"Not my cup of tea," said Robert.
"If you know how to make things work, then you know what to sell about them. Sales. A sales engineer is the best paid of all engineers."
"Once had a newspaper route. Had to give it up. Couldn't afford to keep buying newspapers. Only people I ever sold a copy to were my parents. I couldn't sell an ice cube in the Sahara," said Dastrow.
"I see. Well, do you have a sense for structure then? We can use structural engineers."
"Not especially."
"How about environment? An environmental engineer?"
"Sorry. Just know how to make things work. I see your clock is broken," said Dastrow. He took a little screwdriver from his pocket and within moments had the desk clock humming again.
"You can't tell me you don't need a man like that," said Robert.
"Unfortunately, that's just what I'm telling you," said the personnel manager.
And so did many others. Because in the America of the 1970's the rage was not to make things work, but to make them more beautiful, more modern, and cheaper to produce.
The engineers who got the jobs were those who dealt in theory. As one company put it to young Dastrow, "You should have seen the handwriting on the wall. At most engineering schools, they've closed the machine shops. Nobody cares whether something works well or not because they're designing new ones anyway. It's not important that it work. It's important that it's new. That it's cheap to make, and attractive."
Robert Dastrow, with his degree in engineering, spent the first year of his employable life as a messenger. And then an accident changed his life and ultimately helped change America too.
While visiting a relative in California he noticed a car go out of control. Robert saw the steering-wheel bearings were obviously misaligned. Anyone could see that. It was the manufacturer's fault.
Being from the Midwest, he shared this knowledge with anyone who would listen. Every other witness to the accident suddenly claimed not to see a thing.
A young lawyer, who just happened to hear an ambulance and just happened to be taking the identical route for the last fifteen blocks of the trip to the accident site, and just happened to stop to see what was going on, heard Robert Dastrow talking.
"Would you swear to it in a court of law?"
"Sure. It's the truth," said Dastrow. "But I've got to return home to Nebraska tomorrow. I may have a job. I'm not specifically saying I have a job. I'm not stating it is a sure thing. But golly, it looks good. Looks real good. Looks wicked good."
"I understand," said the lawyer. "I would be the last one to expect you to hang around Los Angeles for a trial when it's costing you money. I would be the last one to expect you to pay money out of your own pocket. But I think I could arrange a little per-diem payment for you, just to stay around."
"Is that legal?" asked Dastrow.
"If you get it in cash, and no one knows, and you don't tell anyone, and I don't tell anyone, there's nothing illegal about it."
"Sounds fishy to me," said Robert Dastrow. "Sounds like a bribe to me," said Dastrow.
"What's your name?"
"Dastrow. Robert Dastrow," said the unemployable engineer, and then sounding like a thousand steel guitars twanging their ugliest notes, he spelled out his name.
"Robert, I'm a lawyer. The law is not open-and-shut like laymen think. Nothing is illegal unless a court and the written law say it is illegal. That's the law. No court ever ruled on anything it didn't know."
"But concealing the truth doesn't make it less than the truth."
"Robert, we're talking about five thousand dollars in cash, minimum."
Robert Dastrow thought about truth and honesty. He thought about the values of his small Midwestern city. He thought about how he had been raised. Five thousand dollars would indeed go a long way toward a comfortable life in Grand Island.
"You said minimum."
"More if we win, Robert," said the young lawyer, who brought him back to his office to take a deposition. It was a storefront with some Spanish written on the front in case a passing Latino might need legal help.
There were two pieces of furniture, a chair and an old scarred wooden desk. On that wooden desk young Nathan Palmer took down a deposition from Robert Dastrow.
His other two partners listened in amazement as he described the make and the car and how he could tell the ball bearings in the steering system were not properly aligned.
"Genius," said Arnold Schwartz, who recognized mathematical excellence.
"Interesting," said Genaro Rizzuto. "but, will it hold up in court?"
As a test all three of them went at Robert Dastrow for two hours, trying to break him. But when it came to the workings of a mechanical object, Robert was not only at home, he was king. He even explained how some engineers might try to defend the structure of the automobile. And he refuted those defenses for the three lawyers.
At the end, Palmer, Rizzuto, and Schwartz were numb from talk of valves, ball bearings, balance, and structural design. Robert was fresh as a daisy and still talking.
What they learned from this young Midwest engineer who didn't have a job was that they would put the manufacturer on trial on behalf of the plaintiff.
The auto company took one look at Dastrow's deposition, passed it to their engineers, and the following morning not only agreed to the largest out-of-court settlement in the history of the industry, but promptly hired Palmer, Rizzuto on a large retainer. This meant that the firm and its technical support, namely its star witness, would never be able to act against them again.
The old desk went into a glass case, and Robert Dastrow received a personal retainer from the law firm of a hundred thousand dollars a year. If Robert had any residual moral qualms, they died after his first really good date. Of course the date had been arranged by a dating service in Los Angeles and the beautiful young woman seemed to smile at anything and everything, but she was a woman. She was beautiful. And Robert Dastrow was no longer poor or lonely.
The second thing he did after establishing human companionship of sorts was to build a machine shop in the basement of his new home back home in Grand Island. Unfortunately Grand Island did not have dating services, since in their lack of sophistication they called women providing companionship for money a form of prostitution.
But before he could get his machine shop running, he was visited by the three young lawyers. They were all desperate. Mr. Palmer had just come back from his honeymoon, which had ended in divorce. Mr. Rizzuto had spent a week in Las Vegas and now his income for the next three years was owed to people who collected either their money or pieces of the debtor's body. And Schwartz, violently adamant about the stupidity of the American investor and how idiots ruined the stock market, had just lost his home, everything in it, and his last extra pair of shoes.
"Golly, how'd you fellas spend so much money so quickly?" laughed Robert.
"That's not the point," said Schwartz. "The point is how we can make more."
"The point is how we can make you even richer," said Palmer. "How would you like to buy your own linear accelerator? How would you like your own atomic clock? How would you like anything in the world you fancy just to tinker with?"
"A bimetric deep-sea evaluator?" asked Robert.
All three young lawyers nodded, although none of them knew what it was. Palmer had read about the linear accelerator in a magazine on the flight to Grand Island from Los Angeles. He knew it had something to do with atoms. He knew it was expensive. He knew it might interest a nerd like Dastrow. He was, it turned out, very right about this.
"Well, there's no such thing as a bimetric evaluator," laughed Robert, slapping his knee.
"Whatever there is you want, you can get. What we need is for you to follow accidents with us and find the ones where a major rich company is at fault," said Palmer.
"Not the best use of your time, gentlemen. Best use of your time is knowing where the accidents will happen. "
"You thought about this already?" asked Palmer.