Quoted By:
"Er ... would you mind if I ... you know, tinkered with the tools a bit, get them a little shielded."
He laughs at that. Not a snort, not a chuckle, but a full, throaty laugh. The peons that are working with him are smirking as well, which really gets under your skin. Though before you can get too sore about it, Quimbix calms down enough to explain himself.
"Smithwick, you are good kid, a good worker. And more than that, you can read, and when you speak it is always polite and formal - which really puts you head and shoulders above most of the other peons. Some of them I can barely understand one word in three, if I am being honest. You are going places, I guarantee it. But what you got to understand is that right now, all you have an EVA wrecker certification. And that is it. You are not an engineer, you are not a mechanist, a machinist or even a technician. You want to try to 'tinker' with the electronics, get them shielded. With what? Odds and ends that you can get your hands on before the start of second shift? Is that the plan?"
Admittedly, you hadn't even thought that far ahead yet, but yes ... that probably would have been your plan. When you don't immediately answer, Quimbix continues.
"What if you break the thing before you head outside, what then? Am I supposed to just give you another, and possibly end up short for someone else? Let you go out there without one? And what happens if your quick fix fails while your inside the hulk, and you end up needing that tool to do your work ... or God forbid, to get out. What the Hell then? Or what if your tinkering manages to last this shift, but then next shift the tools go to someone else, and then they fail on them. I'm not the kind of person who looks for scapegoats, but ... if I was outside, and the stuff I was using broke on me, inconveniencing me at best and endangering me at worse, then I found out that a shift or two previous, some one without proper certification or tooling was fiddling with them, then to be honest, I'd say that it is that person's fucking fault. And of course, Supply would have to get involved to replace the damned things, and the less any of us have to deal with those assholes, the better."
These are all very reasonable points. Perhaps this wasn't your best idea ... or perhaps you should have figured that any foreman worth their wage wouldn't want a semi-skilled laborer 'tinkering' on communal tools. Might have been better to just do it, you know forgiveness instead of permission?
"Listen, kid, you didn't know the full story when you picked up that time-card. So the way I see it, even if you are so concerned about what is left of those worms, there is absolutely no shame in it if you went back to the board, and picked one of the other cards."
