I hired him as a temp to help move the pattern cutters and stitching machines into the new factory and set them up. And he did a great job of it. Those things are really tricky, but he had an instinct for machines. He got them running better than ever before.
After about two months, the whole operation had been moved into the new facility. I had thought the job would take longer. I had planned on letting him go when everything was working right, but it seemed wrong to punish him for helping get things done faster, so I hired him on as a maintenance tech.
I should have told him to start looking for another job. But I wanted to keep him around in case anything went bad. And maybe once a week, something came up for him to fix.
The rest of the time, I had him running preventative maintenance and generally cleaning the machines up. I should have noticed how bored he was, and I guess part of me did. It wasn't that he did a bad job; far from it. The place was real clean and the machines ran great.
But Philip was always looking for something to do. And most of the time, there was nothing worth doing. The longer he worked here, the worse it got. There were fewer and fewer breakdowns, which meant less and less stuff for him to do.
Now most guys, they would start sitting around and taking it easy at this point. I wouldn't have minded. He had earned it. The big boss would disagree, of course. He wouldn't want to pay somebody for doing nothing. And this time he would have been right, but it just felt wrong to fire someone because he had worked himself out of a job.
So Philip stayed on, getting more and more bored every day. He just couldn't sit still. It was like there was some kind of fire inside him that made him want to tinker and experiment with things. And if he couldn't experiment with machines, he would experiment with other things.
That was when the pranks started. Mostly they were harmless fun. For example, someone filled a 12-ounce soda bottle with white grease paint and rammed it on top of a venting tube. When the pressure built up, the bottle would shoot off with a 'Bloop!' and spray grease paint on some poor fool. Then when he went to clean up, he'd find that the air hose had been filled up with more grease paint, so he'd just mess himself up even more.
I even got pranked one time. Someone charged up a small capacitor, taped it under my desk, and ran a wire from it to the seat of my chair. When I sat down and touched my desk, I got zapped right in the ass. It stung something fierce, let me tell you.
But the thing was, it was never Philip that did these things. He was always somewhere else when the prank was set up. Sometimes we'd find out who it was and the prankster would say that the idea just came into his head. It didn't cross my mind that the people we caught didn't have the brains to come up with a prank more complicated than snapping a towel at someone.
Well, about this time, I noticed that the guys started acting funny around Philip. They always used to get along fine, but now there was something going on. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was there. I started asking people about it, but I never got an answer better than, "He's just not quite right in the head."
It was clear that he was causing some kind of problem. I really should have let him go then. I remember that I was going to. I called him into my office to tell him, and we started talking about what was going on. I don't remember much about what we said, but then somehow I decided that I would not fire him. And I never thought about it again, until after he was gone.
About this time, we got a contract to make helmet liners for the army. We were running the machines day and night. Philip may or may not have done something with the machines. I was not really paying much attention to what he was doing.
There was some kind of problem with the helmets. Our inspectors never caught anything wrong, but the army kept complaining that there were strange patterns in the cloth of the liners. We checked and checked for any kind of problem that would have messed them up, but never found anything.
Group after group of army inspectors came to look for problems. They never found anything wrong with our machines. But they brought samples of the helmet liners, and I had to agree that something was wrong. If you got a magnifying glass and looked at the fabric just right, you would start to see strange patterns in the cloth. It almost looked like writing or pictures. For some reason it just looked, well, wrong. It made the hair on the back of my neck crawl, you know what I mean?
Then the last pair of inspectors came. I remember them well. There was the big beefy guy who looked just like an Army guy. He did most of the talking. He was with a black lady, Colonel Bolch was her name. She mostly just looked around the place.
They were looking around, and Philip was doing something with a cutting press. Now, I know that Philip always followed all of the proper safety rules. He was very careful and particular. And I would have noticed if something was wrong. I've been foreman for seventeen years; I know when something aint safe. And I never saw anything wrong that day.
Well, Colonel Bolch took one look at Philip, and it was like she saw Bin Laden himself. I saw the fury on her face, plain as day. I saw something else, too. Her eyes went all funny. They clouded over, and then started glowing with a dancing white fire, like two great big diamonds.
Then, I heard Philip scream. I looked over and saw that he was struggling and falling sideways. It was almost like something invisible was dragging him. He fell under the machine, and suddenly the cutting press with its razor-sharp pattern of blades cycled with Philip right under it. He was dead instantly, slashed and crushed into a horrible mess.
As you might expect, this frightened and surprised a lot of people, especially me. I was running over, I noticed that the inspectors just stood there, like they had expected it.
Everything else is kind of a blur. The OSHA inspector, a guy named Suarez, said that Philip had failed to secure the machine and work area, and that he tripped and fell and a short had set the machine off. We were not fined. The army inspectors confiscated all of the flawed liners and we agreed to a full recall.
When we tried to start running again, the machines acted up real bad. It was worse than normal. We couldn't get anything done for weeks. It took several engineers working full time to get them fixed. But they finally calmed down, and gave us no more trouble than they always used to.
But oddly enough, we never had that problem with the fabric again. Everything came out just fine.
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