CHAPTER 11
In the event, Folklore was able to delay the move to Millar's dungeon for the better part of a year with the advantage that the Department continued to function with virtual autonomy. Grey settled down to life with his four telephones and pretended to ignore the draughty nature of his superoffice. It never did give him the glow of satisfaction it should have done because he knew that it was only temporary and although he brought in a secondhand red carpet from home, this only served to accentuate the reality of the situation and incidentally made him the more envious of Folklore's truly opulent residence.
When Folklore took over the vacant job of Development Manager after the E2 stores fire, he was given a tiny proportion of the insurance payout and forced to set up headquarters in a corner of the main production building. Characteristically thorough, he had set out to equip himself with all the trappings appropriate to one who was not only going places, but was well on the way there already. By ruthlessly pruning all unnecessary expenditure on test tubes and the like he had had enough to buy an executive suite which cut even the Works Manager down to size. The desk alone had required four men to lift from the delivery van to his office and was a magnificent affair of polished mahogany with a red rexine top and matching blotter. It was set off by a Shaeffer Executive pen set in a special desk top holder, complete with calendar and memo pad which he had conned out of one of the chemical supplier's salesmen. He had hundreds of spare memo pads which he had been glad to let him have, because at the bottom of every page was scrawled the legend (in heavy blue ink):
'P.S. Don't forget I.C.I. Chemicals & Additives'
together with the appropriate telephone number in the hope that perhaps constant repetition would make up for any deficiencies of the salesman himself.
The desk top was the focal point of crimson luxury. It matched the fitted carpet and velvet drapes all around the walls. Its surface was unblemished by such vulgarities as telephones which resided on a small separate table, strategically placed so that he only needed to swivel in his luxurious chair and move his arm six inches in order to lift the handset. The only other ornaments were a glass paperweight with a rather tasteless floral design and a press button which connected through concealed wires to a buzzer in his secretary's outer office and which he used to make her life a misery, a skill which had taken much practice to bring to perfection. By dint of careful watching and listening he was able to gauge when she was immersed in a letter, bent over a filing cabinet or, even better, had a teacup to her lips. His pink, manicured thumb would then clamp down on the button and he would keep it there until she opened the door. It had an exquisitely penetrating note (he had been careful in choosing it) so that at the end of a heavy day his secretary developed a twitch in the corner of her mouth which at first he noticed only incidentally but later came to anticipate and work for.
The drapes at one end of the room concealed a flashing light display of the chemical flowlines of the moulding process which he had commissioned Howell to make for him and who had done him proud and still been able to hive off enough profit to finance his own development work for several months during a particularly sticky time when he had had a row with the Works Manager and the latter was attempting to starve him into submission. The ones along the sides of the office were a problem and for a long time covered nothing more than two calendars sent out at Christmas by the chemical suppliers and few visitors were likely to be impressed by the alternatives of Views of the Lake District or an art nouveau assortment of cogwheels. It wasn't until an impending inspection by the Top Brass, to see how he was making out as the new Head of Department that he had had a brainwave and ordered his men to stop what they were doing and produce a series of management-sized charts to show the enormous increase in the efficiency of the factory since his appointment. It took Grey, Smith and Dave a full week to produce what came to be known as 'Folklore's Lie Charts' and when they had finished every drape concealed a glowing tribute to himself.
Howell squeezed into the tiny office with Dave. It had the advantage that there was no telephone and anyone trying to contact him automatically got Grey instead who quickly decided that he was not going to spend his time carrying messages to somebody who could not even organise an extension for himself. Thus freed from outside interference they took to serious chess playing and discussions about the meaning of Industrial Life.
As they climbed on to the open moorland above the tree line, the valley below came fully into view and they sat down on a grassy bank to take in the sight and eat their sandwiches. From up here, the factory was tiny. He could make out the Development block and the main production building with the silver chimney on its roof. The static water tank would have been too small to discern were it not for the sunlight reflecting off it.
"Folklore would appear to be about the size of an ant and Grey correspondingly smaller, from here", he remarked to Howell.
"It certainly gives you a sense of perspective, doesn't it?"
