“Now you do,” I said.
“Now I do,” he agreed.
We moved on to a different topic. Daniel, across the table, was watching this exchange with an expression I could not quite read. Later, in the car going home, he said: “How did that feel?”
“Sufficient,” I said. “Richard is a direct person and he gave me a direct acknowledgment. That’s what I needed.”
“He told me, on the call in August, that he had been operating off bad information. His words.”
“That’s accurate,” I said.
“He blamed me. Which is fair.” Daniel paused. “He said I should have known better.”
“He was right,” I said.
“I know he was.”
We drove the rest of the way in a silence that was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who have already said the difficult things and are now in the period of just living in the aftermath.
## The Work Order Follow-On
Linda Cho came back to me in September about the work order tracking issue that Sandra had flagged after the June session. She was interested in a more focused engagement: two days on site, a specific analysis of the work order lifecycle from initial request through close-out, and a set of recommendations.
I said yes.
I went back to Northbridge in early October. I spent two days on site — one with the facilities coordination team, one split between field staff and the account managers. I sat with people and watched how the work order process actually ran, which is always different from how people believe it runs. The belief: a work order was entered, assigned, completed, and closed. The reality: there were four informal holding points that nobody had documented, three of which were entirely rational responses to real problems and one of which had been created in 2018 by a person who no longer worked there and had never been examined since.