The Fata Morgana

TWO

I guess it all really started because of a problem that exists in the Special Machinery business.

Special Machines are designed and built one at a time, in accordance with your customer’s needs and specifications. If he manufactures widgets, you might make him a machine that assembles widgets, or maybe paints them, or wraps them in plastic film for shipment.

Each special machine is specially designed, you could even say invented, to do only one thing, but to do that one thing extremely well. Such a machine can be very productive, but it is generally of use to only one company. Thus, our industry is one of the last bastions of craftsmanship in this increasingly automated, mass production world.

To be sure, our machines are largely responsible for all that bland mass production, since they can turn out identical products at a fraction of the cost of any other method known, but there is nonetheless a great deal of personal satisfaction in designing something, building it, and then watching it work as you had planned. It is a rare joy that the operators of our machines can never have. When there is an operator, that is, and the whole system is not completely automated.

* * *

I’ve always liked workshops and factories. Some people—my ex-wife, for example—claim that the industrial environment is alien, unnatural, and inhuman, but for me it is the most natural thing in the world.

I am a man, and as such I am as much a part of nature as any tree or beaver or bee. The machines that I build are as natural as any beaver lodge or bee hive. If there is any fundamental difference, it is that, being a man, I use the mind nature gave me to direct my efforts, rather than depending on my instincts alone. Even then, I don’t think that I can claim that a beaver never thought about her work, or that she never sat back to admire a well built dam.

In Special Machines, our sort of craftsmanship entails a whole set of problems of its own, problems that the rest of the world rarely perceives.

You see, in order to get new business for your company, you have to have competent people ready to start on your customer’s job. No purchasing agent in his right mind would trust an important order to someone who had nothing but a vacant shop.

And in order to get competent people, you have to have interesting work for them to do. Even if you could afford to pay them to sit and do nothing while you were waiting for the next job to come in, the best workers would all quit within days, leaving you with no one but the sort of people who would be better off working for the government. When you start paying people to not work, you are automatically selecting for incompetence.

It’s a shame, but the only sane course of action is when the work is gone, you have to lay almost everybody off. It hurts, but there’s nothing else you can do.

It then becomes a matter of "If we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham." I’ve seen a few companies that never were able to get started up again. Oh, in an ideal world, there would always be a fresh job to get into whenever the last job was winding down, but if I ever began to notice that happening to me on a regular basis, I’d start believing in Santa Claus, or maybe even God.

So when a big (for us) Chrysler welding line was getting ready to be shipped, and nothing new was in the offing, most of my best engineers had their computers in word processing mode. They were updating their resumes on company time, and I knew that I was in trouble.

Oh, I had plenty of money. The previous three jobs had been profitable, the company bank account was flush, and I hadn’t even been paid yet for the last one. The trouble was, looking for work, I’d called on everybody I knew (and many that I didn’t) and I hadn’t been able to find anything, anywhere, that was ready to shake loose in less than two months.

By which time I would have to hire a whole new bunch of strangers, assuming that I could find such people. Then I would likely end up having to fire half of them for incompetence, after gracing each such bumble fingered fool with a month’s pay in return for his efforts at screwing things up. And then I would have to waste yet another month teaching those with some small bit of ability the proper way to get things done. That is to say, my way.

All with the net result of an ungodly amount of personal aggravation, late deliveries, and cost overruns that, in this industry, you generally have to eat on your own. It’s not like doing "cost plus" work for the government. Starting with a new crew, my next job would run at a loss, not only to my bank account, but also to my reputation, which—in the long run—is the only really important thing that any company has ever got. Once you have the right reputation, you can buy everything else you need.