I had a good time at Hired Girl all through March and April. I had all the professional tools I could want, technical journals, the indispensable trade catalogues, a practical library, a Drafting Dan (Hired Girl did not make a drafting machine themselves, so they used the best on the market, which was Aladdin’s), and the shoptalk of professionals: music to my ears!
I got acquainted especially with Chuck Freudenberg, components assistant chief engineer. For my money Chuck was the only real engineer there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics including McBee, for the chief engineer was, I thought, a clear proof that it took more than a degree and a Scottish accent to make an engineer. After we got better acquainted Chuck admitted that he felt the same way. “Mac doesn’t really like anything new; he would rather do things the way his grandpa did on the bonnie banks of the Clyde.”
“What’s he doing in this job?”
Freudenberg did not know the details, but it seemed that the present firm bad been a manufacturing company which had simply rented the patents (my patents) from Hired Girl, Inc. Then about twenty years ago there had been one of those tax-saving mergers, with Hired Girl stock swapped for stock in the manufacturing firm and the new firm taking the name of the one that I had founded. Chuck thought that MeBee had been hired at that time. “He’s got a piece of it, I think.”
Chuck and I used to sit over beers in the evening and discuss engineering, what the company needed, and the whichness of what. His original interest in me had been that I was a Sleeper. Too many people, I had found, had a queasy interest in Sleepers (as if we were freaks) and I avoided letting people know that I was one. But Chuck was fascinated by the time jump itself and his interest was a healthy one in what the world had been like before he was born, as recalled by a man who literally remembered it as “only yesterday.”
In return be was willing to criticize the new gadgets that were always boiling up in my head, and set me straight when I (as I did repeatedly) would rough out something that was old hat . . . in 2001 Ad). Under his friendly guidance I was becoming a modem engineer, catching up fast.
But when I outlined to him one April evening my autosecretary idea he said slowly, “Dan, have you done work on this on company time?”
“Huh? No, not really. Why?”
“How does your contract read?”
“What? I don’t have one.” Curtis had put me on the payroll and Galloway had taken pictures of me and had a ghost writer asking me silly questions; that was all.
“Mmm . . . pal, I wouldn’t do anything about this until you are sure where you stand. This is really new. And I think you can make it work.”
“I hadn’t worried about that angle.”
“Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It’s making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we’ve brought out in five years are ones we’ve acquired by license. I can’t get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don’t . . . unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check.”
I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good-I didn’t need them once I had them in my head. I didn’t feel guilty about it; they hadn’t hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month’s pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.
But by then I’d be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I’d take him with me.
Instead of handing my story to the newspapers, Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.