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Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

Chapter 10

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"Yes?""I need you to trust me even when what I say sounds too simple, because the first one is embarrassingly simple."Margaret nodded. Faye reached into the engine bay.The first finding took her eleven minutes. She asked Margaret for the flashlight and the telescoping mirror. She angled the mirror behind the intake manifold where two small sensors sat side-by-side on the driver's side of the engine: a MAP sensor measuring manifold absolute pressure, and a MAF sensor measuring mass airflow. They had nearly identical connector housings; their wire harnesses ran parallel to each other and met at a junction clip six inches away.Faye shone the flashlight onto the sensor bodies. She said very quietly, "There."She pointed at two small white paint dots on the sensor casings, factory orientation marks the size of pencil erasers. On the MAP sensor, the dot pointed toward the firewall; on the MAF sensor, it pointed toward the front of the engine."Pull up the assembly spec on your tablet. Page eleven, if it's the revision I think it is."Margaret pulled it up. The assembly diagram showed both paint dots pointing toward the front of the engine. The MAP sensor was rotated 180 degrees from the drawing.Which meant its connector was reaching across to the wrong harness branch.Which meant that for eleven days, the engine control unit had been receiving pressure data on the airflow channel and airflow data on the pressure channel. The computer had been calculating impossible fuel-air ratios; it had been aborting ignition timing because the math simply did not add up.Faye explained it in one sentence: "Somebody on the assembly line had a very long shift. The connectors fit both ways because whoever signed the purchase order bought the cheaper unkeyed plugs instead of the OEM keyed plugs. It's a forty-cent mistake."A voice from the back wall, very quiet, very sharp, said: "Keep going."It was Eleanor.Preston, against the wall, did not move. He was remembering a cost reduction spreadsheet from fourteen months ago. He was remembering a signature—his signature. He was remembering the engineer who had written in red in the margin of that spreadsheet: Strongly advise against. Keyed connectors prevent assembly errors.He was remembering what he had written back: Approved. $38,000 savings. Engineering concern noted.
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Homeless Girl Tells Millionaire 'I Can Fix Your Car' — Then They Laughed At Her

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