Slum Enterprise - Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

The pre meeting was adjourned. The meeting team leaves the glass walled conference room loaded with hightech speakers and microphones for the online attendees comms over in Belgium. They filter back to their department zones and cubicles. The second meeting was already scheduled. This was considered the "official" meeting. 

After the official meeting is conducted and concluded with everyone feeling satisfied, Over 20 people from 7 different departments have all dipped their toes into the project pool. Lee reflects that likely 2 or 3 members of the project pool did all the work over the past 3 months. The real meeting was a hodge podge of “Job well done, keep up the pace, thank you for all your efforts.” Lee again leaves the same meeting room with stakeholders shaking hands on the way out the door wondering why the hell he was even required to attend, it's not like he said anything or did any work.

“Thank god,” he whispers to himself. “Time was slowing down in there, it was so dense it was bending space time. The ball of mass of complete bullshit was collapsing into itself forming a singularity. The team began to be spaghettified into dough pasty strands.”

“Good, work, thanks for being so diligent, ducks in row, release the hounds, tit for tat, I'm really glad you brought up that point, fantastic insight, I agree, I disagree, table that for later.” All this orbited in Lee’s mind. Corporate jargon and terms were something else. Lee firmly believed that the amount of words you said in a corporate meeting reflected on the salary you are paid. The higher the word count the higher the salary, but the high salary people never say anything of value, it's usually a "clarifying question to help me understand better.” All it does is waste time and brain cells.

A post follow up meeting is scheduled after the official meeting to go over the contents and discussion points brought up during the real meeting. The pre meeting attendees are gathered back into the glass conference room. There is the smell of old catered foods lingering in the air from the meeting group before. 

The debrief begins. Everything gets skewed like an elementary school game of telephone. Things are understood differently. The outcome of the post follow-up meeting is that nobody has any confidence of what was really discussed and planned for the next update meeting. 

The attendees again leave the room scratching their heads with heightened anxiety since now they have no clear direction on what to do next and whether they are doing a good job or not. Instead of going back to his desk, Lee takes an alternate route to find the backdoors of the lab. He walks in and is immediately blasted with the sounds of machinery pumping thick fluids through filtration products. The smell of diesel fuel and hydraulic fluid pierces the nostrils. Lee makes it a point to at least walk the lab twice a day to ensure all the test benches are running. Data needs to be produced, if anything stops he has a chance to correct it with the assigned tech before the uppers catch wind. Lee wanders to the back of the lab. 

Here, he finds Stan Hentz wrenching away on a large spidery hydraulic circuit in the back of a SUV sized steel tomb of metal analytical sensor equipment. The bench he’s working on is used to test fuel filter efficiency.

Stan peaks up from the blind of the hydraulic circuity. “Lee, look here, I found a table top espresso machine. I tucked it into the back corner, here look.” He gets up and drops the wrench onto the diesel soaked ground. And points over to a black table top work bench in the Analysis room. Lee turned his head and sure enough, there was an old dirty espresso machine sitting on it.

Stan leads Lee over into the analysis room and gets into a funny stance like he is about to present the world fair circus juggler team. The machine was oozing out the aroma of burnt espresso. It was once stainless and shiny, it was a bit rusty and caked in thick dust. The under carriage lights were on to illuminate the espresso cup. So, to Lee it seemed like it was in working order. He knew that Stan was more a function then form type of guy.

“It was downstairs in the cafeteria recycle bin”. Stan pointed both arms with hands and fingers towards the machine with a kind of gesture like “come on in.” The cafeteria was in the next door building in the underground level. There was a convenient main ground walkway built to connect the two. The walkway looked just like a downtown skyline, full of plexi glass windows with Green Earth Solutions advertisement and marketing campaigns showing the happy faces of recent customers sucking in air from the downstream side of a massive air filter hexagonal cell orientated industrial air handler. The caption always said something like “Dont want mice pee and shit droppings infesting your air systems, invest in a new sealed industrial powerhouse with Green Earth Solutions proprietary super efficient EXP 2.0 hexagonal panel filters to breathe in the earth's freshness.”

“As you can see Lee, I proactively placed it under the room's air handling exhaust vent to hide the fresh columbian coffee beans and mashed coca leaves.” Stan then motioned to Lee to observe the large stone Molcajete paused in the middle of grinding imported coca leaves. Lee noticed it was very close to a fine powder which revealed that Stan must have been working on a new caffeine/stimulant mixture to fuel his addiction with hyper physic inducers. “My wife installed a new master lock on my basement door. I can't seem to pick with my kit, so I tried to see if I could get a better set of picks from the dark web… I mean my friends at the reputable totally legal locksmith practice. I can't just break down the door, I'm still a reasonable person…Lee?” 

