Trade Secrets by Kathleen Knowles

Author:Kathleen Knowles [Knowles, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635556438
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2020-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

“I don’t think she’s about to fire you. But I believe she wouldn’t hesitate to if she even suspected you had leaked something,” Sheila told Tony later that day.

“Oh, I know. There’s a lot of gossip around at work about who she’s fired and why.”

“I recommend you be careful. Very, very careful, especially about who you talk to and what you talk about.”

“I plan on it.”

* * *

About a month after Tony spent her first night with Sheila, an email notice went out to the entire company distribution list, notifying them of an “all-hands” meeting later in the afternoon in the cafeteria.

Tony wasn’t concerned about disruption of her work. It was on hold currently because Gordon was busy trying to modify the spectrophotometer to perform accurately every time. They’d decided that the spec was the source of their inconsistent results. Tony didn’t have much to do but wait until he was ready for another run. She had more time to obsess about Sheila and when and if she should make her big announcement of love. It seemed like she’d fallen in love too fast, and she was leery of telling Sheila.

She wasn’t optimistic that Gordon could solve the spectrophotometer problem any time soon, if at all. Specs were notoriously sensitive, and the one in Leonardo had been, like all the analytical components, reverse-engineered to make it fit in the available space. Gordon had created it by tearing apart a normal-size spectrophotometer and then recreating it, except on a much smaller scale. Tony had nothing but admiration for Gordon’s abilities, but she doubted even he could manage to create a miniature spec that was as good as the original.

It could go wrong innumerable ways. Since Tony had no electronics or mechanical aptitude to speak of, she was interested only in what a given instrument could do. The most important thing was it had been able to perform reliably. Could she and Gordon possibly convince Erica to make Leonardo any bigger?

Gordon had tried, but Erica was determined that it had to be consumer friendly, i.e., small and simple to use. This was her mantra, and nothing could change her view. In spite of the evidence, and even with modifications, it wasn’t simple or straightforward for the proverbial person on the street to use. But once a thought was established in Erica’s brain, it was extremely hard to dislodge it.

To test the Leonardo’s consumer friendliness, Gordon had taken an early version of the Leonardo 2.0 to a software company in the City, where one of his friends worked. The employees allowed themselves to be guinea pigs. They could manage to prick their fingers, but then they had to collect the blood drops using a gizmo called a transfer pen and get the blood into the microcaps and then into the Leonardo. In other words, lay people had to undertake a lab process. None of them were able to do it right the first time, or even the second and third time.

When Tony heard this, she wasn’t surprised.

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