VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [84]
And:
“Why are you working on that?”
“Because Bob told me to!”
“Forget what Bob told you! Get going on the tensile strength report! Joe Tassoni needs it by the end of today!”
Then there were the emails – hundreds daily flying back and forth. What Murphy noticed as he read so many of them was the same underlying tension. People often went to considerable lengths in their writing – and no doubt invested considerable time – to defend even petty positions.
Every night Murphy called his wife, Coreen, from his hotel. More and more as time went on, he began to voice his own frustration.
“I’m telling you, honey, it’s a zoo up here,” Murphy told her. “For such a bunch of smart people, I sometimes wonder if they could manage to organize a two-car parade.”
Early in his tenure as manufacturing liaison at Rockville, Murphy Maguire was called upon by Sarah Schwick to attend a meeting to talk about something code-named Cobblestone. In addition to Sarah and Murphy, there were two others in the meeting, the project manager and the lead chemical engineer. They assembled around a table in a conference room done in neutral colors that made Murphy long for the vivid, if sometimes ugly sights of his old Oakton plant. The diminutive and pale Sarah, who usually dressed in bland pastels, was wearing something that was a washed-out greenish gray, and she almost disappeared against the walls when she entered the room and sat down at the table.
“Where is Joe Tassoni?” asked the project manager.
“I asked him to be here, and I reminded him this morning,” said Sarah.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll show up,” said the engineer.
“Why don’t you text him,” said Sarah, looking at the project manager, “just to be sure.”
“Excuse me,” said Murphy. “This Joe Tassoni. I’ve heard that name. Who is he?”
“He’s a senior analyst,” said Sarah.
“And for my benefit, being the new kid on the block,” said Murphy, “an analyst is … ?”
“Analysts are kind of central to everything we do here at Formulation and Design,” said Sarah. “They do a lot of things. They specify which procedures and tests are to be run. They approve the research schedule. They evaluate the test results. Based on those results, they then recommend whatever further actions need to be taken. They either write up the conclusions themselves or they approve what others have written up.”
“If F&D was a hospital,” the project manager said to Murphy, “then the analysts would be the doctors. The rest of us would be the medical staff – the nurses, the therapists, the pharmacists, the lab techs, the administrators, and so on.”
“In fact, all of the analysts here have their doctorates,” said Sarah. “They all have PhDs in whatever their specialty is. They’re so valuable that it’s in their contracts that they take flu shots every fall – because if one of them gets sick, it backs up everything.”
“I see,” said Murphy.
“Joe is a brilliant guy,” said the engineer. “Kind of eccentric, I guess you’d say, but nobody knows carbon fiber like Joe Tassoni.”
“And he’s a gourmet cook,” added the project manager. “He can spend a whole Sunday just making veal stock. His osso buco is unbelievable – if you like that kind of thing.”
“Can’t say as I’ve ever had it before,” said Murphy, intrigued.
“All right, we have to move forward,” said Sarah. “Any word from Joe?”
“He just texted back saying start without him,” said the project manager.
“Great. Well, while we’re waiting for Joe,” Sarah said, “let me bring Murphy up to speed on Cobblestone. This is a project that’s been going on for well over two years. We’re working with Caterpillar, which is funding the development of a new class of carbon-fiber materials that are three times as strong as the strongest commercially available steel, yet only a quarter of the weight for an equivalent strength.”
“And for better or worse,” said the