Chapter 39: Trust
In our class action lawsuit, the media reported the filing of charges and Fords denials as a big news story that faded away in less than a week. By 1994 there was no news to report because Ford succeeded in moving the federal court jurisdiction closer to its world headquarters and Judge Friedman, the new federal judge, slapped a gage order on the litigants.
For the rest of that year and the following eight years the public saw more Ford commercials than they had ever seen featuring black Ford buyers, plant workers, engineers and two of its five black designers. The public, which included Judge Friedman and others who would decide our case, saw news stories with Ford handing out big checks to black leaders like Jessie Jackson. They heard about wonderful things Ford was doing for the black community. They heard nothing about the lawsuit.
It sounds absurd for me to say that Ford would reorganize the spearhead of the entire company for the soul purpose of pushing me one guy who says he did wonderful things for the company into a difficult legal position. In practice nothing had to change for Ford. It could reorganize departments on paper to serve any purpose and reorganize them back to where they were five minutes later. The only change I saw was my job title and my new Supervisor, Dave Delikta. When the issue came up again seven years later, Greg couldnt even recall why I chose to go into engineering. He remembered only that I did.
I told my lawyer what happed. He told me that it didnt matter as long as Ford didnt demote me or threaten to demote me if I refused to transfer into engineering. Ford made an offer. I accepted it. I had been a grade-8 Master Modeler. Now I was a grade-8 Electronic Math Model Leader. No harm no foul.
When I explained the foul and the harm that could come of it Martin got angry. He was the layer. He knew the law. I knew Ford. Martin had no clue as to how important my case was to the lawsuit and how this kind of manipulation affected Charles Purnell and Fords black and older salaried workers in general as much as it affected me. If we performed exceptionally well anywhere, Ford could move us and keep moving us until it boxed us into a place where we couldnt excel or get a performance review that reflected our performance if we did excel. Everything depended on how long it took our case to go to a jury.
Charles and I worried that Martin didnt understand what it meant to work in one physical location in Ford design and engineering or another. He didnt know when to distinguish between design and engineering or between NAD, NAAD and Staff so he didnt know when or how Ford used word magic and number magic to create a false picture of reality. He didnt know when distance mattered and when it didnt. He had no firsthand way of knowing that we were telling the unadorned truth when we said things that sounded like exaggerations. Because he didnt know the landscape, he couldnt distinguish between labels and responsibilities or theoretical opportunities and real ones. We urged him to come in, walk around and observe our working environment. He never did it.
On April 19, 1995 I was giving my deposition in a suite at one of the Ford Twin Towers office buildings to a young lawyer named Javier Rubinstein representing Ford. Javier worked for Mayer, Brown and Platt, the Chicago firm that charged Ford $1,000 an hour for its services. A stenographer recorded the proceedings using a steno machine and a tape recorder. The Minnesota-based attorney representing me was Ross Plaetzer from Springer and Lang. Ross was the man quoted in the newspaper article that prompted Martin to merge Purnells case and mine with the class action suit brought by black Ford workers in Minnesota and Texas.
Ross was confident that we would win. He did his homework and he knew how strong the class action case was. He had gotten together with Charles and me before the depositions to find out what he that he couldnt discern about us and our individual claims from the documents to prepare us for interrogation. Charles was slated for four days of interrogation. I was slated for six days. I was there for 8 days
I discovered halfway through the proceedings that Ross didnt have the complete file I turned over to Martin. When he got the missing pages, they were out of order and they included a letter I wrote to Maxi Cason before my promotion, which was dated long after I got promoted. The wrong date was because Martin couldnt find the first copy of the letter. My Tandy home computer held the original that I copied and sent to Ford. The Tandy word processing program automatically entered the current date when a letter was called up. Martin didnt think it was significant because Ford had the one with the correct date.
Still, I was surprised to see the wrong letter in my file at the deposition. I got it straight with Ross. He got it straight with Javier. It seemed that Martin was right. He wasnt. Ford would try to use the letter with the wrong date to make me look like a liar and a cheat but it wouldnt happen for years. The important thing Martin missed was Fords willingness to lie to federal authorities as it did with the two promotion lists it combined and sent to the EEOC to prove that it didnt discriminate against me. I was beginning to worry about Martins competence. I thanked God for Ross Plaetzer.
