yankee stereotype that prizes independent self-sufficiency as the greatest of the virtues. This sort regards with disdain those who actually take their car to a service center to change the oil; this is what a Man does. Only Women and Flatlanders pay good money to have someone else perform simple automotive maintenance chores like changing the oil or rebuilding the transmission. This same logic looks with suspicion and distaste upon egregious creature comforts, regarding them as needless self-indulgence, and probably (much more than the money talk of ROI and amortization of capital) is the real reason they lacked and refused to even consider installing central air conditioning until just prior to their sale.

While I was there, productivity in August would plummet. During those languid, endless, humid afternoons when the thermometer at the Cheshire Bank registered in the high 90s, the work pace slowed to that typical of a rural Alabama crossroad garage. Electric fans might have created the illusion of cooling, but only by sitting motionless before one could you reap even that meager benefit. Papers stuck to your arms, undershirts to your back, and good hair days were weeks away.

On one such afternoon in the early 1980s, I was hanging out in one of the few oases of cool with our lab technician, Wayne Anderson. Wayne had been hired to replace me after my promotion to Associate Scientist, and had proven to be a far better technician than I had ever been. Tall and lanky, with long blonde hair and a beard that refused to fill in, Wayne had come from Electric Boat in Groton CT, and possessed a sense of laboratory organization that I never seemed to have the time for. Under my care, the lab had been as cluttered and disorganized as some crazy cat-lady’s house. Under Wayne's, all the wrenches were arranged by size on pegboard. Where I'd been scattershot and impulsive, Wayne was neat and meticulous.

But on a sweltering afternoon in August, neither of us was especially interested in pushing back the frontier of science. This was a Friday, too, additional incentive to goldbrick. Our boss, Bob Monroe, had given us the means by taking the day off so he could enjoy a 3-day weekend at his cottage on Cape Cod. The AC unit reassuringly thundered beside us while we passed the time as we often did unsupervised on sweltering Friday afternoons, in earnest debate over which of the girls next door in Electrical Assembly possessed the biggest breasts, and speculation on which of them might be most amenable to affording one a closer view.

Then behind us, the lab door was opened, and we turned to see by whom. Buddy Hale from Receiving was maneuvering a hand truck bearing a bulky package through the door, and I slid from my perch to hold the door for him. Buddy expressed appreciation with his usual graceful charm by emitting a reluctant grunt that in Halese meant "thanks, I guess", and set the package down in the first open space he could find. He tipped the carton away from him and slid the truck out from under it. "Nice in here," he said in a tone that dripped sarcasm and resentment like the sweat running down his face. This was Halese for "You College Boys must think you're pretty special to rate AC, huh."

Wayne was fluent in Halese, and responded in kind. "Sure is," he cheerfully replied. "Too bad you don't have any down where you're stuck."

"Yeah, well fuck you too," Hale said, and laughed in an attempt to convince us it was all in good fun.

"Here, let me get the door for you," I said, and held the lab door open. A wave of hot, fetid air billowed inward, but no matter. The AC had originally been installed to remove the waste heat generated by a 300-watt Coherent CO2 laser, and now that we had mothballed that device, it was more than equal to the task of removing a few niggardly BTU's from without. We could afford to piss it away. I smiled while Buddy wiped his face with his arm as he ventured back out into the furnace. I shut the door behind him, and the AC rattled back into life.

We regarded the mysterious package squatting silently on the linoleum floor.

"Wonder what it is," Wayne said.

I peered down at the invoice. "It's for Gary Fielding," I said.

"Who's it from?" Wayne asked.

"Cole-Parmer," I read, and shrugged.

He shrugged too. "Could be anything."

The AC shut down again, having handily removed the bit of humid air we'd replaced Buddy Hale with.

But the package remained mute and noncommital.

"Wonder what it is," Wayne repeated.

"Me too," I said. I withdrew my Swiss Army knife from my pocket and pulled open the large blade.

A grin slowly overspread his face. “Wait a minute. I don’t see a calibration sticker on that instrument!” he mockingly reprimanded.

“It’s for Reference Only." I moved to slit the packing tape sealing the box shut, but Wayne suddenly said, "Wait! Let's tip it over, first."

I saw what he was up to. Open it up from the bottom, so we could sneak in and play with Gary's toy, whatever it was, then replace it, without Gary ever being the wiser. Not that Gary would mind - he was a kindred spirit, about our age, an easygoing mechanical engineer with a kind and gentle sense of humor. He'd relate to our curiosity and be tickled by our resourceful deceptiveness in satisfying it.

