The Audit

The Audit

ShouldKnowBetter

Rating: PG13
Category: Humour
Disclaimer: Paramount owns the characters, the Star Trek franchise and the universe. I just use them for my own private, non-profit making amusement.
Summary: Being an engineer is a thankless task.

Author’s Notes:
1. Dedicated to all those engineers who have ever had to hand their carefully designed products over to an end-user and then seen said products used and abused.
2. By a nitpicker.

********************

Tucker’s expression was glum as he headed for the bridge and the fact that a certain Vulcan first officer joined him from a side corridor didn’t improve his mood. “Were you lying in wait for me, sub-commander?”

“Hardly.” T’Pol matched his pace, giving the engineer an assessing look. “You appear … disgruntled.”

“You still don’t understand human emotion, do you, T’Pol? I’m not disgruntled. I’m real mad.”

“Due to your impending appearance before the audit panel?”

“You got it.”

“I fail to see why this should have an adverse affect on your disposition.”

There was faint puzzlement on the calm features. “Starfleet’s desire to review Enterprise’s performance with its chief engineer seems logical.”

“You’ve never met them! They’re idiots.” They had reached the bridge and Tucker headed for the ready room that Archer had turned over to him for the purpose, turning back for a last glower at the Vulcan. “If you wanna do me a favour, you could ask chef to have some pecan pie ready for when I’m done.”

“I believe that approaching this meeting with a constructive attitude would be more useful than a retrospective intake of sugar.”

That earned her an outraged stare and Tucker slammed through the door into the ready room, sparing only enough time for a hurt glare at his captain who was chuckling to himself.

T’Pol approached Archer slowly, half her attention on the door that had closed behind the engineer. “Surely Mr. Tucker’s record will speak for itself?”

“You’d think so.” Archer was grinning although T’Pol’s disapproving stare forced him to a half-hearted attempt at a serious expression. “But if I were you, Sub-commander, I’d speak to chef.”

T’Pol retreated to her station, reflecting that on one point, Tucker had been correct. She still did not understand human behaviour.

*****************

The three members of the audit panel were all middle aged, one of the two civilians severely overweight to Tucker’s critical eyes and threatening to crowd the others off the screen. Tucker hated civilians; just because Starfleet developed many of its systems in partnership with commercial companies was no reason to let them poke their noses into his business. He took the chair in front of the screen and glared at the people shown on it, who looked tolerantly back – the sort of tolerance usually reserved for a recalcitrant child.

“Commander Tucker?”

He resisted the urge to say, ‘No, Zephram Cochrane.’ “That’s me.”

“I’m Captain Blackford, head of assurance at Jupiter Station.” Aw, hell, Tucker thought bitterly, a bloody QA engineer; anyone can criticize. “This is Mr. Brendel and Mrs. Harris, representing two of our partner companies.”

“Pleased to meet you.” He wasn’t, but Tucker’s mother had been very hot on courtesy.

The fatter of the two civilians grinned – evilly, in the engineer’s opinion. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, commander. My daughter has been a fan of yours ever since you answered the ‘poop’ question for Earth’s schoolchildren. No one expected Starfleet to cover such interesting details.”

Tucker sank back in his chair and crossed his arms, glowering. Great, he’d been trying to live that one down for years. Didn’t these people have anything better to do than remember trivia?

“There are a number of incidents we’d like to discuss with you, Commander Tucker.”

Blackford had retreated behind a PADD. “Firstly, the quality of some of your engineering reports.”

“Excuse me?” That couldn’t be right. T’Pol had reviewed every one of his reports, usually with excessive use of virtual red ink. If he could get a report past her, Starfleet ought to be a doddle.

The captain glanced up briefly at Tucker’s protest but returned quickly to his PADD. “For example, ‘Put out about a hundred fires in Engineering’. Hardly useful from a statistical point of view, commander.”

“That was a log entry! The report gave the details.”

“Still, not very professional.”

“It was after 2300! I’d just pulled a fifteen hour shift.”

“Hmm.” The man made a note and scrolled on. “Ah, yes. The reliability of the phase cannon components.”

