If fuzzy logic could be applied to management, Terry did.

His office appeared to the naïve to be brilliantly retro-furnished with ‘70s Formica-surfaced desks, shelves and filing cabinets, furniture he had inherited after the golfing accident of his father, the well-liked Dr. Donald Hardparcel, designer of a synthetic appendix and the first British physician successfully to complete an axillary hair transplant, but failed in his attempt to reverse the human alimentary canal and whose paper on the subject was rejected by the British Medical Journal. An army surgeon during WWII, after euthanizing his brigadier on D-Day he was cross-drafted to a light anti-aircraft unit and credited with shooting down a Messerschmitt 109 and a Spitfire

Ranged along a shelf opposite the window was part of Terry’s collection of antique light bulbs, in pride of place an intact Lane-Fox from 1888. He treated clients to enthusiastically detailed explanations of the development of extruded carbon cellulose filaments that lost him innumerable sales.

Behind piles of invoices and unsigned letters the telephone rang insistently. Once more he reached forward to answer but it was still stuck. Virginia Roode, his secretary, ducked her head to smile. “Miss Roode, can you get maintenance to fix this thing?” It rang on. He stared at it a few moments and turned in his swivel chair to ask her again. The central column was jammed and while five out of six wheels were well lubricated one was stuck so that it spun sickeningly on the axis of the locked wheel. He grabbed at his desk for stability and picked up his coffee cup, which would not come free from its saucer. “Anyone might think elves had been at work with superglue”, he muttered and swallowed with difficulty. She swallowed a giggle.

He got dizzily to his feet. “Just going to the bathroom”, he informed her as if it mattered, “then the morning round.”

The plant stretched over three acres and employed nearly 90 people, including administrative staff and Keynes the accountant with the recurring error. Terry enjoyed wandering through the maze of immense stainless steel vats, valves and seamless 12 inch pipes, the engulfing roar of pumps annulling his amiable interrogations of engineers, operators and maintenance technicians.

The sheets on his clip-board had stuck together. It was either the steam or the glue epidemic.

“Pressure stable at 115?” he queried the engineer on vat # 4, who under his hard hat was wearing ear protectors against the thunder of the pump four feet away, thus could hear nothing and just grinned broadly and nodded. “Good, good”, said Terry. He tried vainly to separate the pages to make a note, wrenched in frustration and ripped the top sheet in half to expose a sepia-toned ten year-old, wearing only a beribboned sun-hat and high-buttoned boots, simpering shyly at the lens. The engineer grinned more broadly.