"What happened to your eye?"
"Oh, I fell off a motorcycle." He looked nonchalant, but the scar was long and deep.
"Slice it on the pavement?"
"Naw, the lens on my sunglasses broke out and just sliced it up."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, it's not too bad now, it happened about a week ago." He looked back at the paper in front of him. "Ready for run two?"
"Sure," I said. "Randy, you set?"
The operator muttered in his beard and hollered that he was. He called back to the big friendly bubba at the electrical control panel. They were set.
This was the tech belt of the town. The company had been here for about a century, and been in and out of chapter 11. They knew how to build batteries, but apparently not how to manage. The folks were friendly, good Missourians, who liked hunting, fishing, and barbeque. It was a kind of life I knew about, but hadn't ever run into. They were good people, but something about the whole shop still came off as unprofessional. I was here to ride herd on the testing, representing my company's interests, and I was accompanied by our first-tier supplier's rep. He was a quality guy, I was the engineer, between us we were supposed to keep the bugs out of this batch.
The engineer with the scar double-checked the paperwork, and gave the boys the go-ahead. The battery was activated, the shock hammer hit, rose, hit again, rose one last time, paused, and fell for the last hit. Now the data processing started. That always took a while. They folks here weren't too confident with the setup that I had made them use. My hands were bound by company policy, though, so I could sit in smugness and point out the requirements. Ah, engineering. Is this what I wanted out of you? To be an emanation of a company, working its will on the good people of Missouri? Life is funny. The next hit was ready now. I scuffed my boot on the floor and got back to supervising.