I recall the April 19 date because thats when I heard about the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. We were on a break. I stayed in the conference room while Ross took his break to explore the building. He came back with the news about Oklahoma City. Nobody who wasnt involved in the bombing plot knew who did it or why but my own frustration with the machinery of American justice immediately conjured up the image of a disgruntled American. I had no sympathy for anyone who would target innocent civilians to make a political point but I knew from experience that I would have no qualms about taking the life of an enemy combatant in war. I was in a war. Like all wars this one was mostly a contest of words and images.
If you have never been though a protracted class action lawsuit with your professional reputation and the livelihood of thousands of people on the line, you dont know how stressful it can be. You feel it every day. You know that powerful people are out to tarnish your character, to destroy you socially, psychologically and professionally. We expected the contest to last six or seven years.
Calvin Morrison had been willing to endure the long struggle with Purnell and me but his wife wouldnt have it. Cal had hypertension, the condition that killed my father when he was 51 years old. When we filed our charges with the EEOC, Calvin was 52. My sister also had hypertension. She was 49 at that time. I never said so but I was secretly gland that neither of them joined in the suit because I was afraid it would kill them. Purnell and I were single and in good health. If Ford backed us into a position where it could fire us, which it couldnt do while the EEOC determination was pending, only we would suffer for it. Neither of us thought that we were risking our lives.
Fords attorneys made the mistake of proceeding as though Calvin could be turned against us. They knew from his salary and his seniority that his long string of EPs had to be high EPs and probably would have been Os if he were white. A smart guy in Cals place would have known how easy it would have been for him to start getting Os, substantial raises and to take my place as the token black Master Modeler. All he had to do was keep quite when the Ford lawyer said that I was promoted at the same time all of the Masters on Fords combined list were promoted. They didnt take into account Cal Morrisons courage and integrity. He stopped right there and told the real story of what happened.
Calvins deposition lasted one day. It was slated for two.
When Martin sent me a copy of my deposition transcript to check for errors I found so many of them that the document was useless. Ross told me that Javier agreed and new transcripts would be made from the tapes. To my knowledge the steno company had the only tape recording. I never saw a corrected transcript.
The purpose of the depositions was to give Fords attorneys the opportunity to probe for weaknesses in the sworn testimony of witnesses against their client. Their job was to lock us into statements they could attack in court with evidence and witnesses that contradicted us and to learn what legal maneuvers they had to use to block evidence and witnesses they couldnt contradict. Our attorneys had the same opportunity to get depositions from witnesses that would put their sworn statements on record to corroborate our claims. Our attorneys never took a deposition from anyone associated with Ford design and engineering.
Shortly after I gave my deposition, Ross Plaetzer mysteriously disappeared from the case. Our new Springer and Lang attorney was going to be a man named Larry Schaefer that we never met with or talked to on talked to by phone. The change was disconcerting because Ross had a good handle on the key issues in that case that we couldnt get anyone else to pay attention to. We had faith in him. More importantly, he had faith in us. We didnt know about Larry Schafer and we were beginning to have serious doubts about Martin.
Purnell and I met frequently to compare notes and keep up each others morale. Comparing notes did not help our morale. Both of us saw the subtle ways that Martin was trying to intimidate us. Purnell admitted that it worked on him because Martin was the legal expert. He was watching our backs to make sure that Springer and Lang did not put us on the back burner in deference to its other clients. When Martin and I clashed about how the class action suit was proceeding, Purnell agreed with me privately but went along with Martin in his presence. He could see that Martin was trying to drive a wedge between us but neither of us could figure out why.
We knew we were in trouble when Purnell started to voice the same concerns I had and Martin brought a senior partner in Springer and Lange to Michigan to allay them. His name was James A. Jones. I thought he was a grade-A jerk.
To begin with he knew squat about Purnells case or mine. He followed up with a determined resistance to hearing anything we had to say. The previous big case he played a major part in winning was a race discrimination suit, which was why Martin brought us into the class action suit with Springer and Lang. That company was nowhere near as big or sophisticated as Ford Motor Co. It had violated the law in the most clumsy and transparent ways possible. It didnt have the devious machinery in place to defend itself that Ford had. Purnell and I could see, just by the documents Ford sent to the EEOC and the interrogatories it sent to us, that it was using different means to achieve the same end.
