Page 166 - Just Deserts

Scrubbers

up for mass production and mass merchandising. It looked as though
they would make millions.”
“Then Nemesis struck.”
Wachs paused for effect. Most of the class was still with him.
“In practicing its own little deception with Fomalhaut Industries,
Cocker and Philpott had not done its homework. One of the key
catalysts in synthesizing the proprietary binding compound which
made Scrubbers possible was methylchlorazine, obtained in vast
quantities from Axis Chemicals. What the managers at Cocker and
Philpott did not realize—probably since their organizational structure
prevented the production and maintenance divisions from speaking
with each other or sharing data bases—was that both Axis Chemicals
and Fomalhaut Industries were wholly-owned subsidiaries of 3F, the
Framingham Furnace and Fabrication company. And
methylchlorazine, under its more-common name, trichloromethylate,
was one of the compounds being illegally extracted from Cocker and
Philpott’s smokestacks and disposed of by Fomalhaut.”
Two or three of the brighter students started to smile.
Yes, thought Professor Wachs; teaching was worth it if you could
reach just one inquiring mind out there in that Sargasso Sea of
mediocrity.
“Perhaps you have guessed what happened: 3F’s centralized
warehouse received the chemical under one name through
Fomalhaut, and shipped it back under another via Axis. A
muckraking journalist somehow got wind of the transaction and
broke the story in the national news media. Cocker and Philpott were
subjected to intense scrutiny, and their smokestacks appeared on the
nightly news and the front page of The New York Times. 3F was
equally embarrassed, since they had been receiving chemicals which
were supposed to have been disposed of according to
environmentally-sound procedures. The mix-up in names was a
mystery to 3F’s management, who claimed that their automated
shipping and receiving system had fail-safe mechanisms preventing
the turnaround of goods from Fomalhaut to Axis. This did not sit
well with the board of directors, who concluded either the multi-
million dollar computer system did not perform according to
specifications or it had been sabotaged by an employee.
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