All Failures are my fault.

Soon after I began working at Estron, it became clear that most of the manufacturing was copying existing products and selling them for less. After all, the overhead at the Kentucky plant was very low.

Dr. Skora would call me on the phone periodically and give me projects to work on. One project was to test a reaction for making a polyester in the lab. The reaction required very low distillation pressures (under vacuum). I knew it would be difficult to achieve the low pressures needed for the reaction with the equipment I had available. After trying for two days to run the reaction to completion, I found that the only way to get the desired results was to run the reaction at very high temperatures. This of course was totally unacceptable to Dr. Skora because he knew the manufacturing plant could never achieve the temperatures necessary.

When I called Dr. Skora to tell him my results, he was very upset. He told me the plant was going to run the reaction the next day because he had made a commitment to have to product for a customer in a few days. I advised him not to run the reaction because there were problems and that the reaction would be unsuccessful. Dr. Skora ignored my advise and said the plant reaction would go on a scheduled.

The next day the plant started six thousand gallon reaction and I was to follow the progress of the reaction by doing measurements on samples taken periodically. As had happened in my lab. reactions, the process started out fine and then began to level off long before the reaction was completed. The plant couldn't achieve the low pressures needed to get the finished product which is exactly what had happened to me in my laboratory reactions.

Dr. Skora had flown in for the production batch and when the reaction stopped, he accused me of making an error. After repeated tests, he became convinced that the reaction had reached a steady state (or stopped). It was now 10:00 PM and over the next couple of hours, Stanley kept adding ingredients to the reactor to correct the problem. I told that a higher temperature was needed. He ignored my suggestion because the new oil heating system on the reactor was not working correctly and it wasn't possible to get higher reaction temperatures. Finally, at two AM in the morning, Stanley said I could leave, but he wanted me back at seven in the morning to help package the product in drums. Since it was a half hour drive to my apartment, it meant that I would get a maximum of three hours sleep.

The next morning I showed up at the plant and was surprised when Stanley asked, "What are you doing here?" When I told him he had instructed me to be at the plant in the morning, he feigned ignorance.

I spent the rest of the day following Dr. Stanley Skora's directions and generally working in the laboratory to try to find the solution to the question why the reaction had stopped. It seemed clear that a higher reaction temperature was need, but that solution was not desirable because it have meant the Stanley was at fault for using an untested plant reactor. The failure of the reaction due to my incompetence was a much more politically desirable answer.