Chapter 30 –
Tick Tock
It was another day before I got any time with Elise, and it was nothing casual or intimate. She essentially invited me to a meeting. By now the city was sending larger trucks and even a few buses around the flood-damaged areas, so this time I arrived at the school by bus rather than boat. If you would expect that to improve the mood of the folks in the auditorium, you would be wrong.
“Peoria’s Peugeot plant shut down yesterday.” Elise began. I recalled a time when our meetings began with “hi, how are you? I missed you.” I let that pass. I also passed on the observation that one less Peugeot plant was a gift to the motoring public. Now if we could just shut down Citroen… But I didn’t go there. She was obviously tired, obviously stressed. I wondered if I needed another conversation with my general friend.
“It hasn’t been fourteen days.” I replied. You can always count on me to master the obvious.
“It has been eight. They are the largest plant to close, but they aren’t the only one. The ministry estimates we have already lost one hundred thousand workers. Our fourteen day estimate was far too generous.”
“We are making progress,” I replied. “But we still have work to do. We are getting ahead with the cleaning, but I don’t know of anyone who has a functioning computer system. That’s the current problem.”
“Good. Computer systems. I get that. It gives us a focus. Computer systems. It helps us know what we need to know. I can put a team on it. What else should I know?” Huh? She sounded like someone talking in her sleep. I took her hand and pulled her from the room.
“Walk with me. We need to talk.” I led her out of the auditorium and out of the school. There was a playground on one side of the building, and I walked in that direction, still holding her hand. There was a bench near the playground equipment and I sat down there. “Notice anything different?” I asked, once we were settled.
“It’s not raining.” Elise answered. She was going along with me so far, but everything about her body posture said she wanted to jump up and get back to her meetings.
“Not only is it not raining, but the sun is shining, and the sky is blue. When was the last time you were out here to see it?”
“Okay, I get it, but we really need to deal with this. We are going to lose more manufacturers this week.”
“I agree it’s a problem. And we need to address it. But let me share a perspective I got from Jacques LeClerk. I got back to the warehouse one night feeling pretty much the way you do now. By my calculation, only about 25% of our warehouses were going to be ready. His response? 25% is all there was to start with. Lots of companies don’t really produce much and won’t be missed. Peugeot may be a different case, but I bet they usually do a summer shutdown while they go through model change, and knowing folks around here, I bet they also close down for deer season and for all your crazy holidays from All Saints Day to Marie Antoinette’s birthday. Life will go on if they are shut down for a couple weeks in June.”
“You do understand it’s Bastille Day we celebrate, not Marie Antoinette’s Birthday, right?” At least I had her laughing now.
“You know I don’t understand French history. I just see lots of Canadian holidays. You know we Americans are all jealous of you.”
“We have a better pace of life, that’s all.”
“I suppose that is one way to describe it.”
“Okay.” She leaned back on the bench and took my hand. “I get the message. The sky is not falling, at least not today. But you understand we do have a lot of problems.”
“Yes, but good people are working on them, and we are making progress.”
“So tell me about your computer systems. What can we do there?”
“Of the ninety three warehouses I have examined, only one has a dry wiring closet. All the rest have mud across routers, servers, and everything else -- basically ruined equipment. Lots of the desktop equipment got carried to higher levels, but the networks are all corrupted. Without network links, about all we can do on our computers is play solitaire.”
“Please tell me you have a solution.” The grip on my hand just got tighter.
“I have a couple ideas you might bounce off your people. First, I hate to say this, but you should think about taking us out of the picture for at least a week or so.” The grip on my hand rose a whole level in intensity. “Hear me out. The companies waiting for supplies all have functioning systems. Use them, not us. Any company due an order would have received an advanced shipping notice – an ASN . That’s the information you need. It would identify the truck and the date of arrival. Use that and bypass us. Go straight to the trucks and have them ship direct. Some of the loads may be partial or mixed, but at least some of the stuff will get where it needs. It also gets trucks moving again. Having all those rigs sitting around truck stops just ties up traffic.”
“That can be done?”
“The logistics companies will squawk about multiple drops, but, yes, they should be able to give the trucks at least one place to go. And that leads to my second suggestion. I recommend you order all rigs to start moving. No more sitting and tying up the highway. Just get them headed in a general direction – north to Chicago, or south to St. Louis, but moving. That will cut through the Gordian knot we have at too many truck stops. Even if it just stretches them out along the main highways, at least it will get them out of the way so other trucks can make deliveries.”
“I like the idea. It at least seems like progress is being made, and that should improve the general mood. I will see how our people feel about it.”
“I have two other suggestions.”
“Well, you are the idea man today.” This was the Elise of my dreams. She was smiling and sitting closer. I was beginning to think of more personal ideas.
“First, be careful which shipments you choose to make. Our friends the Jouberts came by yesterday.” She looked confused. Good. I wasn’t the only one losing track of names. “They were the Huguenot Business League people we had lunch with. They are concerned that Protestant businesses will not be treated equally during this crisis. I know it’s nonsense, but whatever they are telling us we can assume lots of others are thinking.”
“I will watch to make sure we are fair. And your second suggestion?”
“You have been sitting with your fiancée on a park bench on a beautiful day, and you have yet to kiss him.” That suggestion worked out very well. Not only did I get a kiss and about five more minutes with her before she ran back to meetings, but I got a promise to have dinner that evening. I got back on the bus with a smile.
Back at the warehouse, I huddled with LeClerk and two of his office staff. The office area was still a mess, but it had been cleaned enough so that we could at least walk around it. All the desks would have to be replaced, and all paper files were puddles of paper pulp, but it was the wiring closet that interested us the most. We stood at the doorway and tried to find something hopeful inside.
“The system is backed up nightly at ten.” One of the guys in the accounting department apparently was also the computer expert for the facility. He was pretty honest about his limitations. “Everything goes to a system in Ohio. Given when the flooding hit, we probably lost all data from Sunday, but everything up to then should be sitting on their servers. The problem will be getting it back. Assuming the link is still up to our building, we still have to get it around the building, and as you can see, these connections are toast. And if you are going to ask me if I can fix it, the only think I know about this system is the number to call when it isn’t working.”
“We have a contract with a local service provider,” LeClerk added, as if there should be some explanation. I didn’t need one. Outsourcing made good sense. Why not use an expert company? Of course there might be one reason not to outsource – if the Mississippi ever flooded the entire building and all your systems were des
troyed, you had no one to put them back together again. But then, what were the odds of that ever happening?
“Have you called Philly about this?” That was my stupid question. Of course he had called Philly, probably every day, twice a day.
“They are creating a mirrored system and have it pretty much ready to go.” LeClerk replied. “They can give us basic information over our phones. Where we will have trouble is in remote devices. We are used to using RFID or at least bar codes to track all shipments and get them on the right trucks. Those link into the wireless network – a network we no longer have.”
“And the repair plan?” I asked.
“Your father is sending two experts and a complete network. They might get here as early as tomorrow, now that the roads are passable. Once they get here, they think three days.”
“Anything we can do in the meantime?”
“They were very specific,” the accounting guy said. “They were adamant that we not touch anything.”
“That’s probably wise advice. Let’s follow it.” I backed out of the room. Could they really have things up and running in three days? My dad hired good people, but from the look of that wiring, I thought they might be a bit optimistic. But at least a plan was in place. That felt good. In the meantime, we had the never ending battle with the mud all over the rest of the building. I helped with that for a few hours, and then caught the employee bus back to the school. I had a date!