"Look, there's the Works car on its way back from collecting Anderson".
"What's he come down for?"
"General look round. Making his presence felt, now that he's Works Director. Probably came specially to have the pleasure of making Watkins wriggle a little. I know I would if I was in his position - Watkins almost shits himself every time Anderson threatens to visit. I've never fathomed out where they got him from, and as to making him Production Manager, the mind boggles!"
"Didn't you know about him? He has this tremendous ability to get people to agree to things, and he's quite unaware of why it happens."
"Explain!"
"He has a combination of deafness in one ear, and halitosis, so when he talks to you, he always leans forward and violates your personal space, at the same time pouring bad breath all over you. His victims back off until they come up against an obstruction and then panic. They'll agree to anything, just to escape! The only person it doesn't work with is Mr Happy, because he is similarly afflicted."
"I suppose that's why they hate each other so much!"
"You got it!"
They sat, eating in companionable silence for a few minutes and watching the cars on the distant road below them. Dave saw the Works Manager's blue Volvo - presumably he was taking Anderson out to lunch - leave the factory, and head off in the direction of the pub the managers tended to use when entertaining or when mince was on the menu.
"I used to come up here a lot, before your time. It helped to clear my head when things were going badly."
"I shall miss these mountains when we have to go. I remember saying to the Personnel Manager that I was going to climb up here, one day. He must have thought I was nuts!"
"I'm sure he did. I don't think you conform to the norms down there any more than I do. They couldn't see why I refused to move. They don't put any value on the scenery."
"I suppose I should have dug my heels in, same as you, but in an odd sort of way, I feel a sense of loyalty to the department and Old Folklore. Say what you like about him, he looks after us, gives reasonable pay rises and defends us against other factions, even if it is ultimately just self interest."
"You've got more than I have then. I feel as though I've been on the run from the day I set foot in the place. As a matter of fact, I know that I was taken on by the then Works Engineer as a political gesture and he was given his notice a week after I started. Nobody else wants an electronics engineer. Anyway, worse is to come. I heard on the grapevine that they're going to transfer me to Sage's section and from what I can gather about him, the going is likely to become extremely sticky."
"So why do you bother? Why not tell them where to go?"
"It's crossed my mind, believe me. Only thing is, I get to talking to sales reps and people like that - I've got a few contacts about the country - and from what they tell me, it's no better anywhere else! The whole shooting match is run by people like Folklore, Watkins and the Sages of this world."
"I do believ
e you. It makes you wonder for just how long the whole tottering, rotten, class-ridden edifice will manage to keep going."
"Precisely. So I am faced with the alternatives of jumping from the proverbial frying pan or staying where I am and learning how to survive in my little corner, and every month I manage to do that is one month's more experience gained to improve my chances of continuing to survive. Sometimes I find the game quite diverting!"
"You know" Dave said thoughtfully "I once had a theory that I was going to play the game and make it to the top, and then, when I got there, I was going to put it all to rights, kick out all the con men and empire builders and flannel merchants and replace them with the good people like you and me."
"It sounds wonderful, but haven't you read 'Animal Farm'?"
"'Four legs good, two legs better!' Well, it was only a theory I had. You can't rub shoulders with that lot without getting either poisoned or repulsed."
"So what keeps you going?"
"I have to earn a living, and there aren't many firms who would pay me to play with my test tubes and things. I enjoy the work and I don't suppose that too many people can say that either. When Grey gets upset by the idiocies of the Management, he says that he looks for compensation in what he is doing - and he generally manages to find it. I think that about sums it up."
"It's just about how I feel, too. Because they never give me anything to do, I'm able to initiate my own projects, so I can indulge in pure research work as long as I can do it on the cheap. In fact, I'm just starting on a design for a portable TDI detector, I reckon that the Industry has a real need for one. I'll be needing some information from you about how the colouration test works, in due course. Have you got anything on it from ICI?"
"Only the standard handout that comes with their test equipment. What will be special about yours?"
"Continuous monitoring. At one level to give you an audible warning if you exceed the threshold value and at another to sum your daily exposure for statistical backup."
"Sounds excellent. Then you can make your fortune and retire!"