When Ford agreed to settle the 1973 class action suit out of court in 1980, it changed only the way it practiced illegal discrimination to counter the governments 1960s tests to identify illegal dissemination. My files contained the documents that detailed how Ford did it, the most explosive of which were the ones showing how Ford deceived the EEOC with my raise and promotion. I had spoken with top Ford executives and my involvement in the Performance Review/Promotional Practices task force gave me blueprints to the design of its discriminatory practices. Jones wasnt interested. He flew from Minnesota to Michigan to tell Purnell and me that we were in good hands and thats all he tried to do.
He didnt succeed.
The most galling aspect of Jones lecture was his condescending tone. He talked to us as though we were ten-year-old school children called into the principals office for misbehaving. With the kind of grin that usually accompanies a wink, he proceeded to tell us a lawyer trick he would use to get something for us from Ford that we didnt deserve. To illustrate his point he used a hypothetical situation in which the company fired us for snoring cocaine on company property. It sounded like a black engineer I knew. He told us that if a white guy hadnt been fired for the same thing Springer and Lang would get our jobs back and big bucks to boot.
Why did Jones use that irrelevant, offensive and possibly racist scenario? Why use an imaginary situation at all? I wanted to stomp the man into the floor but I calmed down enough by the time Charles and I left the office to keep from being a menace on the road. I wasnt sure about Charles. He was cursing and shaking so badly with rage that I had to calm him down before I could let near his truck. We were loyal Ford employees who were suing the company only because Ford gave us no other way to get the recognition we deserved for the work we did. Ford owed us a big pile of money it stole from us over decades and money it was continuing to steal from us by way of its performance review system, which encouraged irrational discrimination of every kind.
The system was so badly out of sync with reality that Fords top decision makers didnt know who was doing the work that made the company profitable. Working in product development allowed Charles and me to see years into the future of Ford products. Charles and I knew that Ford was headed for disaster. In a few years there wouldnt be enough qualified people in place to keep the company profitable. Beginning with some of it best black salaried workers, Ford was slowly and systematically killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Fords top executives didnt even know what games were being played by outside firms like ICEM that licensed their software packages and rented their experts like Carl and Angela to Ford. I knew because I was the primary game piece that Carl and Angela were moving around on the board to move their competition out of the picture but I didnt know it at the time. Nobody working for Ford knew about it until the Ford math modeling Manager Greg Burnabi privately urged me to learn ICEM-Surf because CDRS was on its way out.
I took the class at the Southfield, Michigan office building where I went to learn ICEM-DDN. My instructor was Mark Ritz. He had been working with ICEM-surf for seven years. From time to time Carl popped in to set up equipment or talk to Mark. Thats where I learned that Carls primary job was a salesman and the politics inside of ICEM were cutthroat. Every ICEM employee I met smiled and joked with each other and ran each other down down behind their backs. Mark Ritz wanted out. He wanted to work for Ford.
When I finished the course and returned to the Product Development Center I couldnt practice my ICEM skills because the program hadnt been loaded into my computer and the closest ICEM-Surf user me was half a mile away. Neither my Supervisor Dave Delikta nor I could get the math modeling technical support group to move on my request to install the program. The support group was a separate operation run by an outside firm. The telephone line to the support groups help desk might as well have been connected to the San Diego Zoo for all the good it did me. The help tickets I wrote on the computer were no help, either. I spent the next six months working in CDRS.
Finally, Delikta moved me to his studio in the Design Center with his other math modelers. My assistant CDRS instructors wife Chris Lenie was the strongest CDRS user Delikta had. She could do everything in CDRS that Delikta and her husband Andrew could do but she, too, had to learn ICEM-Surf. Her Surf program was loaded into her computer but by the time mine got loaded into my computer I forgot most of the things I learned in class. You couldnt use logic or trial and error to learn Surf because it took multiple menu-picks to accomplish the simplest tasks and the menus were not set up in a logical way. Performing every operation was like using multiple dials to complete a long combination for opening a lock and every job required multiple operations.
Mark Ritz, my ICEM-Surf instructor was now working full time in Deliktas studio. He was supposedly there to assist new ICEM-Surf users but Deliktas math modeling workload wouldnt allow it. Marks jobs were so hot, he worked so long and his nerves were so frazzled that the new ICEM-Surf users were afraid to bother him. It was impractical for me to get any assistance from him because he was on one end of the studio and I was on the opposite end half a football field away from him. I was also up to my neck in doing some tricky work on show cars for the January 1996 Detroit Auto Show. When I wasnt swamped with work in the interim, Mark Ritz was.
