"No," says Ohlson, pricking up his ears.
"That's something you need to do. I think Hal has had a little bit of a problem with leakage. I'm imagining that it may be a big-enough problem that we might want to address it. One of the next times you come in here that you got some clothes on that you can afford to get a little dirty, we'll go down there and take a look. Make you a note on it, and when you come back this way, holler."
Ohlson is writing now. "You call that a slasher?"
" Slicer," Eckl says, smiling at the Yankee.
Ohlson's next appointment is with Don McAfee, the woodyard foreman, over in the maintenance shed. He drives slowly across the yard, on the lookout for arriving semis loaded down with 40,000 pounds of fresh-cut Alabama pine. It's a surreal place, the air aswarm with tiny wood chips, like snow. Ohlson points to a trailer filled with pulp, its tractor still attached; the whole unit is slowly being hoisted to a near-vertical position by a heavy-duty hydraulic installation, the chips sliding out the back.
McAfee, when he shows up, looks like a country singer, with blue eyes that match the color of his jeans, a black- checked shirt, a red face, and wavy gray hair. He hasn't been home before 11 p.m. once since the week began. That's because there's an outage in progress, a planned shutdown of the production line, and the work is not going well. Ohlson takes one look at him and offers to come back another time. But McAfee says no, "I'll see you," even tosses Ohlson a gimme almost before he has a chance to state his business.
Ohlson has been building his reputation at Champion for a long time, but the clincher came last summer, at 9 o'clock on a weeknight, when the phone rang at home. (Ohlson doesn't carry a beeper. He works 60-to-70-hour weeks as it is; once customers know you've got a beeper, he says, "you just can't ever get away." But he does give his home phone number to customers who ask.) It was the manager of maintenance and engineering for fiber prep up at Champion. A hydraulic motor had failed in the pulp press and Champion had to shut down the line. It wasn't even Ohlson's motor, but could he help? Ohlson tried. He gave the manager a couple of ideas, some things to check. The manager thanked him, and Ohlson went to bed.
At midnight the phone rang again. Ohlson's not sure what he said then; he was half asleep. But "after I hung up I realized something was pretty seriously wrong if they couldn't figure it out by now. That's when I got up, woke myself up, and called him back." No, the manager said, by the time you get here we'll have it fixed. But Ohlson fired up the Bronco anyway and drove for two and a half hours. When he got to the plant, at 2:30 a.m., everybody was still standing around looking at the motor, still trying to figure out what was wrong.
Ohlson could see right away that the motor was a lost cause. There was nothing to do but yank it out and replace it. That was not an easy decision for the folks at Champion to make, not when the motor in question came from Germany and cost $44,000. But Ohlson was able to convince them that they had no other choice. And later, after they'd taken out the old motor and installed the replacement, Ohlson was a hero. "We were virtually locked in," Ohlson says now. "I hate to say that, but we did a good-enough job that they appreciated it, and they're going to come back to us."
And so, four months later, although he's exhausted, McAfee watches and listens attentively while Ohlson runs through a product demo on a variable-frequency drive, something new in the Activation line.
"I can see a couple good uses for it," McAfee says while Ohlson puts it back into the box. "I wouldn't mind trying one. 'Course, I'd have to pass it through the powers that be."
"I'll throw you a brochure in the mail," Ohlson says.
* * *
Friday, P.M.
This road trip is winding down. After a quick lunch at Cracker Barrel, Ohlson rejoins the Interstate at Decatur, Ala., and points his Bronco south toward Birmingham. He has one more scheduled stop, at the Americold factory, in Cullman. Americold makes compressors for refrigeration units. Like everybody else in Alabama, the company is operating flat-out these days -- seven days a week, 24 hours a day. A few months ago Ohlson sold it an electronic unit that automates a hydraulic drill, which punches holes in aluminum rocker arms. The unit worked fine for a while but lately has been acting up.
Ohlson expects a quick fix. Instead he's stuck in the plant for two hours, and even then it takes a phone call to the system's manufacturer, in San Francisco, before the thing is up and running again. That's two hours with nothing to show for it, other than the goodwill of the customer. "That didn't make me any money," Ohlson says afterward in the truck. "But it didn't hurt me, either. Sometimes you gotta do that."
Almost home, just outside of Birmingham, and the cellular phone starts chirping. It's Louisiana-Pacific calling, wondering if Ohlson can come by soon and reset some valves on a year-old installation. There's an outage scheduled for tomorrow morning; would that be convenient? Sure, says Ohlson, then snaps the phone shut and tosses it onto the dash. "S___," he says, finally sounding tired, "there goes Saturday morning."
What this salesman doesn't know is how to say no.
* * *
