Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗

Seated next to her, Boomer traced the looping arms on the page with his index finger. “They’re passing something, moving one piece at a time.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought too. The factory is set up to move all these orders. For starters, what if we just try to move some ourselves, from welding, through assembly, to the shipping department? Only one at a time, starting with the orders for Escargot, since they’re our biggest customer. There’s more, but let me explain...”

By the time the food was gone they had the outline of a plan.

Boomer found an order Margaret was confident they had parts for, and pushed it on a cart to assembly. Kahle assembled the parts in a plastic frame to form a kit, and buckled it shut. Then he walked the assembled kit to shipping. Over an eight hour shift, they moved seven orders. Two of them shipped. On the second day, they did nine kits through assembly. Four of them shipped.

It was Friday morning, and after a week they had expedited seventy orders. Twenty-six of them had shipped. Kahle meandered amidst forty-four pallets still stuck in shipping. That book was no help. It reminded him of the math class word problems he always hated so much. Digging foxholes would be more fun.

Cold rain blew in the open shipping doors, agitating clerks who scampered with buckets; plunking them underneath the roof leaks.  A bearded man in an ocean of plaid slashed his clipboard through the air or pointed as appropriate, keeping his employees in furious motion. When he saw Kahle he made a bee line for him in loping strides.

Without extending his hand, he said, “I’m the shipping manager.” His chest heaved as he took large ragged breaths. “You got your junk all over my shop. This stuff is no good. You need to move your stuff back to assembly right away.”

Kahle said, “I don’t understand why these aren’t shipping.”

The shipping manager put a massive fist in Kahle’s face. “You’re not blaming this on me.”

“I really don’t understand.”

The shipping manager asked, “What does the red tag say?” Then he bent over and snatching one off the pallet, sticking it under Kahle’s nose for good measure. “These are incomplete.”

The old red rage came on and Kahle stuffed it down. “We packed them the way the drawing said.”

The shipping manager’s face was swollen with irritation. “You don’t have to understand.”

“This is not my fault!”

“Well, you did something wrong.” The shipping manager punctuated each word with the clipboard, poked in Kahle’s direction. “You take parts, little dude, or I crush you.”

Kahle slumped and the man backed off just a fraction—“I’ll give you till the end of the day.”—then he tucked the clipboard under his arm and stalked off.

Kahle copied notes from the tags then paged Boomer and Margaret. She arrived first, accepted the list, logged in a computer terminal, and started reviewing the drawings. Boomer glided in as she typed.

Fifteen minutes later she softly swore. “The bills of material are wrong!”

“What’s that got to do with quality?”

“It’s a shopping list.” She took out her red pen and started making notes. “The wrong parts were on the list. So you packed the wrong parts. These orders will be way late. Hello, pissed off customer. We need to fix this.”

They trooped across the shop floor to the engineering department on the second-floor mezzanine. After a right at the top of the stairs, began a long narrow galley.

Kahle snuck a look at Beezor's office in the corner.  The shades were drawn, and light crawled around the edges of the closed door. The Red Queen was in study. Not one of them even considered disturbing her. Her ass-chewings were already legendary.

In the galley itself, all the flaking steel desks were empty,  except for one at the end. The foreign exchange engineer occupied the cobwebbed darkness beneath the 3rd-floor stairs.

He was staring at his computer screen, lit by a green glow, intently reviewing drawings. His only company was a  glass of water and a hard-boiled egg. When they surrounded his desk he looked up, startled.

“Dieter Machs, how can I help you?” he asked, in almost perfect English, his German accent detectable as a lilt on the consonants. He adjusted his black plastic frame glasses and ran a hand through long black greasy hair. He wiped the other had on his black shirt as if removing a sheen of sweat. He twisted, and the steel chain between his wallet and his belt clanged against his desk. “What is the problem that you are having?”

Margaret extended her hand. Dieter took the slip of paper and started reading.

She asked. “How can these be in production when they’re not even complete?”

“Well, I cannot know this. I can say that as part of Motomax Future we expedited several models into production.” He said it singsong and fluid, like a doctor calming an agitated patient.

Dieter pulled the drawings up on the computer. “Perhaps these got overlooked.” After a few more clicks of the mouse, he seemed satisfied. “Give me an hour or two and I will have this done for you, ok? You leave the list with me.”

When they hadn’t moved he restated the instruction. “Come back after lunch.” Like a precision instrument, he swiveled back to the screen, absorbed again in his work.

The three of them left, the conversation clearly over. They sat in the cafeteria drinking coffee, gloating as everyone around them dined on leaden meatloaf. When the cafeteria cleared out, they went back.

Dieter was as good as his word. He had updated drawings for them, with signed approvals. His watchful eyes followed them out the door.

Margaret took the lead. “Follow me.”

Her desk was upstairs in the main building, in a glass-walled cubicle that barely fit a desk, two chairs, and several bookcases. She scooped binders of paper out of the chairs, stacking them on the floor in a corner.

“The Boys” waited as she pecked through the list of orders, looking for the missing parts. She tallied the list, and double checked her work.

“Of the forty-four orders still open we have parts for twenty, leaving twenty-four orders still to fill. I’m sending an email to Hamish Rosenbloom in sales with an update. It’s his account. Some of these will clean up late Escargot orders. I think he’ll be pretty happy.”

Hamish called before they left. “Finally, an answer. How soon can I have the twenty?”