"If you believe that, you'll believe anything!" He glanced at his watch. "Time we got back. Wouldn't do to be later than Anderson and the Works Manager."
Five minutes after Anderson had gone back up to the front offices for a reflective afternoon gin and tonic with the Works Manager and before giving Watkins a verbal tickling, Folklore summoned Dave to his office.
"Come in, wipe your feet and" (taking in his once white lab. coat with distaste) "sit down there", motioning to the one odd chair which he tolerated for the sake of preserving his suite.
"Mr Anderson has just paid me a visit and our discussions centred on the Ford Motor Company. We do almost no trade with them at all. As you may realise, there exists a very large market potential for both moulded and converted products and so I have agreed to devote Departmental time to an investigation. I have decided to take you off your present assignment and you are to work through Mr Watkins on the production side and Mr Watson the Automotive Sales Manager. I have informed him that you are the Technical Liason Officer until further notice. Any questions?"
"Does that mean I'm promoted?"
"Not exactly."
"Do I get a rise?"
"Only if your performance justifies it."
"What..."
"That's settled then. Shut the door behind you. Good Man!"
He spent the afternoon tidying up the High Impact-Strength Project and dumped the file on Grey's desk.
"Folklore's taken me off this. Says he wants you to keep it running when you have any spare time, so it looks as though you are going to have to put your white coat on and get into the pilot plant."
Grey grunted without looking up from the 'P & R Weekly', stretched out a hand and transferred it to his 'pending' tray. "Close the door behind you!"
"Might be an opportunity to do myself a bit of good, here" he said to Howell as they put their coats on to go home. "Ford business is as big as it comes anywhere in the country and if we haven't got it, somebody else must have. All I have to do is find a way to redress the balance and my name is made!"
"Now, where have I heard that sort of talk before. You go off up the mountain and give it all a bit of serious thought. Something to do with perspective!"
The following morning he went straight to the Sales office (Automotive) to see 'Buzzer' Watson, the Manager.
"Do you have an appointment?" enquired his secretary. "You can't see him without an appointment. He is a very busy man."
Dave wasn't very good at secretaries. Normally, they intimidated him, but this morning he was glowing with importance and impatient to get on with the business of making his mark.
"You tell him that I have been sent by Mr Folklore and I must see him about important business as soon as he is free."
The secretary sat up very straight in her chair and scrutinised him frostily. The fact that anyone dared to come into the Sales Office in a white coat, and a grimy one at that, was bad enough, but to challenge her authority was clearly beyond the pale altogether.
"Can I have your name? I'll see if he can fit you in sometime today. Most likely this afternoon. Late this afternoon, that is." She poised her pen menacingly over her appointments diary and while Dave was pondering his next action, the tableau was interrupted by the manager himself popping his head around the corner to enquire if his tea and the 'pink un' were ever coming today.
"Can I see you for five minutes?"
"Course you can. Glad to have the company. There's nothing doing this morning, the man who was coming to see me phoned in a cancellation ten minutes ago. I've sod all to do till lunchtime. Mrs Crosby, another cup of tea for the young gentleman."
His office was, if anything, more palatial than Folklore's, the decor a shade deeper red. He sat down and swivelled his chair away from the sunlight streaming through the venetian blinds. A pair of racing driver style dark glasses set off his suntan. Here was a man, every inch a salesman, at the pinnacle of his professional life.
"Mrs Crosby gave me the impression that you were snowed under with work."
"Quite right too! I took a lot of trouble to train her. Second rule of business, my boy. Always appear to be busy!"
"What's the first rule then?"
"Always cover yourself?"
"I don't follow you."
"By crikey, you are an innocent, aren't you! Cover yourself. Watch your back. Don't give the bastards a chance to shit on you or they will. You know the sort of thing, someone promises you something over the phone - send them a memo confirming it. That sort of thing." He smiled benevolently.
Dave thought 'I like this man!' "I'm here because Mr Folklore has appointed me Technical Liason Officer to find out why we don't do any business with Ford and to remedy the matter if I can."
"You mean 'Ford Motor Company'. Note the jargon. That's how they refer to it, therefore that's how we refer to it." He leaned back, hands behind his head, framed against the slats of brilliant sunlight. Dave was impressed.
