Monday, December 6 (cont'd)

Brew had a friend, an engineer, he worked at CRC with.

They both got laid off at the same time, and used to meet for lunch, where they would network, and laugh at the pygmies and back-stabbers they formerly worked with, many of whom they were now entreating for jobs.

Pricks and asskissers.

They would run down who was working where, what contracts had tasking left in them, what new contracts were coming up.
Contract work, you move around a lot, necessarily.

No gig lasts forever, as Owen says.

Brew's friend, Jim, would always ask him if he knew René Dubois when he worked at A/C/T. Jim and René had worked together at Matrix Marine, which A/C/T bought, which was then bought by the company that renamed them Actaeon.

Brew would say he'd heard of René, but had not met him.

Now, René came into Del's office most mornings to talk to Brew about the world situation. Current affairs.

They were both unregenerate liberals, surrounded by John Birch Society Republicans.

They would shake their heads over what the Bush administration was doing, and cluck cluck like old ladies.

Their co-workers, meanwhile, cheered the Bush administration on.

They were patriots.

Anyone who didn't "support the troops," their patriotism was suspect.

Brew had learned to keep his politics to himself, in the workplace, and so had René. But it was nice to find a kindred soul to gossip with.

René's work was running out at the base. He was mildly worried about what might happen to him at Actaeon. You had to bring in your own work.

Nobody would go out and get it for you. You had to cultivate a customer at the base who would keep throwing work your way.

René's customer was old, and about to retire, and his likely successor could throw work René's way, he could throw it somewhere else. To another contractor, another engineer.

René was old enough to retire himself, and could afford it, but he liked having an office to come to, work to do. Living at home with his wife, having his wife find things for him to do around the house, did not appeal to him.

Brew and René also talked about books. René was a reader.

In fact, they talked about the life of a working writer.

Brew was trying to get over feeling guilty about writing on the job, losing jobs for paying more attention to his writing than he did to his job. To accept it as his lot.

He wasn't stealing from the company--although the company looked at it that way--any more than the Republicans talking around the water cooler--these Goddamned unpatriotic Democrats--were stealing.

He gave the company as much as he could spare.

He gave the company as much as the Republicans talking politics around the water cooler, flirting with female co-workers, betting on the football pool, proselytizing for their fundamentalist religion, running their Amway business on the side.

Reading right-wing web sites on the worldwide web and contributing to right-wing chat groups.

Brew was stealing.

No matter how the Republicans--Brew found their noxious shit in the printer--saw what they were doing.

Brew was stealing, and trying to come to terms with himself about it.

At the same time, he was driven to write.

He could not shut the writing off.

It came, unbidden and unstanchable.

And there he sat, with a computer on his desk and down-time between deadlines.

As Potter said, when his first technical writing job gave Brew an electric typewriter, an office, and access to a copying machine, it was like giving Frank Pitts a job guarding the wild, gone-feral hogs on St. Joe Point.

It was like throwing Bre'r Rabbit in the briar patch.

Please don't throw me in that briar patch, Br'er Fox.

One of the columns of the SM&R codes was for level of maintenance. Who was authorized to repair a machine.

There was organizational, intermediate, and depot-level maintenance.

Organizational level was a sailor with his tool kit and the training he had received on the machine. The technical manuals he used in the repair. It was remove a part and replace it with an identical part out of inventory.

Intermediate level was send it to the shop to be worked on. The shop was on base, or on ship, and would have equipment a sailor didn't carry in his tool bag. Sometimes you would tear a part down and repair it, then put the same part back on.

Depot was off somewhere central with the capability to overhaul whole systems. A base or a ship sent a piece of equipment to depot to be worked on.

Another code was don't repair it at all. If it breaks, throw it away and get a new one. Some items it was cheaper to discard and buy a new one than to work on them.

How things were coded was subject to dispute. People high up at the base would argue over it. It had implications for the items stocked in the supply system, the detail of technical manuals, the amount of training required. These figured in the cost.

Anyhow, the base was the depot for the rewind machine, and the reels of cable the machine unwound, to inspect, and rewound, if the wire rope did not have kinks or loose strands or fraying beyond a certain amount, and there was a Quonset hut where Navy technicians inspected cable all day long and either rejected it or certified it as fit for use.

One day Rhino took Brew and Lucy Diamond over to see the machine in operation.

To see the sailors operate it.

I can't tell you all about this because it's classified, but some kinds of cable had explosive charges that would drive a blade into a cable it came across and cut the cable, allowing a mine to float to the surface, and be destroyed, and a reel of cable used for that would have places on the cable to put the charge, so they had to look at all of those.

Rhino was good with the sailors. They had a joking relationship. Since he was an ex-enlisted military retiree, a former master sergeant, or chief petty officer, he spoke their language. It wasn't like he was a feather-merchant who'd never served. He did two Air Force tours in Vietnam, maintaining F-105s.

The Thunderchief, or Thud.

Being in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and a woman, Lucy Diamond knew enough to shut up and listen, to keep her pie-hole shut, until spoken to.

Brew listened too, and took notes.

He didn't have any questions.

He wasn't even curious, about missions, and sea stories, and blarney. Money talks and bullshit walks. He just wanted to see someone operate the controls, and put the machine through its paces.

After the visit, Brew and Lucy and Rhino went to lunch together, to a local steak house, that was full of contractors, and engineers, from the base, and secretaries.

After lunch they went back to work.

Lucy was working on the Maintenance Plan. SM&R codes were her raison d'être.

She had questions for Rhino that she wouldn't ask a maintenance technician.

Brew listened with interest, as he would have to have the same SM&R codes for a part number in a parts list table in his manual as Lucy had in her more detailed list in the Maintenance Plan.

Well, Brew tried to listen with interest. It was deadly boring, and all he could do to make himself give a shit.

Later that week there was a meeting at Actaeon's main conference room, about SM&R codes, with people from the base.

Brew attended. He wore a white dress shirt, open at the collar, chino pants, and shined low-quarter shoes.

He could not have told you what the issues were, but turf was involved, and people felt strongly about it.

The two sides disliked each other, and Antaeon was caught in the middle. Rhino tried to be a peacemaker, but nothing was resolved, and the issue was tabled.

It would come up again.

He would do the best he could to make sure his parts list agreed with Lucy Diamond's, and to change his parts list when her parts list changed.

Donuts were served, and coffee. Bottle water and orange juice.

After the meeting, the leftover donuts were taken into the employee lounge, for employees to graze on.