Joe, Suzy, and Tom Gedanken

Suspend your disbelief for a minute, and consider the tale of Joe, Suzy, and Tom Gedanken, a family of 1950's employees who are inventors on the side, doing experiments in their basement.

Joe is a factory worker, building Fords.  Suzy, Joe's wife, is in the typing pool of Acme Corporation, spending her time supporting the customer service team.  Tom , Joe's brother, is an accountant for the county tax agency.

Joe is an inventive guy, and he believes he has a number of ideas that would help Suzy be more productive at work, which they both would appreciate since they're saving money to start a family, but both work long hours to do so, and they worry they won't have time for their kids.  Of course this means Joe doesn't have much time to invent labor-saving tools for Suzy either.  Tom is similarly busy, and remarks on how much time he spends making bookkeeping entries and then double-checking to find errors.

Joe takes a couple of weeks of vacation and hides in the basement, inventing away.  Instead of solving Suzy's problem though, he first solves his own: he builds a basic robot from spare parts out of the Acme product returns dumpster.  The robot can automatically line up a couple of component parts and do a basic weld, and as long as the welding consumables and supply of parts are maintained, he estimates that the machine can weld parts four times as fast as he himself can.  Joe thinks about going to management with his invention, but instead takes another path.  He takes his one machine into work, and he and the other 3 people in his work cell hatch a scheme:  each will come in 2 hours per day to feed the machine, and spend the rest of the time doing whatever they like outside work. 

They're kind-hearted folk, so in their newly free time Joe and his team make derivatives of the robot to do other tasks, and before long the entire shop floor is filled with machines and two-hour-per-day workers.  Management notices, but the cars are getting built with better quality than before, and a lot faster since extending shifts doesn't seem to be very hard -- the robots are willing to work around the clock and the team agrees to keep them running for some extra pay.  Before long Joe and team figure out how to reduce the support needs, so they split all three shifts, and negotiate 2x pay for 3x production.  Soon, Joe and his peers not only envision raising kids, but buying bigger houses, and nicer cars.  Already they are active in the local Elks Lodge and the community-- they have money AND spare time, and local shopkeepers are happy with the extra spending.  Management is happy too -- they are producing more cars than other plants, at lower costs, and they get bonuses and raises as well.


But what about Suzy and Tom?