"The answer is simple" he continued "you people can't make good enough foam to pass their specifications."
"Our stuff is as good as anybody's" he protested. "We sell on the basis of quality - that we are second to none. You of all people should know that!"
"Be that as it may, we have tried several times with a special grade and we cannot get it passed by their quality control lab. Even if we did, the price would be uncompetitive because it's a special. Three quarters of a million annual turnover goes elsewhere and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it."
"Why does it fail in the lab.?"
"One property only, all the rest we pass with flying colours. They call it 'Resistance to Deterioration', we refer to it as 'Fatigue'. Don't ask me the details because I don't know, it's a technical problem. Ball back in your own court!"
After tea, Dave buttonholed Watkins. "Buzzer Watson is right, we do cons
istently fail the Ford 'Resistance to Deterioration' test."
"Ford Motor Company Resistance to Deterioration test" Dave corrected him.
"What was that?"
"Nothing!" He had taken two steps away from an advancing Watkins and was trying to hold his breath unobtrusively.
"Come into the office. I'll be glad to pass the paperwork on to you - I can do with the filing space."
Watkins' office was small, dirty and extremely untidy and the lab. assistants hung up their labcoats on the door. It smelt vaguely of old socks.
"I'm glad to have the extra space" he repeated, pulling open the top drawer of a much battered and clearly overloaded filing cabinet. He had to wrench at it against the frictional drag of too many papers. "Mr Happy was supposed to look after the Ford sampling procedure, but he's too bone idle, so I got stuck with it."
He extracted a fat wad of blue forms. "First we have the Initial Sample Inspection Reports, known as ISIRs. Every sample has to have one of these, of which there are nine copies. It says on each copy where it has to go to - we keep the bottom one which is usually unreadable because most typewriters can't cope with them. The typists love ISIRs!"
"Next we have the lab. forms" he passed a bundle of yellow papers to him. "of which there are only eight copies. The bottom one is still illegible, though" he added good humouredly.
"What's the difference?"
"The blue one is for dimensional checking, the SQA Inspector usually calls here for that one and..."
"What's an SQAInspector?"
"Supplier Quality Assurance. It's a sort of itinerant Mafia!"
Dave let it pass.
"...the yellow one accompanies the lab. samples which we send off to Dagenham, and that's as far as we actually go because they always fail the dreaded fatigue test."
He extracted some more, rather tattered yellow forms. "These are our copies of previous attempts, which won't tell you very much because they didn't print through very well from the top copy. And last, but far from least" he handed him a large volume "for light reading when there's nothing much on telly, is the bible - 'Ford Q101' which sets out the general conditions under which we are expected to operate their contracts - if we ever get any, that is."
Dave stacked the pile of multi-coloured papers into a tidy heap, placing them on top of 'Ford Q101'. "Tell me something about this fatigue test."
"Take a seat, if you can find one!" offered Watkins. Dave moved a pile of mouldings from the only other chair and sat down, at safe inhalation distance, but to find that he had to peer round Watkins' 'in' tray to see him.
"As you probably know, any plastic material - and foam products especially because of their highly expanded structure - undergoes fatigue when it is subjected to repeatedly applied loads. In the case of car seating, the driver sinks gradually lower in his seat as it fatigues and this alters the geometry of the whole thing - the automobile engineers make allowance for it so that the seat settles to the correct position for maximum comfort and visibility through the windscreen. If the seat fatigues badly, then he ends up with a crick in his neck and peering over the top of the steering wheel instead."
"And hence all the emphasis on resistance to deterioration."
"Quite so. In practice, most of the fatiguing takes place in the first week or so and after that is so slow that it'll get the car through the first 12 000 miles or so which is all they care about."
"So now we come to the dreaded fatigue test which we cannot pass."
"You may have noticed a contraption in the corner of the physics lab. which looks like a deranged paint roller? It's called the Roller-Shear tester and is what we use to torture Ford samples and get a percentage figure for the resistance to deterioration. Smith will show you round it if you ask him - he did all the testing on the special Ford grades we made so you can get the full story from him. I only looked after the samples and the paperwork. Come and see me if you have any problems on the admin. side."