It took at least two years to become reasonably proficient in ICEM-Surf. CDRS took about a year. Learning as much as I knew about automotive design and engineering took twenty years. Most design professionals never got there.
I worked twice as long to accomplish what the best CDRS and ICEM-Surf users could accomplish and I never learned to do some of the things they could do. But I could quickly identify all of the things that needed to be done. They couldnt. I could therefore do the right things the first or second time, however imperfectly, while the expert math modelers frequently fell into a loop of doing the wrong things perfectly.
Whenever a job called for unusually high levels of skill in clarifying ambiguous designs and rapidly bringing them in line with fabrication capabilities in the shops or the plants, Delikta gave it to me. I gave him 150% effort when he needed it. He gave me 150% slack when I wanted it. I sometimes worked overtime without pay. He always gave me time off with pay and no hassles. We didnt talk about it. We just did it. That was Deliktas management philosophy before it became a famous Pepsi-Cola slogan; when you know what to do, dont ask a lot of questions and go through a lot of channels, Just do it.
At a meeting of math modelers where I was the only CDRS representative I got a wake-up call when one of the Surf users made a joke. CDRS stood for Computer Design and Rendering System. The jokester said that it stood for Cant Do Real Surfaces. Everybody except me laughed. I didnt get the joke. Another member of the groups explained that a Surf user trounced the best CDRS user in a head-to-head completion. I told him that I never heard about it. He went on to tell me about a project in which the Surf expert used Surfs superior diagnostic tools to find numerous errors in the surfaces of the CDRS expert. He kept adding details until I realized he was talking about Angela and me on the DN-101.
I glared at Larry Lauth. He turned red and said nothing.
In 1996 Personnel sent me to Mike Hornais Surf group on the second floor of a new design and engineering facility called VC-2. To Ford, VC stood for Vehicle Center. To me and any other Vietnam combat veteran, VC meant Viet Cong the enemy we were sent to Vietnam to kill.
I was the sixth member of Mikes group. Two of them were agency people. Counting Dave Connelly and me, four of us were pay grade eights with the title of Electronic Math Model Leader. Mikes two actual leaders were Larry Lauth and Todd Hathaway. They began using ICEM-Surf shortly after they began their careers at Ford in 1989 and 1992, respectively. They were very good at it.
Todd had an engineering degree. He worked more overtime and took more classes offered by Ford than anyone I knew. The only weakness he had was in his aesthetic sensitivity. He could tell good from hideous, but he couldnt tell great from good or bad.
Larry was extremely ambitious. By getting in on the ground floor of ICEM-Surfs use at Ford when Mike introduced it to the company, he rose quickly from grade-5 draftsman to his current Leader position. He was working with Carl and Angela when I had my blowout with them. He recalled my angry shouting. He did not recall the reason for it. He said he didnt know the reason. He said that he didnt think I had one.
On the surface it didnt look as though Mike and I couldnt work together without coming to blows because some people thought he was quick tempered and argumentative. Like me, he just spoke his mind without always monitoring his volume control and both of us valued the honest expression of emotions. Both of us believed that honest disagreements were good. When Dave Delikta came to VC-2 to give me my performance review, Mike Hornai enthusiastically agreed. Dave Delikta gave me an O.
As an engineer and a former clay modeler for many years, Mike was one of only a dozen or so people in the company who knew what it took to put a car or a truck on the road. Dave Connelly was the only person in his group before I arrived with a strong clay modeling background. After five years Connelly was still struggling with ICEM-Surf but he knew so much about automotive design and manufacturing that he could identify problems and solutions that Todd and Larry couldnt see. Therefore, Mike wasnt at all troubled by my weakness in Surf. His game plan called for a mix of skills and he knew that I had special knowledge and talents that would make me an asset to his group. He had seen them.
