The Long Dark by Billy Farmer (best book club books for discussion .txt) 📗

Here we go again.

I reluctantly grabbed the flashlight and shined it where he asked. He used what looked like a tiny pick to push a recessed yellow button two times. He went through the exact same process on the other board with exactly the same results. This time, however, after what he tried didn’t bring about the desired result, he heaved the tiny pick, nearly falling to the ground for his effort.

After cursing under his breath and flailing angry hands in the air like a demented conductor, he blurted, "Just as I thought. Both boards are bad. We will be down until I can replace them."

“What the hell do you mean they’re dead?” Titouan asked.

“I meant that colloquially. They are inanimate objects--”

“I know what the fuck you meant. Why would you need to change the boards? You changed one last week.”

“I changed one last week because it stopped working correctly.”

“That’s six boards in eight weeks. Eighteen thousand dollars I’ve spent so far.”

“We need two more.”

Titouan paced. He started to say something but hesitated. He looked at me before settling his glare on Avery. “You fucking suck at your job. My ass is going to be in a sling because William caudles your ass--”

Sensing Titouan rapidly increasing anger, I positioned myself between the two of them. “Calm the fuck down. We’ll change the boards, and when we’re not half frozen, we can talk about this.”

Avery gave me this odd look, like I was late to the party and everyone else but me knew the secret. “We do not have backup boards.”

Titouan shook but not from the cold. “Don’t you put this on me, you weasel fuck. This is you. This is your fault. There’s a whole goddamn pile of them around here that you could use if you knew what the leaping fuck you were doing.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Wait… wait a minute. We don’t have backup parts?”

They both answered no, but both had different arguments as to why there weren’t replacements. Avery told Titouan he needed more boards because they were malfunctioning because of hot and cold cycling. He said something about the manufacturer using PCB boards that were too thin to function properly in the Arctic. Because of the nature of the control boxes, the internal temperature was either hot or cold, which caused the already too thin board to warp over time. It was this warping that caused the microcontrollers to unseat themselves from their sockets, resulting in the unit’s failure.

Titouan made the same argument he made to me a few minutes prior. The manufacturer said they should be working great. They shouldn’t warp or do any of the things Avery complained about. After talking to the manufacture, Titouan refused to order more. He told Avery he better repair the boards, but Avery remained firm that what he wanted was impossible.

“If you had hired someone who knew what they were doing instead of dragging along Gilbert Grape, here, we wouldn’t be dealing with this.”

When I left Avery the first time to look for Titouan, he was at a loss as to how to deal with the unfolding situation. After the brow beating Titouan had given him that turmoil had evolved into unbridled anger. Knowing him as I did, I knew the next step in his evolutionary transformation would be rage with a chance of violence. Avery, even with his terrible temper, was generally non-confrontational. His many years of playground conditioning at the hands of bullies, jocks, and greater wimps had caused him to shy away from fighting. But there were limits, and Titouan was pushing all the wrong buttons.

"Enough of the bullshit already. I don't care whose fault it is because at this point we’re all fucked."

Titouan acted as if he were going to walk away, but instead of leaving he started pacing again, back and forth, all the while muttering under his breath and working his hands in frantic motions. High-stress positions weren’t in his wheelhouse.

The elephant in the room was evacuation. With the outfit I worked for, though, that would come with complications. Miley was not your typical business owner. He didn’t get rich by being a nice guy. If I were to tell you he crushed his competition, your natural proclivity might be to read that metaphorically. Don’t make that mistake. He had a mob mentality of running a business, especially in his later years.

Miley was making a hard push into the Arctic, and the word on the street was he was strapped for cash. Any downtime at the Patch, which by that time had become his biggest cash cow, would only exacerbate cash flows. With the potential long downtime because of the bad boards, which could be a month or longer, it was unclear how Miley would react. I feared reprisals.

I was well on my way to being out the door before the power went out. I had jobs lined up for Avery and me back in Indiana. The reprisals and blacklisting wouldn’t affect us, but they most certainly would my close friends. Tom and Sam had worked in the oil industry since Tom graduated high school. That’s all they knew. Jack worked in some construction, but with the economy like it was, he would be lucky to find a job.

As the thoughts of reprisals poured through my mind, something odd occurred to me. Avery had told me how one of the generators was down because of bad bearings. Why hadn’t he thought to check that generator’s control board? Surely it was good, and if it were, why couldn’t it be used in one of the ones with bad boards, I wondered. We wouldn’t be able to resume full operations with one operating generator, but we wouldn’t have to evacuate, either. It would save a massive headache for everyone.

“Avery, you said one of the generators was on maintenance because of a bad bearing, right?”

“Yes. Bearings Titouan had not yet ordered.”

Titouan stopped his pacing but didn't respond to Avery's barb.

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