“Solve This, and I’ll Marry You!” Professor Mocked a Single Dad — Then He Shocked Her!
Chapter 5
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
When Evelyn finally approached, her tone was different. She admitted that his observation had exposed a serious weakness and asked him to review the research documents. Thomas agreed to examine them for one evening, but he made it clear that he was not available for unpaid research work. Evelyn accepted, although she seemed surprised that he had set a boundary.That night, after Nora had gone to bed, Thomas opened the research files on his old laptop. He expected to find a simple modeling error, but the more he studied the project, the more troubling the results became. The original mathematical framework was sound; the problem had entered later, when the team simplified the emergency conditions to make the model run faster. In doing so, they had removed an important relationship between road closures and supply capacity. Their calculations assumed that every available route could carry the same amount of medical supplies, even when some roads were restricted to smaller vehicles. Thomas recognized that this was not just a theoretical issue: if the system were used during a real emergency, it could recommend deliveries that vehicles were physically unable to complete.He wrote a detailed explanation and sent it to Evelyn before midnight.The following morning, she called him into her office. She had read the report and wanted to know how he had identified the problem so quickly. Thomas explained that he had worked on transportation models years earlier, including a project involving city emergency services. Evelyn searched his name in the university archive and discovered an old research paper he had co-authored as a student. It had received an award for its practical approach to network reliability."Why did you leave research?" she asked.Thomas looked down at the report. "My family needed me. Later, my wife became ill. I made choices, and I don't regret them."Evelyn did not ask more. She offered to bring him onto the research team as a paid consultant. Thomas asked for time to consider it: his daughter was his first responsibility, and he did not want to promise something he could not deliver.The real complication arrived three days later. During an internal review, Thomas discovered that the team had not merely simplified the model. A senior researcher had knowingly removed the vehicle capacity restrictions from the final version because the original calculations had shown that the proposed system would miss its delivery targets. The researcher, Professor Grant Miller, had argued that the restrictions could be added later, after the grant was approved. Evelyn had trusted him because he had been part of the project from the beginning.When Thomas presented the evidence, Grant accused him of misunderstanding the research and suggested that a facilities technician had no authority to challenge a professor's work. Evelyn asked Grant to provide the original test records. He refused, claiming that the files were stored on a private drive. The argument became serious when Thomas found an earlier email showing that Grant had been warned about the capacity problem months before. He had ignored the warning and instructed the software team to continue using the simplified assumptions.Evelyn realized that the project was now facing more than a mathematical correction. If she submitted the model without addressing the issue, hospitals could eventually rely on a system that gave unsafe recommendations. If she delayed the grant, her department could lose its funding, and several young researchers might lose their positions.