Lee was taking some buffer steps. He saw an empty coffee mug that was still steaming with residues. Stan was on the wire and Lee didn't know how unpredictable he would become given this was likely the first trial run of the mix. “How are you doing there Stan?” Lee asked, hands now out from his pockets in case he lunged at him for no reason.

“Just fine! Why do you ask, can't you see this thing is incredible, don't tell anyone about this. I put it in a pelican case after I'm done to disguise it as a small oversized laser scatter sensor.” Stan was jumping up and down in place and making twitching looks back at Lee. “This is good stuff, want me to make you a cup?”

“Ill pass, I've hit my limit.” Lee said. He wasn't lying about this either, Lee was on the course of a full blown caffeine addiction himself, his bowel movements began to to get looser over the past few months.

“Are you sure, when we start to act frantic and speed walk around the office cubicle… if anyone questions your hyper state just say that you're late for a meeting. I know you had your little ritual…” 

Lee didn't respond and shook his head. He didn't question how Stan knew about the ritual practices because Stan always found out everything about the company through gossiping channels and deep connections he established members in every single department over the past 15 years. He has eyes and ears in every corner of the damn place, even at the manufacturing plants and storage warehouses.

“And if they know you don't have one and are lying?” Lee questioned.

“Oh that's easy, just say that every second spent inside the walls of Green Earth Solutions is a meeting, a very impromptu and important one filled with rich quality topics such as; the importance of cleaning oil with paper media so metal chunks don't gouge out valleys in the customers engine block cylinder walls. Our product suppasses all other competitors in terms of efficiency, capacity of contaminations, and build quality or that the company hasn't had a recall from a fleet of blown diesel engines in 20 years.”

“Dont forget to mention about our fantastic money back guarantee plan” Lee adds humorously.

“Warrientes, it's all about the warrientes.” Stan yelled back.

Stan was getting more frantic by the minute. He forgot to do half life calculations of the mixture and began to get a little scared since he was now in the euphoria of a cocaine type high. With shaky hands and against Lee’s wishes, he leaps back over to the espresso machine and loads the black handled espresso cartridge with a densely packed layer of quality espresso. Then he took the Molcajete and laid a pinch of finely ground coca leaves on top, loaded the cartridge and pivoted the handle into locking position and hit the top of the machine with the palm of his hand. 

“That makes it go,” Stan said. He grabbed a laboratory beaker from the drawers underneath the work table and placed it under the stream of infused sludge.

“Holy, that thing is loud.” Lee said.

“Dont mind the noise, all just part of the process, I'll turn of the fuel benches main pump flow to drown out the noise. You can hide a lot of things if you know what you're doing.” In flash Stan runs out from the room back to the bench he was wrenching on and kicks on the main pump full blast and runs back. It looked like a scene out of Loony tunes.

“Are you sure that thing is safe? I mean, Joe might get a laugh out of this but the safety guys will scream bloody murder.”

“Yes or course,” Stan screamed. “ I know the rules, no food or drink in the company labs.”
Lee watches the brown sludge fill the beaker up to 100ml mark. The espresso smelled good, it was tainted with the bitter burnt smell of coca leaves. 

“Here, take a sip.” Stan grabs the beaker and shoves it to Lee's face.

“I already told you I'm at my limit,” Lee said, trying to be polite. “400mg, haven't you heard the recommended amount of my body type?”

“I'm not going to stop bothering you until you do.” Stan said. He was practically bouncing off the walls and the afternoon slump was going to hit soon. So, Lee thought carefully and said “No, no I cant, it's all you Stan.”

“Your lose.” Stan said.

Stan takes the beaker and lines up the thin nozzle with his extra lubricated lips and slams the 100ml. Lee watches in horror as he sets the beaker down gently and smacks his lips, aerating his taste buds for his observation section on the report he's creating as he investigates new concoctions. Lee saw that his eyes began to dilate.

“Im fine, Im fine, just a little wired that's all.” Stan mumbles.

Lee watches and doesn't say anything. Stan runs out of the room back to the fuel benches control module and starts setting up for the next test. Then he shoots back down with the wrench in hand (he’s moving so fast that Lee didn't see this action) and starts swinging his arms with force tightening hydraulic hardware connections. Lee leaves and slowly watches from the corner of his eye. “Well, at least he gets extra productive," Lee thought.

Lee finishes the lab walk through and heads back out the front exit which leads right into the main office hallway. On his way back to his desk, he spots a macho looking man coming towards him from the other end of the hall. Lee doesn't think much of this and turns on autopilot for the short journey to the cubicle. But, he can't help but notice that the macho man looks a little strange and is beginning to sprint. 

