Howard Keller came in one afternoon with the assumption that the machine would be ready by the time his corn was dry enough to move. He had a grain bin on his farm, and although the cooperative elevator handled most of his harvest, he still needed a portable auger for a portion he stored himself. He had been using number eleven since he was a young man, and Rachel could hear the pride in his voice when he told her that. He could also be impatient in the way people become impatient with machinery they think they know better than anybody else.
"It ran last year," he said.
"A machine running last year is a good reason to inspect it this year," Rachel answered.
"You're going to make a lot of people late if you take everything apart."
"I'm going to make them later if the thing fails halfway through a load."
Howard sighed and sat on an overturned bucket while she worked. After a while he began telling her about the first auger the pool had purchased, a smaller machine that rattled so badly it sounded like a sack of loose horseshoes when somebody started it. He remembered seeing Walter's father unload it from a flatbed truck and watching four farmers argue about who would be the first to use it. They eventually settled the argument by drawing slips of paper from a coffee tin.
"How'd that go?" Rachel asked.
"First man who drew got called away because his cows got out. Second man had grain too wet to move. By the time the third man was ready, the fourth had already finished his work with a borrowed machine. That's when we started making the schedule according to when the job was actually ready."
Rachel laughed. She had heard different versions of that story from Earl and Walter, and every telling changed the details slightly. The useful part remained the same. A schedule was supposed to make work possible, not simply reward whoever spoke first.
When Rachel inspected the lower bearing, she found more wear than she liked. The old card suggested that the problem had been developing for several years. The belt was also showing age, and one of the guards needed to be replaced before the auger could be approved for use. Rachel wrote an estimate and sent Howard to Rose for authorization rather than let him talk her into a quick repair.
He returned the next day with the signed approval and a complaint about the cost. Rachel told him the alternative was to rent a machine from the highway store and pay the transport charge as well as the daily rate. Howard did the arithmetic in his head and stopped complaining. He even brought the spare belt he'd kept hanging in his barn for years, although Rachel rejected it when she saw how badly the rubber had aged.
"You don't like anything I bring you," he observed.
"I like you bringing things back in one piece."
He looked at her for a second, then laughed. "All right. I'll give you that."