Smith lived in a small but tidy office, tucked away in a corner of the physics lab. His pride and joy was the two filing cabinets which, side by side, took up most of one wall. He had schemed and plotted to get them and had brought off a neat coup during a Marketing Department reorganisation the previous year, bribing the maintenance foreman with the profit he had made on a recent trip to the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham. He always kept them locked on the excuse that they contained confidential information whereas in fact they contained very little of anything at all. If Grey had only been able to prove it, he would have had all the ammunition he needed to get one of them for himself, all the more necessary now that he had a larger office to fill. Their presence in Smith's office so filled him with frustration and envy that he rarely went into the physics lab. these days, instead making frequent representations to Folklore for a new one for himself. The latter was blandly uncooperative. His secretary had no less than four brand new, grey stove-enamelled masterpieces lined up like soldiers opposite her desk and each morning he inspected them with all the pride of a General reviewing his crack regiment. As there was no room for a fifth, he had refrained from exercising his droit de seigneur in Smith's direction, there was no money left over for the likes of Grey and there the position remained.
"Can I come in?" enquired Dave.
"What can I do you for?" riposted Smith, fondling the nearer of his filing cabinets.
"You can tell me all about the Roller-Shear test."
"Oh, well then, come in and make yourself comfortable. Why do you want to know?"
"Because Folklore's made me Technical Liason Officer to the Automotive Sales Department."
"Lucky you! Any money going with it?"
"A few vague semi hints if I do well and justify my existence."
"In other words, no! That's about par for the course, around here."
"I suppose I'll find out what I'm worth when I've delivered the goods."
"What goods?"
"Trade with the Ford Motor Company."
"Is that what he wants you to do! Well, you've got a problem to solve then, that's beaten better men before you!"
"Resistance to Deterioration?"
"Exactly that. The Ford spec. is unrealistic. We can't meet it with any of our current range of foams and a special would be too expensive."
"So I've been told. I was hoping you can explain the technical position to me."
"Well, that's easy enough. As you know, foam is specified by hardness and density. They are independant variables, but loss of hardness in use - fatigue - is directly proportional to density, and so is cost, obviously, because you have to put more weight of material into a denser product."
"I've never looked into this hardness loss business. What goes on?"
"Hardness of polyether foam is controlled by the crosslink density of the polymer. In use, crosslinks get broken and the product softens. Most of it happens in the early stages of its life", he paused to unlock one of his filing cabinets and take out a folder labelled 'Fatiguing of Various Grades of Foam'. He passed over a sheet of graph paper. "This is a typical hardness-loss curve. As you can see, it is exponential so that by the time it has had the equivalent of three month's use (5000 passes of the roller-shear tester) it has softened up by as much as it is going to and any further losses are negligible. The Ford test gives it 20 000 deflections which is supposed to simulate one year's use. It's probably quite a good assessment."
Dave studied the graph. The foam was their top density grade. The hardness dropped off steeply for the first hundred deflections and then less so, until it levelled off where Smith indicated at about 5000. He picked up a ruler from the desk and measured off the hardness loss from the point where it had levelled out.
"This gives a 32% loss."
"Ford require 20%" He produced another graph. "This is fatigue versus cost. In order to achieve a consistent 20% it is necessary to raise the density, and hence cost, by about 30% and you don't need a salesman to
tell you that that's not on!"
"What about this special grade we are supposed to have made?
"We tried boosting the crosslink density and softening it back with cheap plasticiser, a bit of an improvement, but nothing like enough."
"The Competition don't have something that we don't know about?"
"That is the implication, but I'll bet you any money you like that they use formulations which are just the same as ours."
"And that's the situation as of now, is it?"
"Exactly. Let me show you the roller-shear machine and I'll instruct my assistant to give you any assistance you may require."
"That's the girl in the white coat who flits about the place?"
"Gwenda. That's her. Reckons she's sexy. Maybe you'll find out!"
