My boss Don Slewowski was a ten year RAM employee who had worked his way up the
ranks. He had started his career with Exon and came to RAM when the Fitville facility was being built up. Apparently, from the number of ex-Exon employees at RAM, they had raided Exon's technical staff in the late sixties to fill their expanding needs. Don was a very insecure person who always seemed to be on the edge of one disaster after another. Some of the disasters he seemed to create either through his own inadequacies or by design. Somehow I never felt he was sharp enough to be totally responsible for deliberately creating the disasters he would find himself in, but he did know how to take full advantage of the messes when they occurred.

After I had been at RAM for awhile, I found “crisis management” was a favorite game played not only by Don but most of RAM managers. “Crisis management” seemed to be the way managers got a sense of importance and visibility. The project I had been assigned to was a true crisis, and the failure of my area to solve the problem was causing major production problems to the point that the site manager, who would eventually become President Ronald Reagan's science advisor, was having weekly review meetings on the problem. Don loved the exposure, but he was totally unequipped to handle a problem of that magnitude. The crisis problem plus the problems created by my presence made me wonder if Don could take all the pressure.

My other daily contacts at work besides Don consisted primarily of Osama Ikill, my office partner, Klause Closeau, the Senior Scientist working on the problem I had been assigned to and Dick Sawyer, a laboratory technician who was doing a lot of the lab work for Klause.

Osama was an Armenian who had received his education in Lebanon and then came to the United States to attend graduate school at Cal Tech. Osama had many of the characteristics that Buzz had at Gamma Supplies, and Osama really did have that defiant attitude that seemed to characterize Buzz. What was clear was that Buzz was close to Don and a couple of the older employees in my area. For a new relatively new employee, Osama seemed to fit well in the highly political environment that existed at RAM. And being a non-American my tormentors loved using him to terrorize a native borne American – me. As with Buzz and others, to the ruling fascist government, American citizenship is of no value if you are poor.

Klause Closeau and Dick Sawyer were both old-time Ram employees, and they were close personal friends. Together they had taken a research material and made it a practical product for use in RAM's micro-chip manufacturing. In their haste to be successful they had overlooked or hidden some serious problems that the material had, and now that the chemical was in full scale use, the problems were becoming apparent and causing difficulties on the chip manufacturing line. To make matters worse, RAM was unable to manufacture the material in sufficient quantities to keep the chip manufacturing line going. Klause was a very capable chemist and very skillful at dodging the blame for the current predicament. Now I was being placed in the position of solving the problems that Klause, Dick and the rest of the RAM research staff was unable to solve. The problem had grown to such proportions that outside consultants, including Nobel prize winner Paul J. Flory, had been called in for advise. Although Klause resented someone intruding into his territory, I believe he was glad to have some capable help and to have someone else take the heat for a while.