From my perspective, I couldnt have been in a worse position. I had been Deliktas only pay grade-8 and he could afford to give me the O without doing violence to the bell curve. As Mikes fourth pay grade-8 with at least two of his men already getting Os for the work they did before I got there, the curve said that Mike should have dripped one of them to an EP. According to the curve, either Connelly or I should get an E. Mike ignored the curve. For his sake, he shouldnt have
My first significant contribution to the team came in my first week with Mike. Connelly was absent because of a severe flare-up of arthritis in his hands and the expert Surf users could not get a crucial section of the Windstar to flow through the body side and fender. All of them had given it a shot. None of them could do it because they all made the same fatal mistake that had nothing to do with Surf. I told Larry how to solve the problem but he didnt get so he didnt do it. I told Todd. He may not have gotten it, either, but he did it and it worked. It was the same problem I had seven years earlier on the Probe, one that you dont encounter every day, every year or every ten years. Thats what experience gives you and thats what you lose when you discount it.
When Connelly got back he solved a problem that was beyond the grasp of the Surf experts. It was his job to begin with so he had the first crack at it. He realized that the data he had to work with was wrong and a change had to be made in 90% of the finished part to finish the other 10%. The experts thought that his failure was due to deficiencies in his Surf shills but after they failed to fix his mistake, they saw that the mistake was in the raw data. They saw that Connelly was right.
In a few months, Mikes group gained two other permanent members, My ICEM-Surf teacher Mark Ritz and Les Martin. Mark was one of the best Surf users in the world. Les was a young, ambitious clay modeler who had shown me an impressive portfolio of work he did on a 2-dimentional computer rendering system called ALLIES. I lobbied Greg Burnabi every time I saw him to get Les into ICEM-Surf and I gave Les his phone number.
Les had worked at Prince for the man with whom I shared my lead-time reduction process for working models. He was surprised to learn that the process wasnt the way things had always been done at Prince but not surprised that his boss didnt tell him. Les told me that his boss was a ruthless political animal. In the coming year I would learn the hard way that Les was, too.
Mark Ritz immediately fell into the high production mode that he was in with Dave Delikta. The chore of teaching weak Surf users like me fell to Larry Lauth and an independent contract Surf expert named Dave Robison. Robison was a better teacher than Lauth by far but both of them made the same mistake with me that Ballerie Foskeys clay modeling instructors made with her. They assumed that I knew or should have known something that I didnt and proceeded from there as though I just didnt have the talent.
I didnt learn what I was missing until two years later. Todd Hathaway and Les Martin showed me.
The breakdown resulted from the way Mike organized his department to meet scheduled completion dates and to get the most out of what his people could do best. His weak Surf users did only preliminary work and passed off their jobs to the experts. What I didnt know was that the last operation I always performed crinkled the lines and surface in a way that couldnt be seen unless the diagnostic tools I used to check them before I performed that operation were turned on. Everything that Lauth, Ritz, Hathaway and Robison got from me for two years was horrible.
Mike didnt mind. His process was working the way he planned it. His weak Surf users did make progress and the work his group was responsible for got done splendidly and on time. Mike got everything from me he wanted and more. Often it was as simple as asking me to judge whether his aesthetic choices or one of his Surf experts were superior after he got into a heated argument with them. He was right, of course, every time, and I never got accused of siding with the boss to make brownie points because I could explain why he was right in terms they could understand. Making other contributions to the team effort got a bit stickier when Todd and Larry saw what I could do as a real leader.
I got my chance to make leadership decisions when the group received a Ford and Mercury that we had to modify front and rear. Mike split up the leadership tasks between his four leaders. Each of us had one worker.
The man working for me was no better at using Surf than I was but he knew how to transfer electronic information from one database to another. I learned how to do it when I took my DDN cutter path class three years earlier. I hadnt used in since then I and forgot most of what I learned. I had no interest in relearning a technical procedure that required no leadership or creativity shills, anyway. I noticed that Todd and Larry spent a considerable amount of time gathering, correlating and transferring data this way. It would have taken me considerably longer because of my dyslexia. Giving the job to my gade-6 draftsman freed up my time and took little time away from him. In other words, it cost the company less time and money for him to do it.
Ford could have saved millions of dollars by applying this principle across the board. It didnt even take a grade-6 to do it because, although it required a number of steps, they were the same steps every time. A pay grade-3 could have done it more cost effectively than a pay grade-6.
