Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Logical Song
Dusty proved true to her word. She spent the first several weeks learning about our procedures and operations. She seemed to purposely dress conservatively and down played her makeup to be less distracting. It was a valiant try but not very successful. However, a combination of her obvious intelligence and calm demeanor coupled with my daily sexual harassment threats, up to and including castration, cooled the male ardor throughout the plant significantly.
She must not have settled in completely yet. She had not asked me to show her around the town. I had made up my mind that, if asked, it was something I could do on a professional friendly basis. Do they still make saltpeter?
“Mick, have you got a moment?”
“Sure Dusty, what’s up?”
“Well. First of all, everyone has been so nice to me and I have learned so much.”
“That is music to my ears.”
“And I’m sure it’s more Zeppelin than Manilow.”
“You twisted that right, sister.”
“I’m not even going to try to go toe to toe with you on rock references. I hate to lose.”
“And they said MBAs don’t have good judgment.”
“They do? Anyway, Mick, I do have a suggestion to help strengthen security around X-400.”
I dropped the smart aleck smile and remarks and gave her my full attention. “I’d love to hear it.”
She popped a pair of reading glasses on as she consulted her notes. This gave her that faint librarian look. I had to think of rusty butter knives slicing through very valued body appendages to keep my thoughts from wandering into porn land.
“I’ve been looking at your invoice payments for raw materials and your production run reports. If you collate the order dates on the invoices with the times and quantities of X-400 you produce, there is a chance of back calculating the types and amounts of raw materials used. I noticed that extra copies of invoices were thrown away, not shredded. Copies of production reports also end up in the trashcan after your daily meetings. A motivated competitor could do some dumpster diving and calculations to come up with the X-400 raw material quantites and components.”
“Do you really think that could happen?”
“Well, after your last X-400 run, I grabbed some invoices and production reports out of trash cans before they went to the dumpster. Using a few industry algorithms tweaked for the conditions during the run, I back calculated several scenarios of what the raw material mix might be.”
“Ok. How do you know whether any of them were close to being right?”
“I presented my data to Richard. I think his amazed reaction, which was something along the lines of ‘Holy cow,’ confirmed that at least one of them nailed it. With some trial and error, a competitor could have your mix figured out.”
“Geesh, I never thought of that. I hope none of them have either. We still have the operating parameters well safeguarded but we don’t want any cracks in our shield. I’ll have a shredder sent to Invoice Processing immediately and I’ll tell those goobers in the daily meeting to shred the production reports.”
“Can you let me see the next few batches of invoices and production reports before they are shredded to ensure I can duplicate my findings? I’d like to be sure I didn’t just get lucky.”
“Great idea. And, great work, Dusty.”
“Thanks, Mick. I hope you haven’t forgotten that I’d like you to show me around the Asheville area. I haven’t had much time yet, but I think I am free next weekend.”
“It would me my pleasure, let me check my schedule and get back to you.” One should never appear too easy to get, should one?
MBA - Moron$ Ba$ and A$ PG Version Page 39
