Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [119]
Currently his greatest friend in the world was his collection of pink carbon copies. He’d done his best, but he wasn’t going to carry the can when this lot finally fell over, and his pink carbon copies would see to it that he didn’t. White memo paper to the chairman, yellow carbon copy to the file, pink copy you kept. No one could say he hadn’t warned them.
A two-inch stack of the latest copies was attached to his clipboard. Now, feeling like an elder god leaning down through the clouds of some Armaggedon and booming “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you? Did you listen? Too late to listen now!” he put on a voice of strained patience:
“I’ve got six maint’nance teams. I had eight last week. I sent you a memo about that, got the copies right here. We ought to have eighteen teams. Half the lads are needin’ to be taught as we go, and we ain’t got time for teachin’. In the ol’ days we’d set up walkin’ towers to take the load an’ we ain’t got men even to do that now—”
“All right, it’ll take time, we understand,” said Greenyham. “How long will it take if you…hire more men and get these walking towers working and—”
“You made me sack a lot of the craftsmen,” said Pony.
“We didn’t sack them, we ‘let them go,’” said Gilt.
“We…downsized,” said Greenyham.
“Looks like you succeeded, sir,” said Pony. He took a stub of pencil out of one pocket and a grubby notebook out of the other.
“D’you want it fast or cheap or good, gentlemen?” he said. “The way things have gone, can only give you one out of three…”
“How soon can we have the Grand Trunk running properly?” said Greenyham, while Gilt leaned back and shut his eyes.
Pony’s lips moved as he ran eyes over his figures.
“Nine months,” he said.
“I suppose if we’re seen to be working hard, nine months of erratic running won’t seem too—” Mr. Stowley began.
“Nine months shut down,” said Mr. Pony.
“Don’t be a fool, man!”
“I ain’t a fool, sir, thank you,” said Pony sharply. “I’ll have to find and train new craftsmen, ’cos a lot of the old brigade won’t come back whatever I offer. If we shut the towers down, I can use the signalers, at least they know their way around a tower. We can get more work done if we don’t have to drag walking towers and set them up. Make a clean start. The towers were never built that well to begin with. Dearheart never expected this sort of traffic. Nine months of dark towers, sirs.”
He wanted to say, oh, how he wanted to say: Craftsmen. D’you know what that means? It means men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush, no matter what you pay them. So I’m employing people as “craftsmen” now who’re barely fit to sweep out a workshop. But you don’t care, because if they don’t polish a chair with their arse all day you think a man who’s done a seven-year apprenticeship is the same as some twerp who can’t be trusted to hold a hammer by the right end. He didn’t say this aloud, because although an elderly man probably has a lot less future than a man of twenty, he’s far more careful about it…
“You can’t do better than that?” said Stowley.
“Mr. Stowley, I’ll be doin’ well if it’s only nine months,” said Pony, focusing again. “If you don’t want to shut down, I can maybe get it done in a year and a half, if I can find enough men and you’re ready to spend enough money. But you’ll have shutdowns every day. It’ll be crippled runnin’, sir.”
“This man von Lipwig will walk all over us in nine months!” said Greenyham.
“Sorry about that, sir.”
“And how much will it cost?” asked Gilt dreamily, without opening his eyes.
“One way or the other, sir, I reckon maybe two hundred thousand,” said Pony.
“That’s ridiculous! We paid less than that for the Trunk!” Greenyham burst out.
“Yes, sir. But, you see, you got to run maint’nance all the time, sir. The towers have been run ragged. There was that big gale back in Sektober and all that trouble in Uberwald. I haven’t got the manpower. If you don’t do maint