| General Fiction posted March 29, 2024 | Chapters: |
...28 29 -30- 31... 
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Alan hires an assistant
A chapter in the book What We See
What We See - Chapter 27
by Jim Wile
| Background A high school teacher wrongly accused of sexual assault reinvents his life. |
Recap of Chapter 26: Alan drives Tommy and his date, Callie, to the Christmas dance because Ginnie had to work that night. On the way, he gives Tommy some advice on meeting her parents and how to behave on a date. He later picks them up afterwards, and they seem to have really hit it off.
Alan holds his first computer class, and the four kids prove to be wonderful students as they begin learning programming.
Chapter 27
Over the next couple of months, the class went very well. All four of my students appeared to love the subject matter and took great interest in learning to write code. Each of them would often stay late after class and continue to work on their programs, helping each other out on their assignments and writing programs on their own that had not been assigned to them.
The pace of the class was almost too slow for this eager bunch, and it taught me a number of lessons on how to improve the curriculum for future classes. I even decided to create a second advanced programming class that explored additional concepts because all of them were interested in continuing their studies.
The star of the team was Callie Lyons. She had a very quick mind and often had a unique way of looking at an assignment. Her solutions were usually quite elegant and written in a scalable fashion, which meant that she designed them to be run against much larger datasets than what was provided in the assignment and often with fewer lines of code than the others. It was a rare talent she exhibited, and I’m sure it would set her in good stead if she chose to make a career out of it.
She was one of those modest kids who was not a showoff about her formidable skills, which is rare in someone so smart. Tommy adored her, as did the other two boys in the class, but she definitely seemed to favor Tommy. The two of them would often hang out together, and I’d seen them holding hands on several occasions. They would sometimes study and do homework together, and she seemed to grasp Tommy’s disability and would help him understand his reading assignments.
Ginnie and I loved her for that. She would sometimes join the three of us for an afternoon movie at the theater. We even took the kids to see the play West Side Story in Chicago one afternoon in April. We had met her parents, and they were wonderful people. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother, an accountant.
Aside from my repair work and my teaching responsibilities, what little time I had left I spent working on my invention. Although the concept seemed sound, size issues continued to plague me. I wanted it to be self-contained and not overly clunky-looking, but that proved to be a formidable challenge.
I was going to have to do some further research on miniaturization of the camera, the speaker, and the “computer” that would run the software. A power supply would also be needed. How would all this fit on the frame of the glasses? The glass inside the frame would have virtually no function and could either hold the users’ prescription lenses if they wore glasses or would just be clear glass if they did not, but all the rest would be functional.
I was gradually coming to the conclusion that the computer portion would have to be a separate device, placed in a user’s pocket or to the side. It would contain chips to perform the basic functions of taking the input stream of data points from the digital image produced by the camera and converting it to a data stream for the speech synthesizer. This would output a soundwave stream for the speakers. And all this wirelessly, if possible. The power supply, in the form of a rechargeable battery, would also reside in the pocket-held computer, along with a small fan to cool the chips. I just didn’t think it could all be built into the glasses without them becoming too heavy and clunky-looking to be at all appealing to users. The wireless aspect was a big unknown, too, at this time.
On the business front, the workload was increasing as word-of-mouth customers were beginning to make up a large portion of the business. I quit placing ads in the newspaper altogether. The Yellow Pages had been delivered in December, which contained my ad, but that was the only advertising I had now. I had more than enough work to handle, and Tommy’s hours were way down due to school. A number of customers had large TV sets that were too large to bring in for repair and asked if I could come to their houses to repair them. As a one-man operation, I had to turn these jobs down.
It slowly dawned on me that I needed to hire a full-time assistant to share the workload, so I put a want ad in the newspaper for that. I’d had several applicants, but none so far had the qualifications or work experience needed to do the job without a great deal of instruction from me. I held out until I could find such a candidate.
A fellow named Warren Meyers gave me a call one afternoon, asking if the job had been filled yet. I told him it hadn’t, and I asked him a few questions about his past experience in the field. He responded well enough that I asked him to come in for an interview, which I scheduled for the following day at 12:30.
