Tom Ligon - The Delicate Crunch of Marshmallows

Erica sat silently for two minutes. “Thanks,” she said at last, and slowly left the cubicle, deep in thought.

Shortly after Erica’s departure, Buzz Santi entered the shop and spotted Kara, who was attempting to fish a wrench out of the bowels of a fabricator. “Hey, Kara, was Erica down here?”

“Yeah, Doc. You just missed her. She was headed downstairs.”

Buzz shook his head. He spoke in a low voice. “Don’t want to see her. I’m snooping around behind her. How’s she doing?”

Kara looked confused. “I dunno. Got a lot on her mind. Why?”

“Something I said to her the other day that I’m starting to regret,” Buzz replied. “Especially since it appears she is going around collecting bad news.”

Kara shrugged. “Erica is tough. And feisty. She’ll do OK.”

Buzz didn’t look so certain. “She’s tired, Kara. From what I can tell, she feels defeated. For the first time since I’ve known her, she seems indecisive. I’m not sure she has any fight left in her. You were with her at the Supercollider. What do you know about the conditions of her departure?”

“Got fed up, and accepted this job,” Kara replied.

Buzz raised an eyebrow. “I hear a little different story. Some people say she fried part of the Supercollider with an experiment that went wrong, and got chewed out for it. Could she have resigned under pressure?”

Kara shook her head. “Don’t think so. At least, that’s not the way she tells it. But yeah, she did some damage, and they chewed her out.”

“What worries me,” Buzz said, folding his hands, “is that Erica has known nothing but great success for most of her life, and now is facing two failures in a row.”

Erica stepped through the open hatch to Raul Otoya’s tiny office. “All right, what the hell is LVLPSPL?”

He looked up from his computer screen. “Low Volume Large Project Standard Productivity Level. I see you’ve been exploring.”

Erica knotted her brow and twisted her mouth to one side, staring at him for a few seconds. “I know what that sounds like it means, but in that case, your numbers don’t make any sense. What is it, really, and how do you come up with it?”

“It is a relative index of per-worker productivity, compared to the average productivity of similar industry as a whole,” Raul replied. “The classification of ‘Low Volume Large Project’ is for things like high-rise construction, ship-building, big research facilities, and other labor-intensive one-off programs. The other big category is ‘Industrial Mass Production,’ which is totally incompatible.”

“Of course,” Erica replied, rolling her eyes. “But how can you compare us to a shipyard? We’re having to develop everything from scratch.”

“The analysis is set up to cover a wide variety of very different activities,” Raul answered. “The program is fantastically complex, and the data required is prodigious. Considers everything from component count, weight, and complexity installed to kilograms of waste material produced. It seems to work, though. For instance, government-funded activities almost always show much lower productivity than free-market private enterprise.”

“Shoo,” Erica said, gently pushing Raul’s chair from his workstation while pulling up another for herself. She took her seat. “Is this saved?”

Raul nodded, and Erica clicked through a few menus. She called up a graph which showed LVLPSPL on the vertical axis, and Years on the horizontal. The graph showed a steep rise from the left, an early and dramatic peak, then a gradual decline to the right. Midway across, the gradual decline acquired a distinct additional downward inflection.

Erica pointed to the early peak. “This point gives a value of five-point-two. Am I to understand that this crew was over five times as productive as the average of similar Earth industries?”

Raul nodded.

Erica shook her head. “I know they’re good, but how can that be?”

Raul worked the joystick on the arm of his seat, bringing up a small spreadsheet. “I wondered the same thing myself. Nearly fell over backwards when the computer first spit that number out at me. Came up with this.

“In the first place, our crew tends to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week,” Raul continued, pointing to the first section. “That’s basically well over twice the hours most folks on Earth work these days. Next, they’re sturdy as oxen. They were all screened for excellent health, and are in the prime of their lives. They average about one sick day a year.”

Erica pulled out a calculator and checked the figures, then raised an eyebrow.

Raul pointed to several more lines. “Next, you couldn’t make them take a vacation without threatening them with a stick. Every last one is a workaholic. You scared the rest off in the interviews.”

Erica pointed to the next line. “Is this for real? Is the crew’s average IQ really 140?”

Raul nodded again. “Evidently you are a very talented interviewer.”

“At least I did something right,” Erica replied. “But I’m a little humbled. My own IQ is just a few points over the crew’s average.”

Raul’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding! I thought you must be off-scale. Well over 200, anyway.”

Erica shook her head. “I make up for it with imagination and stubbornness. I see you assume their IQ gives a proportional advantage. Are you sure that’s realistic?”

Raul shrugged. “It’ll do for this demonstration. Seems like a reasonable trend, on the whole. I suppose morons would be better at some tedious jobs that would bore this bright bunch silly, but there are a lot of other tasks where the advantage probably varies with the square or cube of intelligence.

“Moving on, the next line has a supervision factor,” Raul continued. “We had a 25 percent advantage because we needed very little supervisory time. Nobody had to be told to do their job. The final two lines are wild-assed guesses to fudge the results to match the overall measurements, but they seem reasonable. These people were so fired up, and believed so much in what they were doing, I figure we had a hell of an advantage right there. I figure our cobby tools and ultra-raw materials pulled us back to the final result. I should probably have factors in there for no booze, no drugs, no TV, no pesky sales reps, no kids getting sick at school, but it would be another fudge factor on top of enthusiasm, and I’d have to counter it with an even more pessimistic assessment of our tools. The point is, you can see where the productivity could come from. The numbers are realistic.”

Erica hit a key to back the display up to the earlier graph. “If I read this correctly, now they’ve dropped to a total of one-point-four, despite still working about the same number of hours?”

Raul nodded.

Erica pointed to the first drop. “Not hard to figure what caused this. That’s when our sponsors started getting antsy, and demanded that I show them some results they could point to. Up to that point, we were still building the facility, not the ship. They complained that we weren’t producing, yet this shows we were really cranking it out. So I screwed around with the priorities and started building the ship.”

Raul nodded again.

Erica’s finger slid down the graph to the downward inflection in the middle. “Also not hard to figure out what happened here. That’s when they imposed Goal-Oriented Milestone Measured Management on us.”