The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“You sure it’s tomorrow already?”
“Today, Michael.”
“Feels like tomorrow.”
“That was a long day. Sit down.”
“Gotta make the coffee. It was the most amazing day ever, but I earned every minute of it.”
“I made it already. Just push the button. I don’t know how you slept with your phone ringing all night.”
“That’s the only reason I’m awake on time. I had Bill put the Ring app on my phone, and I think I’d rather let the machines walk off. The loan requires me to have insurance on them anyhow, so really what’s the loss.”
“I get it, installment loans keep up credit score. What I don’t get is why you borrow the money and pay the stuff down to negligible the next day.”
“Two things. The interest is front loaded.”
“So it’s the interest.”
“I literally started the statement, two things.”
“You better get some coffee.”
“Not ready yet.”
“Maybe take it out early before I give you a fat lip and you need a straw to drink it.”
“You’re little. Why you so violent?”
“You’re snappy.”
“Two reasons…”
“Two reasons why you’re snappy?”
“Interest and loan to credit ratio. Buy big loan, pay off the vast majority of it, but the credit value is still there. When the loan pays off, the credit value goes down that amount, so keep the loan open for the full life with a single digit percentage of actual debt to credit ratio.”
“That’s a lot of work.”
“Actually, it’s the opposite. Buy money, pay it nearly off, and final pay on maturity date. It’s easy.”
“Figuring it out being the hard part.”
“I only had to figure it out that one time. I don’t have to remind myself every time I buy something.”
“What’s on the agenda today?”
“First thing we have to finish the solar install.”
“You came in beaming last… Holy smokes, is that camera going to go off all day like that?”
“It’s this branch in front of the camera. Breeze blows, the branch moves, and the camera alerts. We did get a couple raccoons though.”
“Raccoons?”
“Here, you swipe down, click the offending device, and it will play.”
“Oh, that is a branch.”
“This one’s different though. Just click it?”
“Yup, enjoy. I gotta go brush my teeth and wash my face.”
“No shower?”
“I gotta roll. It’s dam day. Bill’s coming back, and I’m taking the kids to the culvert store with me, teach them procurements and see if I can soften up my dictator stance on the corporation and still get them onboard.”
“If not, will Tanner keep them as employees?”
“I think so, but that’s direct report liability. It’s different from co-ownership. I don’t want to absolve myself of liability and lay it on an innocent kid.”
“Partnership – less liability. Got it.”
“That’s the thing.”
“But Rusty is on board?”
“Last I heard though, Cody was still a hard no.”
“Aw, there are raccoons! I just want to pet their little ears.”
“I’ll be back. Pick one out, and I’ll have a talk with him about the ears.”
“What happened, Tanner? You just give up? It’s 7:45. My coffee’s ice cold waiting for you. And you missed the biggest bear we’ve ever had.”
“So, no. I didn’t give up, but I figured you would get here even earlier just to beat me, so I took my time, teach you a lesson.”
“Played. Listen, we’re carrying a couple pins around and we should hammer them in before we get down the road.”
“What the…”
“The survey guy is coming tomorrow. I guess…”
“You’re weird.”
“Different. Listen. I know I laid it out hard yesterday about the partnership…”
“Little bit.”
“Yeah. But for cause. Cody needs to know the gravy train has a track under it. One way on, headed in one direction.”
“He’s not convinced.”
“We’ll see. But you’re not convinced too. You have a corporation, a license, a bank account, and you have autonomy, and my pushing against that has to creak the boards.”
“Boards, trains. I’m with you, but I don’t need the image clouds.”
“Yeah, so I see you. I know, I sense that you have a clean thing, and adding people to it taints your thing – and I won’t play the bully saying, I told you so before you chose Cody, because the Cody mechanics are not exactly chose so much as considered the need for hands next to the need for a partner.”
“That did look a little trickster, call it my choice right after you left me no other choice, but I saw through it. I saw the deeper meaning too.”
“Deeper?”
“Yeah, hiring is a balance. As soon as you hire hands, you realize that you also hired the person’s complications.”
“Definitely – take it a step further. Your hires are not your helpers, they’re your partners. They make you, or they break you. But if you don’t have hands, you’re broken already.”
“I see that.”
“Okay, now let’s take it one more step. Right now you’re the man. And that’s a comforting noose. It feels like it’s supporting your neck, but the more your feet move, the more the stool wobbles, and you’re not ready yet to stand alone.”
“Go ahead.”
“So, right now you’re coping fine, the bank does the work, and Deno does the legal. You work the phones and shop the insurance, and you give me the invoice. But right now you have one job name, no vendors, no customers, no materials procurement, planning, logistics, bidding, accounts payable, accounts receivable. You’re a guy with a job that runs its own payroll and two other guys that haven’t called in sick yet or, god forbid, gotten injured yet. You haven’t bought or maintained equipment, and you haven’t even planned a lunch break yet. You’re new.”
“New.”
“New, but not stupid. You see what you have in your hands, and the shiniest part is that it’s all yours. And I cannot discredit that. In fact, I hadn’t considered it when the whole idea came to me in the first place. But now it has, and I’ve thought about it, and I think I have a solution. We can create a new one, and all three of you can be in it, and you keep the original one to fill in later, which creates something called a shelf company, or you could let the kids in and start facing the real world right now. Get this one dirty and dinged up and all that will come from putting three virtual strangers into a marriage --- and that’s the other pin. You got engaged – I forgot to tell Stefanie that you got engaged with her Christmas bonus – do you see where I was going with all this?”
