9
When Stefanie returned to the OEG building after her trip to Chicago, she was hoping to make it to her office without having to answer any questions. She wasn’t that lucky. She managed to sputter out an explanation and thank several caring coworkers for their concern each time she was stopped in the hallway. The words felt uncomfortable in her mouth. Even Peggy at the front desk had stopped her to ask about her grandfather’s health scare. She managed to fabricate several lovely memories with a grandfather she barely knew. Only fifteen minutes had passed since she’d walked in the door, and she already felt overwhelmed and exhausted. She was so screwed. Minutes after she sat down to rub her temples at her desk, Nash tapped on her door. She looked up. “Please tell me this is a work question.”
“Ah, a fun weekend with your family?” Nash grinned. Stefanie must have given him a pitiful look because he cringed. “Ooh. That bad, huh? Well, I’ll steer clear of it then, unless you want to swap stories. There have been some family reunions that – oh – too soon? Okay, work, then. I have more ideas for our little research lab under the sea. Want to hear them?”
Stefanie breathed a sigh of relief. “Nash, you’re my favorite lab employee I’ve talked to this morning.”
Nash raised an eyebrow. “And the only one here except for you.”
“Well, on the bright side, you are guaranteed to have the best idea an employee has brought me today.” She leaned back in her chair and cracked her knuckles. Science, she could do. “Don’t tell me what anyone else thinks yet. I want to form my own opinion.”
“You got it, boss.” Nash took out his phone and pulled up a model of the standard-sized, watertight container they often left on the bottom of the ocean. To keep costs down, each custom research platform had to fit within the same size container. He swiped the screen to a cutaway drawing of the internal components. Squeezed in between the sizable transmitter and salinity meter was a rough sketch of a small area with a number of spots for equipment to snap in. Nash swiped a few times to show his design from different angles. “I made a bracket that allows us to snap in/snap out a number of different components of different sizes without going through the normal hassle of assembly and disassembly. Each one will have a special component attached to it that snaps into a standard sized connector. Think about how all your charging cable ends fit into the USB charger on your wall. I just had to find the right spare parts and electronics, which I did, in a drawer in the back of the lab. That means I can use what I have in the lab to create the extra research platforms we talked about, as long as I have your support. It addresses management concerns about part availability while letting us do what we want, starting now.”
“Nice work.” Stefanie smiled. “That’ll make my management presentation a lot easier. What’s the catch?” Nothing came for free.
Nash looked back towards the lab. “The only catch is that to implement this, I need to make some new custom parts and rework the pile of components we rent out to our customers. And we don’t have much time before we’ve reserved the ROVs to send more platforms out in a few weeks.”
“Ooh, do we get to take them all apart and put them back together? That sounds harder. But definitely more fun.” Stefanie let her eyes dart to her calendar. A date was highlighted in red. She mentally did the math. They might make the date, but it’d be close.
Nash’s eyes sparkled. “I am so glad you’re my new boss. We’d have to rework them but not completely disassemble them. It’s not a trivial amount of work, and we have just a small window of time to do it in.”
Stefanie pulled up her budget spreadsheet to buy time to think. Nash had just given her a perfect opening to get the CIA in the office. While a part of her was wary about moving this quickly, there might not be another opportunity. She looked back at the eager young engineer. “Alright. There’s no way Cole would say no to that. I’ll just let management know we’ve already gotten started when I give my presentation. But I’m helping you with this – I’m not going to dump that much work on your lap.”
“Awesome. That’s appreciated, boss.” Nash smiled.
Stefanie looked at her computer, then back at Nash. “On a related note, I received an email from a high-potential grad student interested in an internship with us. I don’t have the budget to pay him, but we might be able to get him to work for us for a few weeks for free. I guess he got some kind of scholarship or grant for it. Wish I’d had that when I was in college.” Watching Nash process the information felt like a knife twisting in her stomach. How many times had she given presentations that talked about how important it was to build trust on a team? Lectured her reports on the importance of honesty? Parker and Ree were definitely going to be in charge of post-holiday kitchen cleanup this year…maybe forever.
“Nice.” Nash nodded, looking off into space.
Stefanie gave him a knowing look. “You’re reassembling the platform in your head, aren’t you?”
Nash shrugged. “Sorry. Bad habit. A new person is coming, which changes
