VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [41]
Wayne also said nothing more for the moment, but got his ladder from the side of the trash receptacle and stowed it in the back of his SUV. By the time Wayne had closed the tailgate, Murphy had concluded that for better or worse he was going to say something.
“Mr. Reese–”
“Murphy, you can just call me Wayne.”
“Mr. Reese, do you know how I came to be called Murphy?”
“Because your family is Irish?”
“Actually, my family is descended from both Scots and Irish, and my great-grandmother was Cherokee. In any case, Murphy is not my given name. It was a nickname given to me years ago when I was a supervisor on the M57 Line. On my desk was a placard etched with the words of Murphy’s Law.”
“ ‘If anything can go wrong, it will,’” quoted Wayne, folding his arms across his chest.
“Yes, and I quoted those words so often that they all started calling me Murphy. So it became my name. But I’d like you to know that when I became a manager on the M57 Line, we had a reject rate of as high as forty percent. Within a few years, we had reduced rejections to four percent, and these days, on average, rejects run two percent or less. I accomplished that by pounding it into everybody’s head that if something is a statistical possibility, then at some point it will occur. And little by little, year by year, we eliminated all the things that could go wrong.”
“So your point would be?” asked Wayne, feeling now as if he were being lectured to.
“I may not know all the Japanese names you use, but I do know how to get things done in my own way.”
Wayne shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and looked out into the emptiness surrounding them and said, “Tell me, Maguire, do you consider a two-percent reject rate to be acceptable?”
“In all honesty, given the number and variety of challenges we currently face here in Oakton, reducing two percent rejection on M57 is not my highest priority.”
“And suppose some part of that two percent gets into a Navy aircraft and fails?” asked Wayne. “Suppose we miss a defective part and it goes into somebody’s car or truck, fails, and there is an accident that kills people? And then in addition to the tragedy itself, there is a lawsuit against the company. Is that acceptable?”
“We do everything possible to prevent that.”
“Uh-huh. Let me tell you something, Maguire, with me as ops manager, settling for anything less than perfection on any process is unacceptable,” said Wayne. “Only continuous striving for the sixth sigma of quality, only that is acceptable.”
In silence, Murphy crossed his own arms over his chest, and the two men just stood there for a second eyeballing each other. Wayne, first to break the stance, then turned to his vehicle, and as he opened the driver’s door, spoke to Murphy over his shoulder.
“I’ll meet you inside the plant, Maguire. I want to get to know Oakton from one end to the other, and I’d like you to tour with me – unless you have something more urgent, of course.”
Wayne’s white hybrid quietly, almost noiselessly, then drove off and circled around to the main parking lot. Murphy, rather unquietly, to absolutely no one except himself, said something unrepeatable, then got into his gas-guzzling Chevy and followed, and he drove a bit faster than necessary.
Inside the plant, Murphy mooched a cup of coffee from Jayro’s pot next to the Cooler. He drank it slowly as he scrutinized the worksheets for the day, and then tracked down Wayne Reese, who was at the head of the M57 Line. As Murphy approached, he saw that Wayne was having a word with his new LSS Black Belt, Kurt, and they were speaking in such hushed tones Murphy wondered if they were lip reading each other. Against his own nature, but from respect for the privacy of their conversation, Murphy slowed and was just shy of being able to hear what they were saying, when they both immediately stopped talking and