Wayne manhandled the box upside-down, and I carefully slit the packing tape. I took care not to cut the cardboard - we could reseal the carton with a length of packing tape from Shipping. Once the tape was cut, we opened the cardboard flaps and peered inside.

Shiny chrome-plated aluminum tubing, stylishly curved. A company brochure, and some paperwork in a ziploc bag. Because we were looking at the thing upside down, it took a few seconds to fully register.

"It's just a chair," Wayne finally said, palpable disappointment in his voice. We'd both been hoping for something a little more high-tech, something with lots of indicator lights and panel switches. Instead it was just a swivel-based lab chair.

"Nice one though," I observed, and lifted it out. I set it right-side up on the floor. "Comfortable, too."

"And here we are still suffering these World War 2 leftovers," Wayne protested, gesturing to the battered olive-drab steel chair with the chipped paint and the warped masonite seat that supported his buttocks as it had once supported mine.

And suddenly we caught each other's glance and had the same idea at the same time and burst out laughing. Without any planning or discussion, we set to work.

I pushed the shiny new chair out of the way into a corner while Wayne retrieved the ancient, battered stool from his workbench. We held our breath while he tentatively slipped it down into the box. If it didn't fit, our little prank would die stillborn. But we were in luck. The box fit the hideous antique as though it had been designed to.

He pulled the chair partway back out so I could tape the paperwork to the seat, and giggling like first-graders looking up dirty words in an unabridged dictionary, we eased it back down into the box. I ventured out into the tropical humidity for the walk down to Shipping, and returned several minutes later with a fresh strip of packing tape. Despite the humidity, the water had partly dried, but there was enough moisture condensed out on the AC's heat-exchanger coils to freshen the adhesive, and we resealed the box as we'd found it. We tipped it back right-side up and manhandled it out into the ME lab, where we left it by Gary's workbench.

All in all, we thought, a good Friday afternoon's work. Come Monday, we'd discretely hang out in the ME lab waiting for Gary to open his package. We'd gape in astonishment at the monstrosity within, shake our heads in disbelief that any company would try to get away with such a thing, and just before Gary got himself worked up into a righteous fury we'd laugh and go "Ta-Da!" and wheel the real chair out from its hiding place in our lab. Then we'd dance around high-fiving, hooting and bonding, before settling down to work. It'd all be over in 5 minutes, and completely forgotten in 10.

That was the plan, anyway.

Over the course of the weekend, our little escapade had completely slipped my mind, and I drove into work Monday morning contemplating how numerical methods might prove more effective at determining fluid inks’ surface energy than the clumsy apparatus we’d been using. In the relative cool of early morning I entered the building eager to get started, but found myself in an overturned beehive instead.

There was an air of crisis about the place. Grim-faced engineers barely returned my “Good Morning!” as I made my way to the lab, and it was too early in the day for so many people to be placing such urgent phone calls.

I put my lunch in the lab fridge and turned to Wayne. We could hear someone over in the ME lab carrying on an angry, animated exchange. "What in hell's going on around here this morning?" I asked.

"They found the chair," Wayne said between sips of coffee.

I stared blankly at him. "Chair?"

He pointed to the shiny new black lab chair tucked off in a corner, and I remembered. "All this commotion about that?" I asked incredulously.

He nodded. "Well," he said evenly. "Gary may have signed the PO, but the chair wasn't for him." He sighed and shook his head, as if regretful for his participation in the affair. "It was for his drafter.”

"Who is...?" I prompted.

"Bill Cartwright," he said, and started to laugh.

Oh my God, I thought. Bill Cartwright...

Bill Cartwright was a sour, humorless, low-level engineer with the word "Yankee" written all over him. Bill's idea of funny was his wife sticking herself with a needle while sewing on one of his buttons, or someone else pounding a thumb with a hammer. I'd seen him convulsed with laughter when one of the electrical engineers - twenty years his junior, with perfectly coiffed hair and the brash self-confidence of youth - spill a cup of coffee down the front of his shirt and tie. Bill didn't wear ties, they don't go with flannel. And if he did, they would clip on. Bill carried every mechanical pencil he'd ever been issued in his breast pocket, and boasted a fine collection of pocket protectors. Horn-rimmed glasses, whitewall haircut, and high-water chinos (to better display his white socks) completed his ensemble. He spoke with the unmistakable nasal twang of old-time New England, and referred to his front yard as the "dooryard" (though it came out more like "doah-yahd" and the space below his house (known in more civilized parts of the world as the "basement") as his "cellah". Noontime repast was “dinnah”, whether it was turkey with the fixin’s, or a sandwich and banana eaten from a black gable-topped “lunchpail”. And every year, he carefully hoarded his vacation days for the end of November - deer season.