“It’s poor.” Tucker relaxed a little at the prospect of a proper technical discussion. “We have to keep replacing components. The specified MTBF …”

“The Mean Time Between Failures is only valid under normal operating conditions,” the female civilian snapped aggressively, thus identifying herself to Tucker as a supplier of phase cannon components.

“Quite.” Captain Blackford took up the interrogation again. “But you aren’t using the phase cannons as intended, are you, Commander Tucker?”

“We modified the power feed to increase performance – significantly increase performance.”
“By overloading the system,” the woman had a stare that made T’Pol’s look mild in comparison, “thus reducing the design life – significantly.”

“We need to defend ourselves!” Tucker protested. “People shoot at us,” but even that sad fact didn’t win him any sympathy.

“Unfortunate, of course.” Blackford managed to make it sound as if it was quite probably Tucker’s fault. “I believe these modifications were proposed by the armoury officer, Lt …?”

“Reed. That’s right.”

“From our records, it doesn’t appear that you checked his simulation results before bringing the modifications on-line.”

For the first time since the ‘poop’ reminder, Tucker flinched slightly. “We were in a hurry and …”

“Hmm.” Blackford jotted on his PADD. “Which brings us to a serious matter: the disabling of a safety critical system.”

“An energy discharge external to Enterprise caused a cascade failure. You had to intervene manually to prevent a warp core breach – which was actually only prevented when an alien visitor took unauthorized action.” For the first time, Blackford looked directly at Tucker. “No single point failure should have catastrophic results. The only reason manual intervention would be needed was if the parallel redundant systems had been taken off-line. Do you wish to comment, commander?”

Tucker was squirming. “They were unreliable, kept tripping the whole system. I’d just taken them down for maintenance. They’d have been operational again if the cap’n hadn’t asked for a tour …”

“Hmm.” Another note on the PADD. “I see that you permitted this same armoury officer to develop and deploy a force field.”

“Yeah.” The ascertain seemed harmless unless they were going to give him gyp for not having done it himself, but he never had time to experiment.

“Thus introducing unproven technology into a safety critical environment.”

“The force field was standalone!”

“Hmm.” Tucker was getting very fed up with that sound of disapproval and doubt. “Perhaps.” At least there was no note taking that time. “But you won’t claim that the technology was standalone when you allowed an alien repair station to integrate non-standard parts into Enterprise’s systems?”

“No, I won’t.” He’d just known they’d bring that one up. “But we were a long way from Jupiter Station so we didn’t have a lot of choice.”

“You oversaw all the work carried out?”

“Some of it.”

“Hmm.”

“Hell, that station was working on a dozen things at once! You expect me to be everywhere?”

“You have results of the set-to-work testing?”

“We ran a whole load of tests before we left.”

“Hmm.” Tucker closed his eyes and counted to ten. “You do seem to have a record of introducing new equipment, commander. An alien microscope into sickbay?”

“I checked it out thoroughly before I installed it.”

“Do you have a copy of the Design Certificate?”

“No, I don’t have a copy of the Design Certificate. I don’t even know if Denobolan’s have Design Certificates!”

“Hmm.”

“I got a training course from an expert user and I even read the user guide.”

That finally provoked more than ‘hmm’. “You read the user guide? Oh, really, Mr. Tucker, you can’t expect us to believe that. No engineer ever reads the user guide.”

“I did!”

“Hmm.” Blackford returned to his PADD for more condemning evidence. “Ah, yes, the simulated warp core breach. Not an approved procedure and caused considerable damage.”

“Superficial damage! Hell, the ship was swarming with Suliban! What d’you expect us to do? Ask them nicely to leave?”

“Hmm. You captured a Suliban ship, I believe.”

“A pod. Yeah.”

“You failed to notify Starfleet Engineering.”

“Why should I? Cap’n Archer reported it.”

“To Starfleet Command. They failed to pass on the information for some months.”

“And that’s my fault?”

“You haven’t yet submitted a report on this … pod.”

