“And you see, that’s why the HN-315 is such a huge improvement over the HN-314!” Ratchet said, pointing to a gleaming hexagonal nut. Reaching into the velvet-lined tray, he removed it, picking up its neighbor in his other hoof. “Check out these threads!” he said, tilting the nuts to allow Cheerilee to see the inner wall. “See how we angled the treads?”
“Uh…” Cheerilee replied as she squinted. The two nuts looked exactly the same to her.
“We tilted the angle three thirty-eights of a percent!” he said, grinning. “Lab tests indicate that for anything less than critical stress, it has almost identical strength!”
“Well, that sounds, uh, nice—” Cheerilee said, sighing as she tried to find some other topic of conversation.
“And if the nut is already at critical stress, then the metal itself is failing! Thread strength is immaterial at that point!” Ratchet said, the words tumbling out rapidly as he dropped the older nut back into his display case. “That means one less revolution in the tooling! We’ll be saving one bit every hundred thousand nuts produced! This innovation will literally save the company twenty bits a year!” He stared at Cheerilee for several long moments, a wide smile stretched across his face.
“Um… wow,” Cheerilee finally replied when it was apparent he would continue to wait for a response all night. “That’s sure… something.”
Cheerilee had met Ratchet earlier in the day as she left her therapy session. He’d been patiently explaining how to maintain the correct tension on the nuts and washers in the office’s water cooler to a bored looking secretary, and she’d though that anyone taking the time to patiently educate might be a pony she’d like to know better. She was beginning to regret that now.
“Isn’t it?!” he cried. “Look!