They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in
Florida felt just right to her. Francis, the leader of the
paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a
kiss, and even Lester's nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good
mood.
When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and
Francis in the shantytown.
"I want to make some technology for those guys," Perry said as they
sat in front of Francis's RV drinking cowboy coffee cooked over a
banked wood-stove off to one side. "Room-mate-ware for homeless
people."
Francis uncrossed his bony ankles and scratched at his mosquito
bites. "A lot of people think that we don't buy stuff, but it's not
true," he said. "I shop hard for bargains, but there's lots of stuff I
spend more on because of my lifestyle than I would if I had a real
house and steady electricity. When I had a chest-freezer, I could bulk
buy ground round for about a tenth of what I pay now when I go to the
grocery store and get enough for one night's dinner. The alternative
is using propane to keep the fridge going overnight, and that's not
cheap, either. So I'm a kind of premium customer. Back at Boeing, we
loved the people who made small orders, because we could charge them
such a premium for custom work, while the big airlines wanted stuff
done so cheap that half the time we lost money on the deal."
Perry nodded. "There you have it -- roommate-ware for homeless people,
a great and untapped market."
Suzanne cocked her head and looked at him. "You're sounding awfully
commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?"
He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years
old. "It's infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a
half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That's
a half-million *lives* -- a half-million *households* -- that we
changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These
RFID things of Lester's -- we'll sign a couple million customers with
those. People will change everything about how they live from moment
to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over
there."
"Well, there's thirty million of us living in what the social workers
call 'marginal housing,'" Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny
smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had
an untreated dental abscess that he couldn't afford to get fixed. "So
that's a lot of difference you could make."
"Yeah," Perry said. "Yeah, it sure is."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account