Some bosses reward their employees with free donuts and pizza on special occasions or because it’s simply the end of the work week — but Wade Linger has blasted off with one better for the Pandemic Age.
COVID-19 at-home test kits: Free of charge, to every employee.
“Well, this is something we can do for our people,” Linger said. “They work hard and do a good job.”
A big part of that work these days is conquering the reaches of outer space.
Linger, a one-time computer programmer and defense contractor, is the founder, president and CEO of TMC Technologies of West Virginia.
From its Pleasant Valley headquarters near Fairmont in neighboring Marion County, TMC Technologies, in effect, will likely trek to Mars one day.
Last year, it was an awarded a $24 million contract from NASA. TMC’s workers, in Pleasant Valley and elsewhere, are now doing critical work on software and guidance systems for the agency’s vaunted missions to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
Up to, and including, that future manned excursion to the aforementioned Red Planet.
Meanwhile, Marion County these days is making like Mars on the county alert map by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, which tracks the contagion and its variants across the Mountain State, tracking red like 39 other counties.
Linger said COVID, and its quickly morphing variants, can feel like something out of a science fiction movie.
Lighting the candle
Depending on its form, the coronavirus can mimic the symptoms of a common cold — or leave you tethered to a ventilator, like an astronaut in a hostile, alien environment.
Much like his company’s work with NASA, Linger wanted to bring a little certainty to the uncertainty of COVID.
His company directly employs 115 people, who all occupy diverse galaxies.
Besides West Virginia, they support mission-critical, federal programs and projects in Washington, D.C., and its Beltway orbits of Rockville, Md., and Dahlgren, Va.
Other TMC-fueled work takes flight in Pocatello, Idaho, and Boulder, Colorado.
Albuquerque, N.M., also.
It’s the kind of work, the president and CEO said, where deadlines are everything and COVID is not an option — the “not knowing about it” part, that is.
The pandemic is roiling in its latest surge and the federal effort to provide free test kits is still rolling to the launch pad, Linger said.
High demand for the kits has cleared shelves in pharmacy chains nationwide, he said.
TMC work, he said, is often shoulder-to-shoulder work, with associates leaning in close over monitors, schematics and the like.
One positive case, Linger said, could shut down a whole line in a project.
That, he knows. He recently recovered from COVID-19, and being able to deploy a home test, he said, quickly guided him to the treatment he needed, while keeping his family, friends and co-workers safe at the same time.
“Without the home test kit, the whole thing would have been different,” Linger said, “including hours of spreading it around before I knew I was contagious.”
The flip side of the flight manual, he said, is the gravitational pull of all that uncertainty early on, and the sequestering from a contagion — that isn’t.
“There are people who cancel things and rearrange their lives around what turns out to be the sniffles,” he said.
Roger that
Enter the iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test kits, which will only set you back $19.80 — if you can find them. Linger did, and said kits are already in possession of several TMC workers nationwide, two kits per household.
“This way we could get them into the hands of our employees quicker, so they could make the decisions they needed to make,” Linger said.
Right now, Lynn Dombrowski doesn’t have to make any decisions. The TMC employee who also leads at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg doesn’t have the sniffles.
Which probably means she doesn’t have COVID — but she and her husband now have a test kit apiece, courtesy of TMC, should they ever feel they need to use them.
All systems go
“We’re both vaccinated and boosted,” she said. “And we wanted the home kits when you couldn’t find them anywhere. This is a good, supportive thing Wade is doing.”
Dombrowski, meanwhile, is in possession of what some might say is the coolest job title on this planet, or any planet next door.
She’s a SCRUM Master, and yes, “SCRUM” does have a rugby reference.
It comes from the “scrum” that kicks off every series of play in that rough-and-tumble sport, and while it looks chaotic, it’s really not. Call it intense teamwork, instead.
The product development experts who first employed it more than 30 years ago said the rugby scrum best epitomized the all-in effort that has to go into such research projects, such as the creation of software for deep-space missions.
Or, the benchmark safety tests that always have to go first.
To be a master of SCRUM is to also work within the project management methodology known as Agile, which Dombrowski does, for the FBI and federal clients of Linger’s company.
That takes up both sides of Dombrowski’s business card, Linger said, but for him, it also emphasizes how important the TMC hires are to every project: Even the projects that don’t conquer gravity along the way.
That’s why COVID test kits — and knowing if perhaps you’re positive or negative in your living room — are important, he said.
Jeff Edgell, the company’s senior vice president and chief strategist who couldn’t resist employing a little NASA parlance as he discussed the payload of free test kits.
“The health and safety of our existing and future employees is our number priority,” he said. “We are committed to being a world-class employer, putting ‘Team TMC’ first.”
Linger let that orbit a bit.
“We’re family,” he said. “And you do right by your family.”
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