On Wednesday morning two things were delivered to The Firm. One was a printout of a picture e-card, sent from her hotel on Ibiza, from Denise to "All at The Firm". Denise had written, "Having a great time, nightlife is wonderful!" and signed it with a kiss. Elaine pinned it up on the notice board, as was usual for holiday postcards. Stan noticed it as he went for a coffee that morning.
He read the card and smiled, thinking, 'So much for spending the nights in bed!' He just hoped Denise was being careful.
- - - - - - - - - -
The other delivery was the first preproduction samples of Anne's chip. These had been assembled quickly and flown to the UK. Anne and her team leapt on them.
The delivery paperwork for the samples came to Harry's desk as the Materials man. He called to Stan from across the office, "Just one day early. Still, it's better than late!"
Stan agreed, but asked if he could see the paperwork that Shucor had sent. Stan said, "Help yourself," and got back to his PC.
Grabbing the paperwork, Stan went back to his desk and began running through it. He was still uneasy, feeling that there was something 'not right' about it all.
Later that afternoon, he went to see Anne in the lab, and asked how things were going. "Fine," she answered, "We can already tell it's fundamentally sound." Still, he had that 'something's wrong' feeling.
- - - - - - - - - -
The next day, the fertilizer hit the impellor blade. Anne came storming in to see Stan.
"There's something wrong. Shucor has made an error. Can we check their data?"
Stan quickly put aside his current, rather routine, work and made a space available on his desk. Anne strode purposefully over and sat next to him.
"I thought the chip worked?" he asked.
"It does. Well, it does, but not quite to the design specification. That means it won't work for our customers, which means we'll have to re-spin it. Which means we'll miss the delivery date in any case. We've got to find what Shucor did, so we can prove their liability!"
Anne was nothing if not completely convinced that it wasn't, and couldn't have been,
her
fault. Stan, for his part, was
not
pleased at all that even though his instinct had been right he hadn't been able to track anything down.
So, Stan asked a few questions about the nature of the fault. It was what was known as a parametric error – it all worked fine, but something was in the wrong range. In this case, where the device should have been sending a signal on a particular frequency, it actually sent it out on something else.
"It'll be easy enough to fix, but I want to know what's caused it. We ran check after check on that silicon, I'm
sure
we didn't miss anything.
Stan said that he'd recheck everything from his end as well, but he was sure that Shucor had fabricated that silicon exactly the same way as usual.
That evening the lights were burning late at The Firm. It was a small fault, but it could cost them thousands
and
harm their reputation. Anne and her team were trying to do two things at once: to fix the design and to find out what
exactly
had gone wrong with it.
- - - - - - - - - -
It was almost midnight when Stan, eyes red and puffy, drained yet another cup of coffee. He'd been in touch with Shucor's representative in the UK to ask if there were any unusual circumstances or problems with the chip when it was made, and he'd been instantly assured that no, there was nothing, but they'd check anyway.
"Standard response!" Stan had told Bob, Anne and Percy.
"They never,
ever
admit to a fault, do they?" said Percy.
"Well, they may not admit it, but they've made an error somewhere!" asserted Anne. They went back to their investigation. Bob and Percy had left about eleven, leaving Anne's hard-pressed team in the lab and Stan alone at his desk in the fluorescent light.
"These are preproduction samples," he told himself. "They are made on the same production facilities as normal parts, but they go to the head of the queue. Otherwise they should be identical to normal full-production units.
"Ok, let's compare the process flow of these versus the process flow of one of our other parts made there."
He found a suitable set of papers, cleared space on his desk for what seemed like the hundredth time, and laid them out side-by-side.
'It all looks okay to me, still...' he thought.
"Wait. They've used a different bonder."
The connections between the silicon chip itself and the outside world were made using gold wire, very thin gold wire. A 'bonder' was a machine that, effectively, "stitched" the wire in the right place, from the edge of the silicon chip itself to the connection on the legs of the part.
Shucor had met a roadblock. The bonder that was normally used for this had a different machine number to the one used on Anne's parts. Well, probably nothing. Stan decided to look closer.
They'd used thinner bond wire!
Still probably nothing, he told himself. Had it been
thicker
it would be likely to cause trouble, but thinner... well, he'd better tell Anne anyway.
He got up and walked over into the lab.
- - - - - - - - - -
Anne's team looked very stressed indeed. He took a look at Anne's face and reversed, walking instead to the coffee machine. He poured a cup, black, added extra sugar and took it to her.
"Thanks, Stan," she said a little absently. Anne looked tired out and not a little frayed around the edges. She made a face at the old, scorched coffee, but sipped it gratefully anyway.
"I noticed something," began Stan, "They've used thinner bond wire. Does that help?"
Anne looked at him blankly for a moment. She felt exhausted. Then she looked intently at Stan again.