“Yes, Cody and Rusty need in, and you need me to trust you.”
“And you’ll never get to work before I do because I never stop thinking about it, which is the end of the corporation epoch. When you get there, you’ll know what I mean. For now, the sun is not up yet, but the solar panels are hot. Get the keyhole saw out of the back of the truck, cut holes in the floor for the conduit that you’ll find in there, thread the conduits through the holes. Use the fittings to turn up to the back wall. Bring everything in the truck to the shed. I have to go call Stef. If I don’t tell her about this, she’ll murder me.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“News already?”
“Old news. Now listen. I don’t want your crap. This is not evidence of my failures, but evidence of yesterday’s other grand moments.”
“Oh Christ! So you…”
“No, let me tell it.”
“I’m on a Teams meeting. I haven’t got time for your – you-ness.”
“Me-ness. No problem. Tanner got engaged with your Christmas bonus. Okay, byeee.”
“What the hell?”
“You said get everything out of the truck and put it in the shed.”
“But you only had a minute while I was on the phone.”
“Worthy cause.”
“Did you have to get every bit of garbage though? I mean, the cigarette packs, the McDonald’s bags. Is that literally dirt from the floor in a pile?”
“I thought that was a good touch. Are you going to answer your phone?”
“Nope, that’s Stef, and she’s got a lesson of her own to learn.”
“Gahhllee, that’s a lot of cigarettes. I can’t believe you smoked them all in one night.”
“Mornin’, Cody.”
“I was gonna lead with the cameras, and the cigarette packs derailed me.”
“Yeah, how did you get in here without the Ring notifications?”
“I went around them. Are you gonna answer that phone?”
“I’m not.”
“Send it to voicemail then.”
“Can’t do that either, or she won’t be sitting there fuming with every ring.”
“I hate when my old lady does that, just keeps calling until I answer.”
“It’s 8:00. Rusty’s huffing and puffing up the hill and we gotta get these panels wired to charge the batteries. Look here, they ship at fifty percent, and we ran the router all night, so the four lights blinking mean forty percent. Four batteries is twenty kilowatt hours, and we get about four hours of sunlight at around sixteen hundred watts worth of panels…”
“Bro, answer the phone or ditch the math lesson.”
“Or I can buy what I want to buy, which is a trained hand rather than a moron I gotta watch every minute because he won’t listen to me when I’m telling things that I want him to know.”
“Just answer the phone.”
“Listen up Cody, or stay toxic. Your choice. The batteries are reporting about forty percent. That’s around twelve kilowatts down. If we take in four hours of nameplate…”
“Nameplate?”
“Good question, Tanner. That sticker that you oriented downward yesterday is called the nameplate. It holds all of the panel’s information. In this case, the stated wattage, the amount of electricity that panel is supposed to put out in benchtop testing conditions. There’s more here, and I’ll get to that, but for now, know in your mind that each panel is 425-Watts, nameplate, so if you multiply that by sun-hours, you get…”
“Seventeen hundred.”
“Not entirely, Cody. That’s the nameplate value of the four panels combined. When you multiply that by sun hours, around three hours here in winter, deep in a valley with the panels pointed east-southeast.”
“Um, he’s right. This is a lot of data.”
“He didn’t say that, Tanner. He interrupted with a half wrong answer. And you’re interrupting with impatience.”
“I think it’s the phone.”
“Fine - - - Hey honey, you’re on speaker phone with Cody and Tanner…”
“And Rusty. Mornin’ Stef. I can’t wait to see him try and weasel his way out of this.”
“Michael, I….”
“Speakerphone, honey.”
“I’ll deal with you later. Tanner, congratulations! Did you have it planned, or was it spontaneous?”
“Spontaneous.”
“How’d you do it?”
“So, we’ve been talking about it for a while, and you gave us that bonus, and we went and paid the deposit, and there it is.”
“Was she happy?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Did she cry?”
“A little.”
“Did you cry?”
“Me?”
“What did her mom say?”
“She was psyched, of course.”
“When is the….”
“Honey, the third degree.”
“I said I’d deal with you later. Do you have a date yet?”
“Soon. We’ve been talking about it for a while.”
“Honey, we’re in a team meeting, and we have electricity on the floor and…”
“I’ll deal with you later, byeee.”
“You’re fucked, bro.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, listen. I’ll be happy to play you guys in for me taking the whole fight to a kiss and make up tomorrow, but for now we have to get this wire moved, in conduit, and landed and harvesting electricity. The whole word problem I was working on…”
“That explains it. It was a word problem I was so irritated by.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Bro, I hate word problems.”
“Yes, kids. Cody, Tanner, and Rusty are each making twenty dollars an hour from Michael. Michael spent ten minutes trying to teach Cody and Rusty and Tanner how to calculate solar production and how long it would take to fill the batteries. Instead, Michael had to waste another ten minutes explaining that math is the job. If the three men do not stop interrupting so we can get on with the day, how much will Michael be paying them?”