The Card I Laid on His Desk

What I Put in the Box

I had drawn the fix for that press in March. Four months before Dale ever got hurt.

We have a suggestion box bolted to the wall by the time clock, a dented metal thing the color of split pea soup.

The plant calls it the Bright Idea box.

If they use your idea they are supposed to put two hundred dollars in your next check and your name up on the board in the hall.

Mostly people drop in gripes about the vending machine or jokes, and mostly nobody empties it.

I am not an engineer.

I run a brake press and I have a high school diploma and twenty-two years on factory floors, first in Ohio and then here after my husband Jeff and I moved back to be near his folks.

But I had worked a plant down in Columbia City that had light curtains on every press, and I knew what they cost and what they did, and I knew Number Six would stand still forever before anybody spent the money without being pushed.

So one night in March I stayed late and I drew it. A plain index card.

A little sketch of the press mouth with the beam across it, arrows showing where the sensor boxes would bolt, a note that Number Six had a part revolution clutch, same as the new press up front, which meant a curtain could stop the ram in the middle of a stroke.

The old full stroke presses by the dock could not use a beam, because they cannot stop once they start. But Six could.

I wrote that down because I figured whoever read it would say it could not be done, and I wanted the answer already sitting there.

I signed it. I put the date in the top corner. March the ninth.

Then I folded it once and dropped it in the pea soup box and went home and did not think about it again.