Another possible story opening:

Jack’s butt was numb. He stretched and leaned, lifting each cheek without getting up. He felt his coffee cup. It was dead cold. Sixty-eight was too damn old to be putting in ten-hour days, but he was glad of the work. The Second and Greater Depression had wiped out his retirement accounts, even before the previous administration had seized them, or taken them into protective custody to hear them tell it. They were saved in Federal Reserve dollar denominated bonds, so if he cashed them out, they’d only be a tenth of the value in the new United States Greenbacks.

He’d retired briefly, but had to come back to work again if he didn’t accept the settlement on his accounts. He had more in mind thirty hours a week or so, but they seemed to find a lot more for him to do than he’d expected. If he got too busy and unhappy, he realized there were lots of others who would be outright envious of his ability to go back to work.

He’d really have been up the creek if his wife’s life insurance had not been ruled payable at full value in the new notes. He was holding out on taking a settlement, hoping some of the court cases would favor a full payout of his retirement accounts in the new money. A lot of people had signed off on the switch, needing funds to live right now, and accepting a dime on a dollar. He had a little nest egg due to the insurance money, but was very conservative about spending it, after seeing how easily he’d been stripped of almost everything before.

Guys his age usually had trouble finding work, but his age was a benefit with this struggling niche plastics company. His experience with their obsolete computer and older AutoCAD software, let them suck a little more use out of it. The youngsters who came by his cube looked in horror at the six-year-old box. It might be obsolete, but it could easily handle files for the relatively simple plastic parts they were contracted to tool and produce.
If you wanted five million cheap, crappy parts with flash and uncertain material specs, the job was going to Malaysia or Vietnam. If you needed five hundred parts in virgin material, and really needed the dimensions to resemble spec, then Midwestern Molding was the company to shoot your job.

He’d have been delighted to have this computer and its huge high-definition screen twenty years ago. He started out years ago with NASA on a machine that you could instruct to do an operation, like rotate a part, go use the bathroom, refresh your coffee, say hello to your work mates in the coffee room, and still be back at your desk before it was done.

There were five job files waiting for him. None was labeled hot by some miracle, so he skipped down to the third. That file was smaller, perhaps he could finish it off by the end of tomorrow, and have a clean wrap-up for the weekend.

The screen showed a standard three view line drawing print with details, and a 3D rendering rotating in separate window. Jack couldn’t help the big smile that came to his face. It was a long time ago, but you don’t forget a part once you’ve gotten every detail about it in your mind, and designed a tool to make it. He’d worked with this part when he was at NASA. It was a space suit visor.

He looked at the revisions list, and was unsurprised to see it called out a different material. They’d done a lot with plastics since he was a green NASA nerd. The material it called for was stronger and more heat resistant than the original Lexan. The revisions included anti-reflective coating and sapphire on the inside but deep bonded diamond film on the outside. That was a whole new technology they hadn’t dreamed of back then. The gold film was deleted so they must be using separate flip down sun filters and shades.
The seal groove was modified. Likely the seal was new up-to-date material too. There was still room for ejector pins outside the seal groove so this tool as going to practically design itself since he’d done one before. It needed a lot of diamond polishing on the mold to produce the clean optical surfaces. That wasn’t going to be cheap. It was still a highly skilled hand craft, that a robot couldn’t do.

Jack looked at the corner to see who was having it made. Tangent Fabrication. He’d never heard of them but he’d been out of the aerospace game for years. Then his eye caught the part name: Face Shield / Motorcycle Helmet.
“Bullshit!” he said out loud. Then he looked over his shoulders. Sudden paranoia made him want to keep this to himself until he understood why. No way in hell was this for a motorcycle helmet, so what did it mean? Why would anyone make an obsolete space suit part, and lie about what it was?

Jack was so agitated he had to get up – taking his coffee mug and going for a fresh one. The little bit of coffee left was old and burnt. If he made a new pot at 3:30 people would complain about the waste. The price of coffee was out of sight. He just rinsed the mug out and got water from the cooler.
By the time he walked back and sat at his station he was calm again. It was even starting to make a little sense to him. If you needed space suits quickly on the cheap, most NASA research and data was in the public domain. The basic design was pretty good, not like the first suit they used for Mercury which was basically a high-altitude aircraft suit. It was far better than the Apollo suits or even the very early Shuttle suits. Modernize the materials and the basic design was damn decent. But who the hell needed space suits, and wanted to keep it secret?

He wrote down Tangent Fabrication, the address, and print number on a Post-it note. He considered putting the CAD file on his key ring drive and decided against it. He wasn’t sure the network administrator wouldn’t see the download. They didn’t run a high security shop. Most of their work was appliance parts and high-end toys. Anybody could reverse engineer them by buying the product and measuring it. But they might be watching his activity to keep track of his productivity.

He had a funny feeling about this. It failed the sniff test and he intended to find out why. In fact, he had a vacation penciled in for next month. It would be worth missing a little fishing time to see what Tangent Fabrication looked like. It was north of Sacramento, along the route he’d be going anyway. He wrote down the revisions on the Post-it and put it in his wallet. Then he pulled a standard base out of the D-M-E catalog and started designing the tool. This was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in years. In that way it wasn’t entirely unwelcome.