Lee passes on of the glass conference rooms and peers inside quickly. There was a skinny blonde woman in tight black jeans and a tight fitting shirt showing off the goods. Lee rarely saw women in the office so it was a nice change of pace from the standard, awkward, stain shirt wearing engineers with the look of “I have no more life to give” face that just bugs for sympathy from cog bystanders trying to go about their day in peace. As Lee continues walking, the macho man sprints by moving massive amounts of air creating a slip steam of cologne. 

He spots the macho man dolphin dive head first into the conference room. Mid dive, Lee caught a glimpse of the macho man's pants. The man was wearing the tightest blue levis known to the human race. “He must be showing off the goods too,” Lee thinks. The macho man sits down across the table from the blond woman. A passionate conversation takes place. Lee can only see their mouths move while they make wild hand gestures at each other. 

Lee quietly whispers to himself, “I wonder what they are talking about…Does this shirt make my tits look big and do these pants make my penis look small?”

To get to his cube from the lab he needs to pass Joe Fisher's office with the door open. Joe caught a glimpse of Lee walking back to his desk, now was his chance to catch him he thought. His desk is like a watch tower. It stands in front of the entire lab's cubicle zone. The office wall and door are made of glass, there are no blinds so Joe can watch and monitor all under him.

Immediately as Lee sits down and starts to pull out a sandwich he packed for lunch, Joe materializes at the cube walkway.

“How are you doing Lee?” Joe asked with a fake smile.

“I'm great, how about you?” Lee responded back, he needed to make an effort. Lee found that if he made an effort in actively listening to Joe by staring intently at his vanilla face and nodding his head, Joe would get through the long winded conversation faster. This was extremely difficult because Lee had an Achilles heel about prolonged eye contact for people he didn't respect.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk in my office?”

“Sure”

Lee puts his sandwich down and follows Joe back into his office. Lee slides the glass door shut and makes sure the gasket seal is intact so the conversation wouldn’t bleed out into the halls. The office was dull. It was white with an accent wall painted green behind where Joe sat. “Just a king sitting in his grass-filled watch tower surveyed the peasants,” Lee thought secretly. Joe positioned himself behind the desk and pointed at a chair for Lee to sit and face him.

“I wanted to take a few minutes to chat, there are a couple items I want to go over.” Joe said cryptically. Lee didn't know why he always started these talks with a mysterious tone. “As you know, there was a new safety policy introduced.” Joe paused and waited for verbal acknowledgement.

“Yes, in the labs,” Lee said.

“Long sleeves…you remember the new long sleeve policy? I've noticed that your techs haven't been wearing their assigned lab coats, this a violation, a reason for a write up.” Joe raised his left eyebrow.

“Yes, I've noticed that the team has been slow to adopt.” Lee quickly countered.

“Well Lee, this is a problem, It seems to me that they are being openly defiant to company policies. Do they not understand that long sleeve lab coats protect their skin from harmful fluids? Didn't we all just go through the 15 meetings reviewing all the options. Wasn't it made quite clear to the team that this was the direction we were going. The safety committee conducted their reviews and found that long sleeves were required.” Joe shifted in his seat and now sat on his leg. Lee was digging deep to look for a reasonable excuse that he was supposed to deliver.

“Yes, the techs have noted that for 20 years, long sleeve attire and lab coats in the labs were never required. If oil,fuel, or any hazardous substance gets on their skin while working on the test benches, they are able to quickly grab their back pocket shop microfiber rags and whip it away. Now, if harsh fluid splashes and gets soaked into the long sleeve attire, the exposure time for direct skin contact exponentially increases. Isn't this more dangerous overall?” Lee said slowly with half care. He didn't care either way, but what the techs did explain to him made complete logical sense. Why did the safety committee change the policy now? There was never an incident that triggered the change, Lee thought. It must have sprung up in an Exec meeting and filtered down into the trenches. Now Lee, and the other lab managers were supposed to enforce the new rule. This was one of the many other million things to enforce and police. Lee already had a problem with authority so it felt like he was selling his soul to the corporate devil, the worst part of the job.

“I understand the techs point, truly, I do.” Joe began. “But, safety has put the foot down, it's your job to uphold these policies and write up anyone who doesn't fall in line. I would suggest keeping a log of techs you see not following the rule. Once substantial data is gathered and plugged into the HR dashboards, formal write ups can start being delivered. I hope we don't have to resort to PIPS or forced time off. Lee, I trust that I will see a change in the coming week?” Lee nods in his head and looks down.

“By the way, have you smelled anything different today?” Joe asked.

“Uh no, what do you mean?” Lee said with a perplexed look.

“It smells like… like burnt coffee beans… forget I asked.”