Todd and Larry went on two-week vacations and Connelly was at home recovering from an operation on his arthritic hands. Todd and Larrys jobs could wait until they returned but Connellys job had constant changes that required immediate attention so I did his job and mine on my own initiative. I found myself doing a lot of running around from one engineer to another the way Todd and Larry did to track down information that should have been at my fingertips. Suddenly I got a flash of Sgt. Taddy from my days as the Headquarters and Headquarters first sergeant in the 70th Army Reserve Division.
Most of my running around was necessary only because I kept so much information in my head and dispersed it when somebody asked for it. There was no systematic way of getting it and making it readily available to everyone who needed it without having to go thorough me. I located the data sources, put everything in one database and updated the database at regular intervals. Once I had the system in place it virtually ran itself with no more duplication of effort, no more scrambling to find the latest and greatest information and no more questions about where to get it.
Mike initially accepted the process but when Todd and Larry returned they objected. They argued that they should be the keepers of the databases. Mike compromised. He kept the idea of a single database but gave the job of keeping it to Todd. He then abandoned the idea of his four leaders taking responsibility for the four portions of the cars and gave one car, front and rear, to Todd and the other to Larry.
I was steamed. Todd and Larry were playing power games. They didnt want the former modelers horning in on their territory. It was as simple as that and thats what I told Mike. He told me that he had to give up his plan to make full use of his four leaders because Connelly wasnt there and Mike didnt know when he would be back. That was the end of it.
When Connelly returned he told Mike about an ICEM-DDN modeling package that was faster and easier to use than ICEM-Surf, especially for clay modelers. He said that it didnt have the diagnostic tools that Surf had but it would be ideal for putting in the first surfaces of new designs for generating raw data. It sounded like a great idea to Mike so he sent Connelly, Les and me back to Southfield to take the class. Less waned no part of it. He saw his future in Surf and he was already casually dropping the buzzwords of accomplished Surf users. Mike ordered him to take the DDN modeling class.
In the real world, nobody could do some things that everybody had to do in Surf to produce a class-A surface. Les, aided by his ignorance of real-world surface development and his readiness to tie up any amount of Robisons time to help him, was rapidly catching on to the fundamentals of ICEM-Surf. He had a better understanding of patch structure than Connelly or I had but he could not build a model from scratch.
ICEM-DDN had more in common with CDRS than ICEM-Surf including its basic conceptual flaws. It was nevertheless light years closer to real-world modeling than Surf and therefore easier for Connelly and me to grasp. The biggest plus for DDN was our instructor Kim Gruber, a computer programmer who was willing and eager to rewrite the DDN codes to give us the feature we wanted.
Les Martin fought DDN all the way, never missing an opportunity to compare it unfavorably to Surf while we were in school and when we went back to work at VC-2. That didnt stop him from grabbing Kim every time he came in the door closest to him and tying him up with questions until he was satisfied and Kim had no more time to spend with me. Kim had his hands full assisting Al Biggs and his people downstairs with DDN cutter paths
DDN worked well enough that Connelly and I were able to do some practical interiors work for Mike much faster than it could have been done in Surf. Mike got the idea that DDN was so easy to use that anyone with minimal skills could do what we did. He thought that Les did as much as Connelly and I did. The only thing Les did was criticize our terrible patch structure and the time we wasted doing it wrong in DDN when he believed he could have been doing it right in Surf.
Les didnt have the clay modeling experience to fill in the numerous blanks in the data. It never occurred to him that the Surf experts couldnt have done it at all because they needed the raw data that we created in DDN to begin. Normally they would have had to get that raw surface data from scanned clay models but there was no time to build them. We could make expert-to-expert comparisons because Connelly and I used our expertise to define crucial sections in crucial views in the necessary sequence and Kim did most of the actual DDN work.
Word or our success got back to Delikta who was beginning a new exterior car design with no money in his departments budget for a clay model and a short deadline for a picture review. It had to be done without overtime and he wanted two math models to get the project started. He didnt have the personnel or the magic tool we had to meet all of his objectives. He didnt want finished models because the design was incomplete. He wanted to see only clear 3-D definitions of what the designer indicated in his rough sketches. We had to fill in the rest the best way we could with only basic engineering data.
Delikta went to Mike with his request and asked for me. He trusted me. He wanted to know if I thought it was possible with DDN to do everything he wanted. I looked over the information he gave me, which was all I would have needed to make a clay model, and told him I could do it. Mike wanted Connelly and Les involved so they could practice DDN modeling while it was fresh in their minds and to give Delikta more than he asked for. Because Delikta asked for me and Connelly was off work again for a few days, Mike put me in charge.
