by Josh Karnes
* * *
Poppy made his way from the manufacturing building over to the offices of FSS and knocked on Chief Technical Officer Phil McLain’s closed office door. It was way outside of protocol for a lowly manufacturing manager to barge in on the CTO, but this was no ordinary problem. It was way over his head.
“Come in,” Phil invited. Poppy turned the knob and came in with a log under his arm. It seemed very out of place in the rosewood-and-windows office. “Lucas. What’s up?”
For a CTO, Phil was pretty casual and didn’t mind mixing up with his underlings. He had a real knack for seeming friendly and remembering people’s names. This felt very much like visiting a college professor’s office. Phil even looked a little like a prof, always wearing starched-stiff khakis and a button-down-collar oxford, with tortoise shell glasses and barely a fringe of hair.
“Mr. McLain, we had a stop on the wood line where we make those cubes for Thermion. You know, the cubes?”
“Yeah. Little carbon cubes they feed to their machine. Kind of weird. So you had a line stop?”
“That’s right. The saw that chops the logs got hung up on something it couldn’t cut. So Mike Keenan, the guy who manages that line, took a crowbar to the log so we could see what stopped it.”
“I presume this is the log.”
“Yes. I thought it would be best to just bring it up and show you directly, because this don’t make no sense at all to me and Mike.” Poppy set the log on the round table in the middle of the office as McClain got up from his desk to come take a closer look. When he saw it, his eyes went wide.
“Thank you, Lucas. You can leave the log here. Let me know immediately if you have any other issues like this on the line.”
“Okay, Mr. McLain. Will do.”
As Poppy left the office, Phil McClain was already dialing the phone. Hopefully someone at Thermion had an explanation for this.