Furthermore, in deference to the gustatory habits of striped bass, Bill's summer hours were from 6:00 am to 3:00 pm. Mine were from 8:00 to 5:00, so not only had he been the one to blunder into the trip wires we’d set out for Gary Fielding, he’d had nearly two hours to stew in it.

I gleaned from Wayne (who had wisely chosen to quietly observe from the sidelines) that Bill had indignantly pointed out his new purchase to at least a half-dozen unwilling passersby, and had pounced on Gary the moment the latter had walked in the door. Gary's boss happened to stop by while Bill was railing on and on about the ethics of the company who'd taken Markem money in return for their refuse, and sternly ordered Gary to look into it. Gary had notified Receiving and asked their help, and had gone on to delegate the task of calling the vendor to Purchasing, whose best agents were on the phone at the moment, talking to a salesperson at the other end who had no idea what they were talking about. Receiving had called the carrier, who was now diligently backtracking the package's progress from one depot to another. Rest assured, they grimly promised, We'll find out who did this.

And our own boss, Bob Monroe, was due in any time now to find out how things went on Friday, and would undoubtedly spot the sparkling new lab chair hiding under Wayne's workbench and wonder how it got there. Bob & I had a cordial but somewhat stiff relationship, and had never managed to be truly at ease with one another. Over the past year I’d occasionally wondered if I’d made the right move in coming to Markem, and even my recent promotion had failed to completely dispel the doubts.

Despite the AC, I broke into a sweat. It wasn't supposed to have unfolded like this...

Bob and his boss came into the lab, each carrying a steaming mug of coffee. "Did you guys hear anything about a package delivered to Gary sometime Friday afternoon?" they asked us.

Wayne and I glanced at one another, but kept our faces deadpan.

"Uh," I began.

"We saw Buddy Hale drop something off late in the day," Wayne offered truthfully.

"Bob, could I talk with you for a minute?" I stammered.

He looked at me with a curious look on his face. "Why, what's the matter?" he asked solicitously.

I looked back to Wayne. I'm going to the mat for you, bro, my eyes tried to say. "Let's go across the hall," I suggested. The Environmental Chamber wasn't being used at the moment, and possessed a heavy meat-locker door whose insulation not only kept the interior of the chamber at whatever temperature and humidity you dialed in, but also rendered it pretty soundproof.

Bob looked anxious and concerned when I pulled the door shut behind us. The last time I'd invited him into the chamber to discuss something, it was to take him to task for upbraiding me for some minor offense in front of visitors. He hated the touchy-feely aspect of management, and was clearly uncomfortable with what I might have to say to him within this Cone of Silence.

I spilled my guts to him, apologized profusely for the chaos our little prank had engendered, and volunteered myself for a transfer to one of our customer's sweat shops in the Phillipines.

Instead of taking me up on my offer, he started laughing. Coffee slopped up over the rim of his cup onto the floor of the chamber, and he pointed at me as if to say, "You?? You did this??" He finally managed to compose himself long enough to assure me that he'd handle Purchasing and Receiving, provided I 'fessed up to Old Bill Cartwright.

Not a pleasant task that, but at least it was man to man. I found all I had to do was keep from smirking, to assure him No, I did not think it was funny and I can't imagine what possessed me to do that, and to let him gruffly posture and hold forth for a few minutes. After pressuring from me assurance that I would never do anything like that again, he let me off the hook. I returned to the lab determined to find something else that would get under his skin. (I eventually learned that he had an unnatural aversion to eraser crumbs, so I began saving all of mine.)

And Bob and I seemed to warm a little more to one another after that, too...


 

[mnaz]

Good story. I think you started to "speak more of their language" (so to speak).

[sasha]

Good story.

thanks - pranks that backfired make for better stories, immho (though I've got a few that came off per plan)

I think you started to "speak more of their language" (so to speak).

sorry, not sure what you mean by this.....whose language....?

[mnaz]

Sorry, I meant Bob in particular. If you and he warmed up to each other after the prank, then maybe he was one to appreciate a good prank; a "connection" a little deeper than boss/worker or tech stuff.

Btw I also like your scene-setting descriptions here, such as "flinty Yankee" and "rural Alabama crossroad garage."

[sasha]

ahh, got it. Bob & I did learn to relax with one another. I mostly had good relationships there - one guy that I couldn't stand (and he returned the sentiment), and one woman I fell hard for (who did not return the sentiment) - actually had a career there.

Thanks for the positive statements. Had an English prof in college who hammered home the importance of concrete imagery - not necessarily a lot of details, just the right ones.