He specialized in sending rescue expeditions after letters missing from his keyboard. An accomplished investigator committed to the cause of truth and justice, he was not shy of using innovative and groundbreaking techniques to track down missing letters and charged them with abusing the company's regulations. Hovering with the index finger over his keyboard was one of those techniques. Going slowly and methodically from the left to the right was another one. Aware that persistence prevails, the production manager could stare at his keyboard in total silence for hours, carefully examining all available data, analyzing all possible eventualities, and exploring all known avenues till the first clues about the faith of the missing letters would start to appear. A hard worker, he was no stranger to controversy and would investigate his own emails if needed, just to establish when the missing letters were used for the last time, what letters were in contact with the offenders and who was ultimately responsible for their disappearance. Driven by natural curiosity he was not afraid of asking tough questions a person of a lesser intellectual denomination would not dare to ask: How many letters were gone in total? What was their motivation? What could he do to change that? And finally, what was the involvement of the letter "W"?
Letter "W" had a well-documented history of misconduct in place of work and the production manager had been suspecting it to play a role of a proverbial apple in a barrel. He could not prove it because he had no space for a barrel in his office but his guts feeling had told him that "W" was a bad influence on the whole of the alphabet, pulling strings from behind the scenes and encouraging other letters to join in unauthorized walkouts. Something had to be done before the situation would get out of hand and the production manager has had considered issuing a fake official warning letter to sort the matters out. The only reason he did not do so was that at the time of writing letter "W" had still been missing and the letter "N" looked just like "M". As a result the official fake warning letter had to be titled "Arming Letter" and "misconduct in place of work" had come out as "Niscomduct in place of ork", considerably reducing its intended disciplinary impact. The production manager was far too experienced to allow himself for any reduction in intended disciplinary impact. Discipline was essential to order and the production manager welcomed both, and discipline and order for as long as they were not expected of him. He thought it would be unfair.
His small office had a corner location from where he saw very little and wanted to see even less. His outside view was permanently blocked by the four-story building of the psychiatric ward and his inside view by a row of racking his supervisors had raised without consulting him, cutting off most of the factory from his sight, correctly assuming it would be beneficial for all parties involved to see as little of each other as possible. The feeling was mutual and the production manager did not oppose the idea. It gave him a perfect alibi. He could always say he did not see anything. The only reason he would reluctantly leave his office was when he had to bring cutting sheets to the skinny saw manager with whom he could gossip about the woodshop manager or when he had to go to the woodshop manager to confirm orders for materials and gossip about the Managing Director whom he saw once a week and could not gossip with about anyone at all. Both trips to the woodshop manager and the saw manager were necessary but also unfortunate and unwelcome as one was sick in his head and the second crazy like hell.
The saw managerpassionately hated the woodshop manager. The woodshop manager vehementlydetested the saw manager. Both men loathed the production manager. For reasons of their own, theywere deeply disappointed with his management style which did not produce anyparticular advantage for neither of them. Their systematic calls for hisintervention to be a final straw breaking rival's back remained unanswered justas much as the production manager's hopes for their filthy mouth to be shut onceand for all. The problem with both men was that they could not beblackmailed.
4 Production manager
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