Now, I thought I could repair the heating units, but I knew that a country boy like me might get into trouble with the union if I did anything except just what my card said I could do. So, one day when no one was looking, I repaired the units and got the thing to working like it should work. Then in about three weeks the unfriendly pair of electricians came and notified me that they were ready to repair my hot-oil bathtub. When I told them it had been repaired, they were surprised. They didn't know there were other repairmen around. They asked who did it and I told them. But they didn't believe me. They left quietly, acting as though they thought I was pulling their leg. One month the box-building crew was packing airplane nosecones for shipment. They had two men, each working ten hours a day, sawing plywood lumber into oddly shaped pieces to fit snugly against the fragile parts to protect against breakage. I was working in the hot-oil department and I had improved the efficiency of the department to the point where my job was easy and I had a lot of time to loaf. Many of the boards the men were sawing were inaccurate and had to be thrown away as scrap lumber. I recognized their problem and set about to find a solution. Then, working in my spare time one afternoon, I built a jig, made of plywood and fitted onto a sawtable, that enabled me to saw out the pieces accurately and fast. The next day I used two hours of my spare time and sawed more pieces than the other two men had been sawing in 20 man-hours. Not only that, my pieces fitted better and there were none to throw away. From then on, I sawed out all the pieces in my spare time, and the two sawmen went back to packing nosecones. One of the Lockheed supervisors saw a lot of the little efficiencies in my work and he told me that, after the war, if I would team up with him, we could make a million dollars. He said that with my brain and his "gab" we could improve the efficiency of factories all over America. For an example, they gave me charge of the hot-oil department which had been keeping two men busy. I soon had it so I could handle it alone. Then I made more improvements and could loaf half the time. When I took over the job of sawing the plywood pieces, I was doing the work that four men had been doing, and still had time to loaf and see who else needed help. Lockheed was paying me $12 a day and I was saving them the other $36 a day. During those four months that fall, there was an awareness in the back of my mind that the day was coming when we would need gas to get back to Texas in December. I had saved all the coupons I could, but it looked as though we might be about 25 gallons short. And since I hadn't worked six months at this job, I knew I wouldn't be able to get coupons this time. So, I asked my straw-boss, "Don't you have a gasoline camp stove up overhead in your garage?" He said, "Sure have. You can use it any time you want to."