VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [79]
Sorry,
T. D.
Well, she thought, it does at least mean that he cares. She picked up the phone and called him.
“Dawson here.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said.
There was a long pause.
“All right,” he said, “we’re both sorry. Do you want to try again?”
“Do you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have sent you the roses if I didn’t.”
She smiled. Spoken like a true man, she thought.
“This time,” she said, “I will not talk to you about business when we’re together.”
“Hey, I don’t mind if it’s once in a while. Some of it is interesting,” he said. “It’s just that there’s a time and a place for everything.”
“I agree,” said Amy. “I absolutely agree. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right balance.”
On Tuesday morning Viktor Kyzanski called from Rockville.
“Amy, it’s Viktor. Listen, before we get into everything else, I want my factory back.”
“Your … factory?”
“Right. The little factory that Random Tornado, in his infinite wisdom, did away with. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? That factory we owned over in Virginia, near Dulles. We used it for all kinds of things, small-lot classified work, single-piece projects – and more important, we used it to build prototypes and to test manufacturability. It was very handy, and if a problem came up, we could scoot right over there and have a look. I mean, it was like our own, private Skunkworks.”
Amy dredged her memory. “Excuse me, but Skunkworks?”
“It was a sort of factory-within-a-factory that Lockheed set up to build advanced aircraft.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, go on.”
“Well, now, post Tornado, having found that we just can’t get any cooperation out of Highboro or Oakton, my people have resorted to using outside suppliers for prototypes and testing. And it is damned expensive, plus there are often proprietary and security concerns, not to mention delays and the inefficiencies of dealing with vendors who are hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles away. Seriously, Amy, I’m having to put my analysts and engineers on airplanes, causing them to lose days, whereas if we had a place nearby, they could resolve everything in a few hours. So I want my factory back.”
“Viktor, I don’t disagree with you on this, but who’s going to pay for it? There is no money in this year’s budget for building a new factory – even a small one.”
“Can’t we go to Winner for funding?”
“We can, but I know they won’t give it to us.”
“Why not?”
“Because their own manager – Randal – was the one who closed the Dulles shop! Nigel Furst is not going to take kindly to investing in a new mini-plant to replace the one that was shut down just a couple of years ago. No way.”
“Well, something has to be done, because we are getting serious push-back from clients about the costs, and the lost time, and all their other concerns, which are legitimate,” Viktor insisted.
“I understand what you’re telling me. But the facility that you’re talking about is out of the question. We’re going to have to come up with some other solution.”
Viktor was barely listening. He rambled on with his complaints.
“Don’t you find it ironic that you have this Lean Six Sigma program going on that is supposed to eliminate waste – and we have a real problem that is extremely wasteful in any number of ways! Why can’t we solve this?”
That was when the idea popped into Amy’s mind.
“Maybe we can. I just thought of something,” she said. “Let me do some checking and call you back.”
Two weeks later everything had been worked out. With the approval of Human Resources, Murphy Maguire took a new position called Manufacturing Liaison. He would be assigned to Formulation & Design in Rockville, and would be on their payroll – at a 20 percent cut in pay – but would split his time between there and North Carolina. His responsibilities were to coordinate anything F&D and its clients needed with respect to manufacturing at Oakton, and also to serve as a kind of internal consultant on all things manufacturing related. In particular, one of his major objectives was to reduce the professional time and expense associated with building