At the end of today, I had dinner at the Boardmans’. Ginnie was working the night shift this week and had to leave at 6:45, so I left too to go straighten up the shop and work on my notes for the invention. I had created physical files to document the work, which included hard copies of the design notes stored on my computer plus all literature sent to me as part of my research. I stored these in a new filing cabinet I’d purchased. Plus, I’d made diagrams of the design using purchased software called AutoCad. I kept these in both the physical file and on my computer on a hard drive I had purchased and installed inside my computer since it had not come with one.
Warren Meyers arrived at 12:25. He was a big guy and a bit overweight. He had a friendly face and sported a beard and mustache that were neatly trimmed. He wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt over a pair of old jeans. His resume, though, was very attractive. He said he was 30 and had been working with electronics and electrical apparatus since he was a teen. His previous employer had owned Dvorak’s Electrical Repairs, a shop in Fort Wayne, until he retired a couple of months ago. Warren didn’t have enough to buy the business from him, and the store was still for sale but closed now.
“Part of the job, Warren, will be to travel to a few homes where there are large TV sets to repair. Do you have your own car to do that?”
“Yeah, no problem with that. I did that a bit at my former job. I kept track of the mileage, and my boss would reimburse me at a standard rate for that, Mr. Phelps.”
“You can call me Alan. That sounds fine. Do you have any computer repair experience?”
“A little, but I may need some help with that for a while. Why, do you get a lot of that?”
“It’s beginning to pick up now that home computers are starting to get popular and cheaper. I’ll be able to teach you that. The job will be 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday, 9:00–5:30 with a half-hour lunch. No weekend work. I can pay you $10 an hour. The job is yours if you want it.”
“That sounds great, Alan. When can I start?”
“This is Friday. How about on Monday? Do you live nearby?”
“Not far. North side of Grantham. Monday sounds fine.”
“I’ve also got a young man who lives next door who works with me during the summer and puts in a few hours a week during the school year. His name is Tommy Boardman, and he’s 13. He’s a good kid, and I’ve been training him as an apprentice.”
“Is he any good?”
“He’s becoming very good. He’s like a little sponge. I’ll mainly have him work with me, but he may ask you the occasional question.”
“That’s fine. I like kids.”
“Okay, then, Warren. It was great meeting you, and I’ll be happy to have your help. The store has gotten too busy for just me and Tommy, so we sure need the help.”
“Well, I’m happy to come work for you, Alan. See you Monday morning,” he said, offering me his hand, which I shook.
 Recognized |
CHARACTERS
Alan Phelps: The narrator of the story. He is a 28-year-old high school physics and natural science teacher in Grantham, Indiana in 1985.
Archie: David's orange tabby cat
Tommy Boardman: Alan's 12-year-old next door neighbor. He is dyslexic like Alan.
Ginnie Boardman: Tommy's mother. She is 30 years old and is an ICU nurse.
Artie Intintoli: Tommy's friend who also lives on Loser St.
Ida Beeman: Alan's first customer. She is a nice old lady who lives on Loser Street.
Leroy Beeman: Miss Ida's grandson and Tommy's friend.
Mrs. Dunbar: Tommy's 7th grade English teacher.
Callie Lyons: A nice girl in Tommy's class at school.
Warren Meyers: Alan's assistant in the repair shop.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. Alan Phelps: The narrator of the story. He is a 28-year-old high school physics and natural science teacher in Grantham, Indiana in 1985.
Archie: David's orange tabby cat
Tommy Boardman: Alan's 12-year-old next door neighbor. He is dyslexic like Alan.
Ginnie Boardman: Tommy's mother. She is 30 years old and is an ICU nurse.
Artie Intintoli: Tommy's friend who also lives on Loser St.
Ida Beeman: Alan's first customer. She is a nice old lady who lives on Loser Street.
Leroy Beeman: Miss Ida's grandson and Tommy's friend.
Mrs. Dunbar: Tommy's 7th grade English teacher.
Callie Lyons: A nice girl in Tommy's class at school.
Warren Meyers: Alan's assistant in the repair shop.
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