VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [143]
“I don’t see what difference it makes. It all has to be done anyway, so, like, if I’m doing centrifuge, why not do all the centrifuge? You know? Like, why do you want me to stop doing centrifuge and go do elastometer?”
Or:
“Oh, I forgot. You needed that today, didn’t you?”
These were often the smart people, too. Sometimes the less intelligent – the ones who did not question – got it quicker.
For Sarah Schwick, organic chemistry had always come easily. Human chemistry was much more challenging. She learned in this time that she had to be strong, yet gentle. She could not be a diamond; she had to be more like graphite.
It was easier at Oakton. Murphy Maguire had experience on his side, not only in an intimate knowledge of the plant itself, but with respect to running it successfully as an unbalanced system with Godzilla as the constraint. The major failing of the pre-Winner era – and it was hardly Murphy’s alone – was that inertia had become the limit to continued growth.
As one might expect, there was some confusion – and some carping – on the part of the workforce over the seeming waffle between the two messages. For years, during Murphy’s first tenure, they had been told that Godzilla’s schedule was law, and that everything else revolved around it. Then Kurt and Wayne told them that Godzilla had the same status as all other equipment in the line and that the M57 Line was setting the pace. Now they were told that Godzilla was back on top.
“Shoot, I thought we wasn’t spozed to pay no more spay-shul ’ttention to the ’Zilla. Spozed to be like ever-thang else. Why cain’t they make up thar minds?”
“Now, Tee-Jay, you just do what you’re told. It’s real simple. Even you can get this. We empty the ’Zilla; we fill the ’Zilla. Empty the ’Zilla, fill the ’Zilla. Fast as possible. In and out, in and out, in and out, real quick. Got that?”
“Sounds X-rated to me. But whatever y’all want.”
The Godzilla pit crew – of which Tee-Jay was a member – was back. And those boys were soon at the top of their game again. Turnaround time between emptying what had been processed, filling it again, and getting the big autoclave back into operation was reduced to single digits – less than ten minutes. This reduction meant that Godzilla, instead of doing eleven soaks per day, on average, could now do twelve. And this multiplied by six or seven days a week – every other Saturday was set aside for maintenance – meant that the single-digit changeovers were like gaining an entire production day extra every month. On an annual basis, with strong demand and full production, this was roughly equivalent to an extra two weeks of throughput.
One of the best things that happened due to Murphy Maguire’s sojourn to Rockville was that he could get on the phone to Sarah Schwick any time and she would take his calls. That had not been the case previously, as Murphy had no rapport with Viktor. If Murphy had any special requests, the only way that they would be honored was if B. Don made the call. After B. Don departed, that channel had gone away, whereupon most requests made by Murphy were ignored. But now Murphy could get through any time he so desired.
“The moral,” Murphy told Jayro, “is never underestimate the power of atomic buffalo turds.”
So one morning Murphy called and said, “Hey, Sarah, got a question. Is there anything that could be done from a technical standpoint about these twenty-one and twenty-three-hour soaks in the autoclave? Because I’m looking at the schedule and we’ve got seven of them coming right at us. Usually we don’t get but one or two in a month’s time. But now we’ve got seven. That is just going to kill us.”
Sarah understood the problem immediately.
“You can’t resize the batches, to try to combine some of them?” she asked.
“No, we’ve already done that. We’ve still got seven full-capacity batches going into Godzilla in one month. That’s like a whole week of production when we can’t process anything else.”
“Have you talked to Garth?”
“I have, and