A very thoughtful Dave retired to his office to go through the heap of yellow forms Watkins had given him. The procedure was that the supplier made up two sets of supposedly identical test samples, one of which was put through the lab. before despatch and the results entered in the appropriate place on the yellow form. This then went off to Dagenham, along with the other samples for Fords to carry out their own comparative tests. Some of the past attempts were legible enough that he could see where Watkins had put in an optimistic 17% or so against the entry for 'Resistance to Deterioration' and the returned copy from Ford with their own figure of around 30% and the comment:
'REJECT - Resistance to Deterioration'.
He seemed to have reached a dead end.
He phoned Buzzer Watson. "Do you think you can get hold of some competitive Ford samples for me? Anything will do, anything at all. I want to run some fatigue tests."
"Shouldn't be difficult. I'll get on to the Rep. straight away and see what he says. Call you back when I've got somewhere."
He was back on the line in twenty minutes. "The Rep's supposed to be coming in on Thursday morning and he'll bring you an assortment of products then. OK?"
The Roller-Shear tester ran virtually non-stop for a week. Gwenda may have been sexy, but both she and Dave were too busy for him to find out. By the time he had finished the last sample he knew that Smith was right, the average loss was 32.4%. Not one was better than 25, let alone 20.
Mrs Crosby let him in without demur. "This is the position" he began. "The Competition's material is no better than our own and I can only conclude that they are fiddling their samples through."
"How?" enquired Buzzer Watson, sitting in his characteristic posture, hands behind head, swivelling gently to and fro in his chair. Dave regretted the lack of sunshine.
"Easy enough to set up. All you have to do is get a sample that is too hard and give it a few hundred deflections on the machine to take off the first fifteen percent or so before sending it in. We have some substandard bus seats which will do very nicely, cut down into sections you wouldn't be able to spot the difference. I could do it today, but there's one other thing that worries me. According to 'Ford Q101', they reserve the right to carry out random inspections, either on the production line or here, at our Works. What happens if they exercise their prerogative and we are in production? We could be right up the creek, and no mistake!"
"I don't know the answer to that one, except to say that if that's what the Opposition are doing, then there must be an answer."
"Are you willing to give it a go, then?"
"We have lots to gain and very little to lose. Why not."
One morning when he went off to get a couple of spare substandard bus cushions, he came upon a group of maintenance workers clearing out the area of the factory which had been used as the store for scrap and substandard products for as long as he had been employed there.
"What's going on?" he asked the foreman.
"This is where the new Ford line is going in. Hadn't you heard? There will be two assembly lines laid out this way", he indicated up the length of the shop. "So they tell me, there will be thirty or forty people employed here. There's an advert. in the 'Echo', this week. We are taking on labour specially for it."
"Nobody tells me anything in this place!" he observed, making off in the direction of Folklore's office.
"I see that the Ford line is starting up. That was very quick, I only had lab. clearance last week!"
"Good news, isn't it." Folklore beamed paternally. "Once the lab. report came through, it unleashed the floodgates. Apparently Watkins had dimensional clearance for a number of products - something to do with blue forms, he tells me - all lined up and waiting to go. He's done a good job, there. As the Motor Industry is in a state of boom at the moment, Ford were only too glad to have the extra manufacturing capacity and now they're pushing us to get moving as quickly as we can."
"What sort of turnover?"
"First estimate from Automotive Sales is œ600 000 for the first year. That's got to be good. Even at 10% overall markup, it is going to improve our performance figures no end. The Board will be impressed."
"Not bad for a little bit of sleight of hand!" Dave grinned.
Folklore's brow furrowed into a frown of real displeasure. "That is not the sort of comment I wish to hear. This is a reputable Company and our methods utterly scrupulous. All that has been done is to regularise the initial sampling procedures."
"If you say so." Dave excused himself and retired to the quiet of his own office to mull over this magnificent example of 'doublethink'. He had been too taken aback to prod Folklore towards the idea of giving him a rise. He had the uncomfortable suspicion that if things went wrong, he would deny any knowledge of it and leave Dave and his substandard bus cushions to take the blame. It was, after all, his signature on the forms, not Folklore's and in six months time he would actually believe what he had just said.
There's many a slip twixt blueprint and product"
N.F. 1970