It's Not Luck - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [87]
“How cool,” Sharon squeals. “Remember, you promised to give Debbie and me a ride. All the girls will die. Yahoo!”
“Cool down, Sharon.” What a lively imagination. “They first have to fix it. Right now I doubt if it even has an engine.”
“Yes, it has,” Dave assures me. “The original, and it’s just been rebuilt. It runs like a dream. But of course, there’s lots of work to do before we can put it on the road. Lots and lots.”
“How did a fifty-six Olds become a nineteen-forty-six Cadillac?” I wonder what’s going on. “Where did you get the money? A forty-six Caddie with a good engine is not something that you can get for fifteen hundred dollars. Not even fifteen thousand.”
“It’s all thanks to you, Dad.”
“To me?”
“In a way. I took your work, you know, Jimmy and the boat, and . . .”
“What boat?” Sharon is all ears.
“Keep quiet, shrimp. I’ll tell you later,” Dave promises her. “Anyhow, I wrote my negative branches. Actually they boiled down to only two . . .”
“Dave, don’t try to sidetrack me by talking about the Thinking Processes. Where did you get the fortune to buy the car?”
“I’m telling you,” Dave sounds irritated.
“Let him tell the story,” Julie says. “It’s fascinating.”
“So I wrote two negative branches.” Dave is still a little put out. “One dealing with all the problems of sharing and maintaining the car between Herbie and me. You know, like what you had with Jimmy. The other was about Herbie’s problem getting the money.”
I barely listen. The kids had a hard time scraping up fifteen hundred dollars. Where the hell did they get the money for such an expensive car? How much was it? Thirty grand? Forty? Maybe even fifty?
“I started with the easy one,” Dave continues. “The one about the problems of sharing. I went over the logic with Herbie. I forced him to read every word. If I spent so much time writing it, he could spend the time to read it. He trimmed it in five seconds.”
“Tell your father how.” Julie makes sure that I get to hear all the details.
“Oh, it was simple. We both have to leave for college in September, so we decided that at the end of August we’ll sell it. That’s not much time, until then we’ll manage.”
“When will you finish the car?” I ask.
“Early July, we hope. I’m telling you, there really won’t be time to fight about it.”
“So the first negative branch was trimmed. Great. What about the second one?”
“The second branch was more sensitive. As I told you, I was concerned about where he was going to get the money. Well, it turned out he was planning to sell some grass.”
“What! You didn’t tell me this part.”
“Mom, cool down. You know that I would never agree to such a thing. Herbie knew it too. That’s why he didn’t tell me about it before.”
“So that was the end of that idea,” Julie states.
“Yes, but it wasn’t the end of our idea to restore a car. Herbie used our first injection to develop the second one. He said that since we were going to sell the car anyway, why not borrow from the future buyer. We knew approximately how much the car and the parts would cost us; about fifteen hundred dollars. Remember, at that stage we were still thinking about the Olds, we didn’t know about the Cadillac. On top of the cost to us, we estimated that we were each going to put about three months’ work into it. So we thought that offering it for twenty-five hundred would be a good bargain.”
“Whom are you going to sell it to?” I ask.
“To you,” he smiles at me.
“You are still talking about the Olds? Why do you think I would be interested in an Oldsmobile?” Really!
“That’s exactly what gave us the real idea,” Dave beams at me. “You see, I remembered what you told me about the difference between the perception of value of a supplier, and the perception of value of the market.”
“What does that have to do with it?” I ask, baffled.
“The way we figured the value of the car—you know, what it cost us and the labor—is the way a supplier