By which time I would have to hire a whole new bunch of strangers, assuming that I could find such people. Then I would likely end up having to fire half of them for incompetence, after gracing each such bumble fingered fool with a month’s pay in return for his efforts at screwing things up. And then I would have to waste yet another month teaching those with some small bit of ability the proper way to get things done. That is to say, my way.
All with the net result of an ungodly amount of personal aggravation, late deliveries, and cost overruns that, in this industry, you generally have to eat on your own. It’s not like doing “cost plus” work for the government. Starting with a new crew, my next job would run at a loss, not only to my bank account, but also to my reputation, which—in the long run—is the only really important thing that any company has ever got. Once you have the right reputation, you can buy everything else you need.
THREE
I sat alone in my office wondering what I would do next, after I fired everybody, when the room darkened and I noticed that my chief engineer was filling the doorway into my office.
Adam Kulczyinski is the biggest man I’ve ever met, standing six foot five, and so wide that, from a distance, he looks squat. He’s powerful, not like a bodybuilder, but like a big time wrestler who’s going to seed. He has thick legs, thicker arms, and a big, hanging gut. When you add thinning, unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, and a huge beak of a nose, you have a remarkable looking individual.
He walked in with a yellow legal pad filled with numbers and sketches, sat down in the chair across from me, and put his feet up on my desk. His shoes were very expensive Italian jobs, since with what I had to pay to keep him, he could afford anything he wanted. But the soles were worn through because he never got enough time off work to either have them fixed or buy a new pair.
His suit was crumpled, of course, since his suit was always crumpled. On business trips, I’ve seen Adam put on a good suit fresh from the cleaners, and watched it crumple as he stood there. It was just one of his many magical talents.
Another of his peculiarities was that he always wore both a belt and suspenders. I’d asked him about that, and he’d said, “A good engineer, he don’t take no chances.”
Now, most people would get fired for putting heel marks on their boss’s desk, but I’ll put up with a lot from a man who really knows what he’s doing.
Hell, once I went into engineering to find Adam winning a farting contest with a Japanese customer. Three detailers were acting as judges, holding up scorecard numbers for volume, odor, and tonal quality. When I mentioned his conduct to him later, all he would allow was that, “Yeah, well, it probably woudda shown more class if I’d ‘a let da customer win. I just got carried away wit da spirit of da competition, is all.”
Adam was one of the few people left in the world who still spoke with a Hamtramck (pronounced hamTRAMik) accent. Hamtramck is a small city that is completely surrounded by the city of Detroit, like a tough little amoeba that a bigger amoeba could swallow but couldn’t quite digest. Any place else in the world, the larger city would simply have absorbed the smaller one, but here, for fairly good reasons, the city fathers involved were just plain scared to try it.
You see, early in the century, Hamtramck had been populated by Poles who had abandoned Europe in favor of the American car factories. For many years, it was actually the largest Polish-speaking city on earth. Thus, those who “came over on the boat” never had to learn English at all, and the second generation developed something that was almost a creole of English and Polish. It involved substituting a “T” sound for an unvoiced “TH”, and a “D” for the one that was voiced. The word order used was half way between the two parent languages, and its other unwritten rules were beyond my understanding. Furthermore, while I have never been able to get Adam to admit it, I am positive that he has a lot of fun making his statements as deliberately ambiguous as possible, and just filled with internal contradictions.
In writing this history, I have found that I am completely unable to do justice (or rather to do proper injustice) to his strange accent. Nothing that I am capable of putting on paper sounds exactly like whatever it is that Adam actually does. I regret to say that even when I am quoting him, you must take it for granted that what I am actually doing is paraphrasing his statements into something closer to a civilized tongue.
Yet while Adam’s accent was probably authentic, to the extent that it really was what he grew up with, it was more than a little bit phony as well. I say this because sometimes, when he was tired or distracted, he would start speaking pure, Midwest Standard English, the language of Walter Cronkite, until he caught himself and went back to his Hamtramck accent.
His constant use of an illiterate creole convinced some people that he was a “regular” sort of guy, and others, who didn’t know him well, that he was a fool. He liked people thinking both of those things. Very few of his associates realized that he had graduated summa cum laude from Michigan Tech, an engineering school that is second only to Cal Tech and MIT. He never mentioned it. In fact, I’ve heard him denying that he’d even graduated from high school. The only reasons I knew about his education were because I’d seen his resume when I’d hired him, and because I went to the same school that he had. Oh, he’d been a senior when I was a freshman, and we’d never actually met during that year, but it was not easy to miss a man as big as Adam in a crowd.
Even then, I’d phoned our old school, not so much to verify his technical skills, but to see if he’d actually passed an English course. He had. Indeed, he’d minored in English Literature, and pulled straight A’s doing it.
But whether it was because of or in spite of his various peculiarities, when Adam designed a machine, the machine performed flawlessly. What’s more, it generally worked perfectly the first time it was turned on.
Therefore, if Adam wanted to talk with his feet on my desk, I was willing to listen with my feet on the rug.
“I take it that that’s not your resume,” I said, pointing to his pad of yellow notes.
“Nah, I do dose on one of da draftin plotters, on dat nice cotton bond what I had you pay for.”
“I wondered why you wanted that stuff.”
“Well, if you woudda axed me, I woudda told youse.”
“Maybe I just didn’t want to know. So what’s your idea?”
“So sales has screwed up again, and we’re looking at some serious layoffs.”
From Adam, this was a remarkably tactful statement, seeing as how I did most of the actual sales work myself. Not out of choice, you understand, but because I have yet to find a sales engineer who was both good at his job and willing to work for somebody else once he’d learned the ropes. You have to be a good engineer to be able to talk to other engineers, and once you have the sales contacts besides, the temptation to “buy your own cannon,” and run a company the way one ought to be run is just too strong.
I’m very familiar with the process, since that’s how I got my company started twelve years ago, and that’s how I lost my first (and last) four sales engineers. And so although I suppose that it represents a monumental case of hypocrisy on my part, well, let’s just say that I’d gotten tired of training my own future competitors a long ways back.
“Look, I’ve gotten solid promises for two big lines in a couple of months. Most of the guys and girls have been working sixty, seventy hours a week for over a year now. By the time they come back from a long, deserved, company-paid vacation, there will be plenty of work for them to do,” I said.
“Nah, you know better den dat. Dees guys, dey been pulling down twice deir regular wages for so long dat dey tink forty hours’ pay is like bein’ on welfare. Dere’s udder outfits around wit plenty of work dat’ud snap up our best people in a hurry. But me, I figure dat if we could give dem sometin fun to do, we could keep our best ones, anyway. Say ten from engineering and maybe a dozen from da shop. Da other tirty-five, well, dey’re not so bad, but we could live without ’em, and anyway, dey’re the ones dat will still be dere without a job when we need ’em back again.”