Putting it together

Crunching numbers with crafty downtown denizen Eric Fransen

Who: Eric Fransen, CEO, Fransen Furniture and Cabinetry

Where: Soundpony 

To drink: Dos Equis on tap

The Tulsa Voice: Could you be bad at math and do what you do?

Eric Fransen: [Laughs] So, I guess the long and the short of it is—OK, let me use an example: Let’s compare mathematics to something you know, like creative writing. Creative writing starts with the alphabet, we learn letters first. Then we learn letters make words and words make sentences and sentences make paragraphs. But all of this is learned over a relatively long period of time. Once we learn this, we can use these tools to write poetry or prose or maybe something that might stir human emotion and move people. Mathematics is no different.

We start with quantities, with numbers, and then add symbols that link them together, like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Then we add letters and variables, algebra and calculus, rules and definitions—and eventually, you might write the poetry. It’s the same thing.

So, having said that: Can you be bad at math and do this? You might be bad at some of the “grammar” part of math but have the overall concept down.

TTV: You’d have to be able grasp the overall concept.

EF: Yes, because it’s complex. It’s a lot of 3-D spatial visualization. To take a space that is empty and visualize everything that’s in it, and break it down into two dimensional parts and put it all back together and make it make sense in a three dimensional world takes an understanding of math, which in this case would be measuring space.

TTV: That being said, are you good at writing poetry?

EF: When I studied mathematics a lot, I wrote papers that were published on number theory, so I have written original mathematics.

TTV: There you go. Is your work poetry?

EF: The design and execution of my work can be. And I think that, just like many writers feel—it’s almost all terrible.

TTV: Right. There’s no satisfaction, except for being done with it.

EF: No. I gave away all of my furniture to my son. I was sick of looking at it. I had five pieces that I made; some of them took me a hundred hours to make.

TTV: So you just see the flaws?

EF: Yeah. It could be the most wonderful piece and the flaw could be insignificant, maybe not even visible, but it’s there and I know it, and it still bothers me.

TTV: Yeah, I get that. From a writer’s perspective, I don’t think I’ll ever create a piece without flaws. Math is a little less slippery. Is it possible to make a perfect piece of furniture?

EF: I think, yes, through iteration. I take a lot of my designs and I change little things through iteration, in almost an OCD fashion. I’ve made four of the same coffee table, changing it just slightly every time. Through iteration, I am starting to approach some level of perfection, or at least something that allows me to be comfortable with what I have produced. Don’t you do the same with writing?

TTV: I don’t think so.

EF: No, c’mon. You self-edit as you go, maybe edit some more, then an actual editor makes more edits. You are refining through iteration.

TTV: Yeah, but I like the flaws, as long as they’re not foundational in nature. I’m kind of wabi-sabi that way. The truth is, I’ve learned to love the flaws because I can’t be flawless.

EF: I see. I get that.

TTV: I imagine that there has to be a great deal of satisfaction in actually making something from an idea—producing a tangible object. There’s a fair amount of noise coming from certain groups of people who claim that one of the things that’s wrong with this country is that we don’t make things anymore. Thoughts on that?

EF: Oh yeah. That’s a wormhole, man. 

OK, I think it started with us selling our steel mills to the Chinese and Japanese three decades ago. We sold our manufacturing facilities, not because we didn’t have the people who wanted to do it, but for pure profit because the owners of these businesses could make so much more money by exploiting the labor forces of other countries. It’s a small oligarchy that controls all of that, and I think that’s what we’re seeing now. On a small level, at the grass roots level, yeah, I’m making this stuff because I love the tangible side of making something.

When my mom was still alive, when I was a mathematician for a living, she said, “Eric, you’re not going to be happy unless you are using your head and your hands.” My life was research and writing papers and studying and teaching math all the time. So I never had anything tangible at the end of the day. I just had ideas and concepts and stacks of papers with arguments written on them that only a few people in the whole world would even care about, much less understand. My mom reminded me that, you know, I have this vigorous physical energy. I wake up every day happy and excited to get going, I’m a high-energy person. When I was little she’d have me run around the house ten times just to burn off energy. As a kid, I was doing all kinds of stuff, just a crazy volume of stuff, naturally. 