Connellys absence didnt matter because I could do both models with Kim Grubers help and the other models were mostly for practice. I gave Les and Larry the rundown on what Les, Connelly and I would be doing and why. Les wasnt happy about doing anything in DDN and he was less happy about not being able to work overtime. Delikta needed to demonstrate what DDN could do on straight time. Larry and I agreed that overtime for Les would not be a problem. Larry suggested that Les could do something else in Surf on overtime strictly for the money so the time test for Delikta would not be affected.
Note here that Larry and Les were clear on what the DDN users were supposed to do, why were asked to do it and why Mike put me in charge. We were doing a favor for Dave Delikta as a professional courtesy and conducting a practical test of DDN for Ford. It was supposed to be a cooperative effort.
I began by making a mental map to our destination that Thursday afternoon with foreknowledge of every twist, dip, detour and pothole in the highways and byways to get us there in ten workdays. I knew what I could do. I knew what DDN could do. I knew what Kim Gruber could do and I had his phone number. Kim was waging his own battle inside of ICEM to demonstrate DDNs math modeling capabilities. Carl and Angela were doing everything in their power to undercut him. I didnt know what was going on with Kim, Carl and Angela at the time. In any event, DDN could save Ford millions of dollars in development costs so my course was clear.
Picture yourself on such a course in the driver seat of a vehicle with a display monitor in place of a windshield, a speed control lever on the ceiling a steering bar on the floor and buttons here and there to activate all other functions. Thats how it was with me trying to use the DDN modeling package. Although it was a software vehicle that could maneuver in ways that Surf couldnt, it was a far cry from what I could do in clay. I knew what DDN could do but I didnt know how to turn on all of the features that would allow me to do it. With or without Kim Grubers help, I was nevertheless confident that I could give Delikta what he wanted in time with the help of Dave Connelly and Les Martin.
Kim Gruber had shown Les how to do some things I needed to do on my models and Les unstintingly showed them to me. But when I got Kim to myself for two hours that Friday at the end of the workday, the project zoomed ahead. Kim did things in a minute that would have taken me ten minutes to do and other things that I didnt know how to do at all.
Kim and I worked as a team the way we did in school with Connelly on the interiors items. Kim sat down in front of my monitor and performed the operations I told him he needed to perform. He couldnt figure out what I was doing or how I expected everything I asked him to do to come together. He kept saying. This makes no sense.
My instructions made no sense to Larry or Todd, either at first.
Step by step as I told Kim what had to be done and why, one element after another that seemed to have no relationship to the whole fell into place exactly as I told him it would. This was only a fraction of what it meant to be a true Master Modeler and I could tell that Larry and Todd were getting the message loud and clear for the first time.
My peripheral vision was far better than most people imagined it could be. While looking at the screen I could see the expression on Larrys face go from befuddlement to a cross between astonishment and fear. Todds expression turned from curiosity to respect. At the end of the day Kim and I had a solid 3-D framework in place, which accommodated all of the feasibility requirements as well as the crucial elements of the design.
I went home knowing that Connelly would be back on Monday and feeling that we could deliver the goods to Delikta well ahead of schedule.
I came in fifteen minutes earlier than my starting flex-time of 7:30. Todd, Larry, Connelly and Les had been there for an hour but Les and Connelly could not have done as much as they did in an hour. They had worked eight hours that Saturday and five hours on Sunday. Connelly was struggling in DDN to catch up with me without using my architecture. Les was zipping right along in Surf. To keep up with Les, Connelly was also doing a model in Surf.
When I saw what had happened in my absence I was furious.
Connelly didnt know what was going on. Les said that Larry ordered him to work overtime on Deliktas model and he did it in Surf because he was more comfortable with it. Larry said that Mike told him to do it.
I wasnt as upset with Mike as I was with Larry and Les. Delikta apparently hadnt told Mike about the straight time constraint. I had certainly told Larry and Les. Now the only valid models were mine but Les had four, fully rendered Surf models and I didnt have a full skin over my DDN framework. I didnt even know how to change the ugly default color on my model or put in a light source to make it shine. I didnt know how far Larry and Les would go to make themselves shine at my expense.