“I’ve never had time!” Tucker was finally losing patience. “I’ve had to keep Enterprise running – and I have done, without any help from you. Hell, she’s a new ship! She could have failed a dozen times but no, she’s out-performed our expectations in every department and she’s never once let us down.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ve had enough of this.” Tucker lost his temper and with it any thought of how one should address a senior officer. “You weren’t there. You can’t know what we had to do just to survive. Half the time we had to write the rules as we went along and we certainly didn’t have the time to stick to every damn procedure you wrote here in a nice, safe, clean environment. You wanna complain, then go complain to Cap’n Archer because he endorsed every engineering decision I made.”

He headed for the door, to be brought up short as Blackford said in much his usual flat tone, “You don’t wish to discuss the positive feedback, commander?”

Tentatively prepared to be mollified, Tucker came cautiously back. “Such as?”

Blackford scanned down the PADD. “The modifications you made to the command chair have been adopted as standard across all Starfleet vessels.”

“Excuse me!” Even T’Pol would have noticed that the engineer was rather more than disgruntled. “I keep Enterprise operational, I fix a dozen other ships, and all you can congratulate me on is … is,” he couldn’t immediately think of a derisive enough term, “interior decorating? Forget it.” He was already at the door. “You wanna annoy me some more, you put it in writing – and copy it to Cap’n Archer.”

With Tucker gone, the audit panel exchanged surprised looks. “He took that very personally,” the woman remarked and Blackford sighed even as he scanned through the extensive list of positive points he had not been allowed to deliver.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have started at the bottom.”

*****************

Tucker was still fuming when he encountered Archer an hour or two later in the gym. The captain came to stand beside the younger man where he was diligently applying himself to bicep curls and scowling. “I got a call from Captain Blackford.”

“When’s the court martial?”

Archer grinned. “Not this time, Trip. Captain Blackford’s regards and he’s submitting a proposal for a commendation to be added to your record for your performance in maintaining Enterprise under difficult circumstances.”

“He’s what?” Tucker was so startled that he nearly dropped the weight he was toting. “But all he did was give me a hard time!”

“He said he thought that there’d been a misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding! He …”

“Trip, leave it.” Archer moved to the treadmill, slapping the other man’s shoulder – in a terribly avuncular manner - as he passed. “You’ve been commended. What more do you want?”

“The respect of my peers?”

“Sorry, commander,” Archer was already running but had enough breath left over to speak. “They never see the most of what you do. You’ll have to put up with ridicule.”

“It’s not fair!”

“You’re an engineer, Trip. Life isn’t fair. I can prove it – chef didn’t make pecan pie.”

“Aw, f…”

“Don’t say that, commander. There are gentlemen present.”

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A whole mess of folks have made comments

Yup, it is funny. I'm grinning from ear to ear. Thanks.

I really enjoyed this a treat. Poor Trip, being put through the mangle before any of the positive feedback could lift his spirits. And no pecan pie? That is just plain Cruelty to Chief Engineers. Hmmm, might have to report that to Starfleet. Well done, this was fun. Ali D :~)

You gave me my laugh for the day. I especially liked the ending.

Very funny! Trip meets bureaucracy - it defeats us all, even OMT.

Thanks for making me laugh.

And the question of poop remains to haunt him... he will always be the sanitation engineer to the Jupiter people now, no doubt ^^

And what do you mean, no pecan pie for Trip?!?!?! That is damn discrimination. No pecan pie, indeed... not right. Not right at all. But very funny. Very funny, indeed!

Oh that was so well written, I could just see OMT's expression as he tried to do battle with bureaucracy, tee-hee.

A very enjoyable read, but poor Trip...I don't know how to do it, but if he wants to call this way, I'll have a go at making pecan pie.

It was destined to happen. It does to every engineer. But it's even better when it happens to Trip. Nice work, I was laughing after the first few paragraphs!

Been there done that! OH MY!!!

Well done!

i hope my character on the proxima never has to face an audit i'm sure ginny would make then worse than they were to trip (yep an obsessed trekkie in an official simm wont advertise ot tho so no adress) I'm a lt. Jr grade and already under scruiteny, god laughed loads tho btw. loved how you portrayed trip.

"People shoot at us"--chuckle-- i love it when trip is in over his head.