You mop the floor. What exactly makes you think you understand a $2 million machine better than 12 engineers who've had their hands inside it for 72 hours. I'm not saying that, sir. I'm saying the fault code pattern doesn't match a dead board. A dead board wouldn't.
Stop. Dale's voice cut like a blade. You don't speak in a technical meeting. Not in my division. Not ever.
The room was still. Elijah's mouth closed, but he didn't drop his eyes. And that was somehow worse for Dale than if he'd argued. Dale turned to the room and forced a thin smile. Since our night janitor has so much technical insight, let's put it to use.
The loading dock floor is filthy. There's a mop in the west closet. That's your contribution to this machine. That's what you're here for. Two engineers laughed.
A third shook his head. One young engineer near the back, a woman named Priaire, didn't laugh. She looked at the floor uncomfortable and said nothing and hated herself a little for saying nothing. Elijah stood there for a long 5 seconds. Then he did something no one expected.
He set the trash bin down, walked to the whiteboard, and picked up a marker. "May I? " he said. It wasn't really a question. Before Dale could stop him, he drew fast and clean the layout of the spindle's thermal monitoring system, the heat sensors, the connector block, the signal path from the sensor into the board, and the safety cutff that watched it. He wasn't guessing.
The lines were sure, the labels correct, the kind of diagram a man draws only when he's held the real thing in his hands. If the board were truly dead, Elijah said, the whole machine would be dark. It isn't. It powered up, ran its checks, and then tripped its own safety cut off. That's not a dead board.
That's a board doing its job on bad information. Something is feeding it a reading that isn't real. Find what's lying to it, and you find your fault. For one second, something crossed Dale's face. Recognition, maybe fear.
Then it was gone. Dale took the marker out of Elijah's hand and with the flat of his palm, wiped the entire diagram off the board in one long smear. "Your hands," Dale said quiet enough that only the front row heard it. Are good for holding a mop. Waste my engineers time again and you won't have a job here at all.