So, I need this. I need the design details, the technical side, the running of the business, the physical component. There are a lot of aspects to what I do, and I believe that I, on purpose, directed my life to this place. 

TTV: Tell me about life as a mathematician.

EF: I taught mainly at junior colleges and some state schools. I worked for MCI [telecomm company based in Washington, D.C.] for four and a half years, as an engineer, and I made killer money there. But it was a terrible environment to work in. I didn’t feel like my work ethic was challenged. It seemed silly in some ways, almost a sophomoric pursuit of life. I mean, people were engineers and this job was just reduced to this oddly simple thing of filling out spreadsheets.

TTV: Tell me what you were actually doing there. What was the goal for the company as it related to your work?

EF: We would analyze all of the traffic across the fiber network and we would try and forecast the rates of growth in certain corridors. And we did it all by hand!

TTV: What?

EF: Yeah, so I got there and I noticed that on this weird, green monochrome screen that related to the mainframe, there was this little code that would change with each screen. You’d be on one screen and the code would say, like “TCA497” or something, and then you’d change screens and the code would change, but when you went back to the previous screen the code was there again. So, I thought, “That’s a data table or something. Where’s the data?” So I found the data and got access to the mainframe, and then I wrote programs to do all of my work for me, and then thirty hours of work was done with a single push of a button, always accurate. But I didn’t tell anyone, because all of those guys were such assholes. I just goofed off all the time; I came in late. So in some sense I was the best employee, but in some sense the worst employee. And I enjoyed that kind of duality. 

TTV: But ultimately what you were doing was using math to make this Telecomm giant, who had helped bust up AT&T, more money.

EF: Oh yeah, I wrote a program that made it possible for them to save $12 million a month by handing off the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) and putting it on a long haul network, on an OC12. So I wrote a report and showed them how they could save the money and another guy, a guy above me, took credit for it.

TTV: Because Corporate America.

EF: Right. I was in the meeting when he took credit for it. He said he discovered it and I just wish I had asked him in front of everybody how he did it, or what his assumptions were, or just to show his work. I don’t know, I went through all kinds of bullshit at that company. 

TTV: I don’t think much has changed in corporate culture, do you?

EF: There’s a lot of bright people in some of those companies, and there’s a lot of people that just kind of get by. But here’s what happens to the bright people: the bureaucracy of the companies, the machine that they’re plugged into, just dumbs it all down. It doesn’t allow them to shine, and that’s the problem.

TTV: Because once you are in the machine, there is no payoff for innovation other than maybe saving yourself some time and effort.

EF: Right. I didn’t get shit for coming up with the formulas to save them that money. I should’ve said, “I will show you guys how to save $120 million a year if you put $1 million in my bank account right now. Now shut the fuck up and do it.” 

TTV: Should young people be looking to technical schools to learn to build things rather than going to traditional universities to try and score a job in finance?

EF: I think it’s sad that a lot of junior highs and high schools are getting rid of the vocational programs they used to offer. I think it’s a mistake. You know, even if we have robotic-run manufacturing facilities, we still need someone to repair the robots, and that technical know-how starts at some sense at a basic shop level. So, a great vo-tech class could be robotics, both maintenance and design. I do think there needs to be more career paths for all of the different types of people that are alive. 

TTV: Instead of saying, “If you want money, you should get this type of degree whether you care about it or not.”

EF: It’s like everything is geared toward people ending up in some sort of middle management position, and middle management is the entire problem. 

TTV: Right. Middle management is heavy; they take up a lot of cash and resources and don’t really produce anything.

EF: The unlimited, unfettered free enterprise system is too much controlled by a small group. And even though the wealth potential is uncapped, it should be capped by each person.

TTV: Ah, but that person would have to be of the mindset that he or she is not more deserving of the money than someone else.

EF: It’s self-regulation. There is a point where a person should say, “It’s vulgar to take this much money for what I’m actually producing for mankind.” It’s rude— that’s what it is, those people
are rude.

We’ve created a situation where everyone is out for themselves, there’s no sense of community. Everyone is out to fuck everyone.