Installment 2.12

Liz was thoroughly agog.  She knew the difficulties in voice-to-text programming.  “How did you manage that!?!” she asked.

Dilip said, “I stumbled into it while solving a different problem.  The microphones are really crappy because the manufacturing tolerances are all over the place.  So I needed a way to calibrate the mics and to ‘teach’ them the acoustic properties of the room.”

“I talked to my grandmother and she suggested that I focus on using TVs.  Every one of our rooms has a TV and they are played at conversational levels.  The first time I tried it, the TV was set up to show captioning.  BINGO!  Sound coming into the microphone and captions to map those sounds too.”

Denice said, “I want you to hold that thought.  In fact, I want you to keep fiddling with it in your spare time.  There may be times when we want access to information and not have to go through official channels to get it.  Just keep your work very, very secure.”

“Next topic,” Denice said “is the new head of Transportation.”

“Liz, there is a snowball’s chance in hell that Bart will get off his ass and start fixing things.” Denice continued.  “So rather than lose time I want you to access the parts queued to be ordered.  Start with the PCMs, sensors and transmission cooler lines.  A little birdy told me that would get most of the disabled busses back on-line and they don’t take much time to install.”

“The next thing is that I have a list of three candidates for his replacement.” Denice said, laying a sheet of paper on the table.  “I need to have somebody take it to Personnel.  Any of the three are acceptable to me.  I will let them pick which of the three they like best.”

Liz looked at the sheet. “Oh-oh, Personnel is not going to like any of them.”

“Why not?” Denice challenged.

Liz said, “None of them have Ph.Ds.  Policy is that Department Heads have to have a Ph.D.”

Denice said, “They have something better than a Ph.D.”

“What is that?” Dilip asked.

“They have a GSD.” Denice said.  “In case you don’t recognize the honorific, it stands for Gets Shit Done.  If you want to succeed working for me you damned well better show me you have a GSD attitude.”

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