Creative Strides

The eraser end of a pencil tapped a muffled rhythm against the table, a testament to the annoyance of its holder. The meeting had been dragging on for what felt like hours, and all that happened was that she had been getting more and more irritated. The people she was in charge of just couldn't seem to understand what they were supposed to be doing.

Their training hadn't prepared them for everything, true, but what happened to common sense? If you know the basic rules, then it should follow that common sense plus those basic rules should give them some idea of how to handle certain situations.

For instance, the paper pushers knew that they had to fill out the paperwork a certain way. If they came across information that needed to be input that did not fit the general parameters that they had been trained, then they went over it, sometimes with each others, sometimes with her, until they figured out what should go where and how.

And those were the desk jockeys, the people who would never do much more with their lives!

But when she had to sit in a five-hour meeting with her scientists, all because they couldn't figure out how to go about making a particular piece of equipment work, she wanted to scream.

Her frustration grew until she snapped the pencil, startling everyone at the table. Taking a deep breath and expelling it slowly, calming herself down, she looked at all of them, one by one. "The training you were given for that piece of equipment did not, I understand, give directions on what to do if a link failed, because it was not expected to fail. However, I also understand that the links are metal. Find a suitable replacement - wedding rings, paperclips, a staple, something, but fix it, and fix it now. We can't afford to have the reactor offline for much longer."

She waved her hands, shooing them away in a clear dismissal, and turned to look at the map of the facility, steepling her fingers together. Minor snags, but annoying ones, and preventing their work from proceeding on schedule. The reactor had to be completed by the end of the month, or there would be hell for all of them to pay.