McBee

McBee, Hired Girl’s chief engineer during Dan Davis’s return to the company, embodies the institutional resistance Dan encounters after decades of technological change. He initially doubts the founder’s practical engineering value, asserts control over his working hours, and warns that he can withhold Dan’s paycheck or transfer him to advertising. After Dan’s later return to the company’s affairs, McBee is eased upstairs into the honorary title of Research Engineer Emeritus, and Chuck Freudenberg takes his place as chief engineer.

Position at Hired Girl

When Dan comes back from the Long Sleep, McBee is the chief engineer in the firm that bears the name of the company Dan founded. Dan’s first encounters with him expose a sharp divide between historical prestige and current technical competence: Dan is the inventor of the original Hired Girl, but he admits that he knows solid circuits only from reading non-classified publications. McBee’s raised eyebrows register his skepticism, and he does not endorse Dan’s proposed place in the engineering department.

The company’s structure helps explain McBee’s position, though the exact details reach Dan secondhand through Chuck Freudenberg. The present firm had apparently begun as a manufacturing company renting Dan’s patents from Hired Girl, Inc. Roughly twenty years before Dan’s return, a tax-saving merger exchanged Hired Girl stock for stock in the manufacturer, and the merged company adopted the name of Dan’s original firm. Chuck believes McBee was hired at the time of that merger and may own a piece of the company. McBee’s authority therefore belongs to a later corporate order, built around the commercial use and consolidation of Dan’s earlier inventions.

Attitude Toward Dan and Engineering

McBee’s initial response to Dan is guarded rather than openly hostile. When the company considers assigning Dan a special position, the chief engineer makes clear that shop facilities are available, but only “within reason.” That qualification establishes a boundary around the very practical access Dan wants. Dan is glad to see the original Hired Girl model he built by hand, but McBee will not let him start it; Dan suspects McBee does not believe he understands how it works.

Chuck’s assessment makes McBee’s conservatism explicit. In private conversations with Dan, Chuck says that McBee does not really like anything new and prefers doing things as his grandfather did on the banks of the Clyde. Dan considers him an example of the difference between academic credentials and engineering judgment, while Chuck shares Dan’s distrust of McBee’s approach. These judgments are presented through Dan and Chuck, not as an independent account of McBee’s abilities; their importance lies in the contrast they draw between McBee’s established authority and Chuck’s openness to new work.

That contrast is sharpened by Dan’s own adjustment to the future. With Chuck’s friendly criticism and help, Dan begins to recognize when an idea he has sketched is already obsolete by 2001. McBee, by contrast, is associated with resistance to novelty. The book thus distinguishes the older engineer’s genuine historical knowledge from the institutional authority McBee holds: Dan must learn the present’s technology, while McBee is portrayed as reluctant to welcome change.

Conflict over Authority

McBee’s managerial conflict with Dan comes to a head when Dan refuses to be treated as an advertising asset. The company’s publicity people want to present him as a living relic and use him to promote Hired Girl, but Dan has come seeking engineering work and objects to being dressed up in an invented historical image. McBee tells him that he lacks the right attitude and explains that, although Dan is assigned to engineering, he is also expected to be made available to advertising and sales.

McBee then tries to place Dan under ordinary workplace discipline. He orders him to use the time clock and to check in whenever he leaves during working hours. Dan replies that he was chief engineer of the company before McBee began shaving and refuses to knuckle under to the clock. The exchange turns a disagreement about procedure into a contest over whose claim to authority counts: McBee’s current office, or Dan’s founding role and earlier experience.

McBee’s answer is backed by immediate economic leverage. He warns that Dan will not draw his check if he ignores the time clock, then argues that he can at least transfer Dan out of engineering and into advertising, where he doubts Dan belongs. Looking at Dan’s drafting machine, he complains that Dan is producing nothing and that the expensive equipment is tied up. The scene ends with McBee briskly dismissing himself from the confrontation, leaving their authority dispute unresolved in the moment. Dan’s distinctive position—as founder but also a newcomer to current engineering—makes him difficult to subordinate through ordinary workplace rules, but McBee attempts to enforce those rules nonetheless.

Change and Narrative Function

McBee’s final recorded change is a demotion softened by an honorific. After Dan and Pete return to the future and Dan regains leverage through Ricky’s Hired Girl stock, Dan has McBee eased upstairs to Research Engineer Emeritus. Chuck is installed as chief engineer. The change reverses the earlier hierarchy: the skeptical manager who controlled Dan’s access to engineering work is removed from the department’s leadership, while the colleague who helped Dan catch up becomes its head.

McBee’s trajectory connects the novel’s corporate history to its central concern with technological time. The company has continued to grow and reorganize around inventions made before Dan’s involuntary cold sleep, but its present leadership is not necessarily receptive to further invention. McBee’s authority is real enough to threaten Dan’s paycheck and equipment access; it is also temporary, and ultimately gives way to a more forward-looking engineering leadership. His reassignment closes the conflict not through a reconciliation scene but through a change in who controls the department.