By six o'clock Wednesday morning, James Jericho had taken a shower, brushed his teeth, and climbed down the fire escape to the curb where his car was parked.  He could have taken the antique elevator down to the ground floor, but something about being cooped up in a rickety tin mechanism just rubbed him the wrong way.  He might, it occurred to him, have been more comfortable with it had he built it himself.  But anyway, the fire escape was more fun.

 

The joy of being a machinist is that you're never supervised.  Sure, there's always a deadline of one kind or another, but every good machinist sets his own hours.  For his part, James liked to get up with the sun; it reminded him of life on the family plot up north, and he never wanted to let go of that bit of his childhood.  He was a man who believed in details, and he kept the past alive in little ways.  One of them was to be the first man at the machine shop and the first to head home.  Father would have approved.

 

As he pulled into the parking lot of the shop, James knew something was up. It didn't take a gumshoe to figure that out; there were already other cars in the lot.  'Guess a few of the boys had to make up some lost time.'  Stepping out of his old junker (he kept the engine in good condition, anyway), James kicked the door shut and rolled up his sleeves on the way inside.  First rule of machine work: caught sleeves lose a man his fingers.  One of a hundred little rituals peculiar to the profession.  Grabbing the handle, James pushed the door open, waved to the groggy-eyed men who looked up from their machines, and sat down to his work.

 

The order of the day, as it turned out, was a number of custom parts for a prototype engine.  The problem with these jobs, James found himself musing, was that they never included the whole design.  Risk of industrial espionage aside, it would have been nice to have had the whole picture.  Would give him something to think about, anyway.  Brain fodder.  The problem, he thought, with this job in general was that you couldn't very well read a book while you were at it.

 

The hours passed with a comfortable predictability.  Machine work had never really been the Plan, but it had turned out for the best.  Like generations of his ancestors, James found an abiding pleasure in working with his hands.  As much as he might have liked to spend his time in a more cerebral pursuit (Jess liked to say he'd make a good teacher), he was honest enough with himself to admit that he never would have been completely satisfied by one.  'Big peasant hands,' his father used to say, 'made for hard labor.'  He had to concede: aching muscles told you you'd spent your time well.  A machinist was a happy medium.  Work with your hands without all of that heavy lifting.

 

The last piece of worked metal (looking like something out of a science fiction series, really) emerged late in the afternoon, later in fact than James usually prefered.  Not that it mattered today.  Jessica wasn't in town, and the pub was always empty on a Wednesday night.  Home and a book, he decided on the way out of the shop.  And pizza and a Guinness.  Yup, even the empty days could be alright if you knew what you liked.

 

Stepping out into the fresh air, James Jericho took a deep breath and smiled, thinking incongruously of Dr. Seuss.  

 

'It's good to be good, but you have to know how.'

Time stopped...