The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
At 6:00 the whistle blew and not one of them moved toward a station. For eleven seconds nobody on Line 4 touched anything. Then Vern Hlavac came down the aisle from the far end with his clipboard held flat against his chest.
Vern is the line lead. He is fifty-seven, big through the shoulders, and he looks at the floor when he has something to say, as if the words are written there. He looked at the box. He looked at me.
“Go see him,” he said. “I’ll hold the stand.”
“Vern.”
“Go see him, Judy. Then we’ll talk.”
I put the lid back on and picked up the box. It weighed about what a sack of flour weighs, and I carried it down the long hall to Conference Room 2 with Gene’s photograph riding on top, because I was not going to leave any of it on that bench a minute longer than I had to.
Kyle Lindquist is the controller. He is thirty-four, from the Minneapolis side of Plainsmark Industrial, the company in Omaha that bought Tallgrass three years ago from the Koenig family. He had been in Cobb Creek since March, long enough to learn where the good coffee was, not long enough to learn anybody’s name. There was a folder in front of him, and a box of tissues beside the folder, and at the end of the table sat Pam Eilers from human resources, who did nothing wrong that day, and I have told her so.
“Mrs. Hanneman,” Kyle said. “Would you like coffee?”
I said I would not.
“I want to be clear before I say anything else that this is not about your performance. Your performance is not in question. It never has been.”
I set the box on the chair beside me.
“Your position on Line 4 final test has been eliminated, effective today. The Hydro-Check cell went live in July. It runs the same pressure test on two cylinders at a time and keeps a data record on each one. Plainsmark’s operations group reviewed the positions the cell replaces, and yours is one.”
“One of how many?”
“Eleven seats across three plants. At Tallgrass, yours.”
He slid the folder over. Twelve weeks of severance. Coverage through the end of August, then the continuation forms, which would cost me $1,640 a month. A pension summary: vested, reduced for early retirement, $1,480 beginning now if I elected it. I read that page twice and the numbers did not change.
“October ninth,” I said.
He looked up.
“Thirty years. It is October ninth. That is sixty-two days from today.”
“I understand the date is close.”
“Did anyone look at it?”
I want to be fair to Kyle Lindquist, because I have been fair to him since. He did not lie to me. He put his hand flat on the folder, turned a page, read something, and turned it back.
“The roster ranks seats by cost to the plant,” he said. “Wage, benefits, the pension accrual. It sorts the highest-cost seats against the savings from the cell. It ranks positions, Mrs. Hanneman. Not people. I don’t think anyone looked at your anniversary.”
It was the honest answer, and it was worse than a lie would have been. A lie would have meant somebody decided this about me. Nobody had decided anything. A column of numbers had been sorted, and my name had dropped out the bottom.
“The plan requires active employment on the anniversary date,” Kyle said. “I checked. I’m sorry. I really am.”