2.1.1994

I came into work early today for our day shift versus swing shift battle, and those slimy bastards pulled a fast one on me. I knew they were going to be trouble today but I didn't anticipate this junk. I was all prepared to go down fighting this afternoon and they cancelled the meeting. That's got to be the first time ever that day shift cancelled a line meeting. They live for that shit. I should have known those deadbeats were up to something. I don't know when I'm going to get the opportunity to terrorize them now. Dammit!

The Wrath Of Royonics

All of the rollaway carts next to the Royonics machines are filled with PC boards that have loose components inserted into them. It takes the Royonics operators a long time to get all the PC boards loaded up with parts. Sometimes it takes a few days of meticulous work to get it finished. While the carts are sitting out on the shop floor everyone is extremely careful to not bump into them. They have signs in large, bright red letters to not bump, move, or disturb the carts in any way. I've seen what happens when some poor fool does bump into a cart filled with Royonics boards, and it's ugly. It's like pouring gasoline onto a hornet's nest.

Most of the Royonics operators are little old Asian ladies. There's a few guys out there but not many. When some idiot sideswipes one of the Royonics carts, hundreds if not thousands of loose components pop out of the Racked PC boards and go flying onto the floor as well as rain down onto the PC boards below each shelf in the cart. I have never seen angry Asian women swarm around someone so fast as they do when their boards get wrecked. If they catch you they'll try to hit you, kick you in the shins, shout all manner of horrible insults at you, and they'll probably steal your lunch. No apology for ruining their boards will suffice. Once they see you bump a cart with loaded boards and the parts scatter, you are doomed. The best course of action quite simply, is to run. Run out of the department as fast as you can and don't look back at the horde of angry women trailing you. Run swiftly, like the wind.

I've seen it happen a couple of times and each time I shout, "You better run dude! Get the fuck out of there now!" But, it's always too late. Just as the bungling employee looks over at me the angry female Royonics mob engulfs him and his torment begins. Watching the brawl usually makes me smile but a couple of times it's been so rough that I cringed a little and felt sorry for the guy. I tell you what though if I ever accidentally bump one of those loaded Royonics carts I am going to run like hell and then call in sick for a couple of days after that. It's the only way to avoid a beating.

Communication Overkill

At Bill and Dave's company, you can never have too many meetings. Communication is key, they say. Any employee can call a line meeting whenever they feel like it. A coworker of mine can call a line meeting and then decide to call another meeting to discuss the results of the previous meeting. Management likes to encourage consensus at our meetings to solve problems. That's all fine and good, but have you ever tried to reach consensus with 39 other people? It doesn't work. We have line meetings, shift meetings, department meetings, Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) meetings, Coffee Talks (management propaganda sessions), Risk Assessment meetings, and it goes on and on. It just doesn't stop. I'll bet out of a fourty hour work week here most employees spend over half of that time in useless meetings. What a waste. I'm already fed up with it so I try to weasle my way out of as many meetings as possible so I can keep working. Manufacturing PC boards makes us money. Meetings do not.

Now don't get me wrong here. Some communication between coworkers and shifts is obviously important. Things change on a constant basis here and if you don't talk to the people you have to work with and depend on, you can screw things up in a hurry. At a minimum I try to find out what I need to do to keep working effectively. I don't want to go over business metrics for an area clear over on the other side of the building. I don't want to know what a department manager thinks our business outlook is going to be six months from now because quite frankly, they'll have it all wrong. I'm not interested in being baited with cups of cheap coffee and low grade cafeteria cookies to go to a Vice President's propaganda session. I want to keep busy at my job, and do my job well. That's it. All these meetings are frivolous and waste my time. I've learned this during the past year the hard way. I've attended far too many pointless meetings.

That Friday afternoon when my supervisor was finished harassing the day shift on their poor performance we went through a re-cap of production information that was for November and December. It appeared that swing shift roughly doubled the throughput capacity compared to day shift during those two months. Why am I not surprised? As a result of this at the end of the meeting my boss asked me to oversee a meeting between our two shifts on February first at two in the afternoon with the goal of getting them up to speed. I willingly agreed. So, before I left work that night I began collecting more dirt on day shift to back myself up with the facts, not opinion. Ironically enough that Friday morning day shift only did one Racking inventory at 6:55am. I saved the que sheet and I plan on bringing it to the February meeting. If they give me any lip I'm going to use that as a prime example of their shoddy work habits.

I expect at the February meeting the day shift retards will do whatever they can to resist any changes that might cause them to actually start working. I'm skeptical they will go along with any recommendations we present them with. They'll probably just sit there the whole time and try to defend themselves. This is going to be interesting.

1.28.1994

As I believe I have mentioned before, our day shift robot operators performance has been poor. Their shoddy work effort has been going on since April of '93 and my supervisor, Shamu has basically refused to deal with the situation for almost a year. My boss is a classic example of an ineffective manager, one of the worst I've ever encountered at any job so far. Part of the problem is the fact that she does not get involved in issues concerning our area. She prefers to sit back and let us work things out for ourselves. Most of the time what actually happens is the day shift imbeciles do not see eye-to-eye with us on swing shift so the problem(s) go unresolved and each shift ends up doing their own thing.

Last Friday we had a line meeting. It started at two in the afternoon but I was late and did not show up until three. I found out later from fellow swing shift employees that the first hour of the meeting was trivial. A fact backed up by my boss. She told me she would sit down with me at four in the afternoon on Tuesday and fill me in on what I missed, but Tuesday came around and she never showed up. That's proof to me nothing important came out of yet another line meeting.

The last half hour of the meeting was great though, and looking back on it I'm glad I showed up after all even though I was an hour late. What happened was this. Shamu got really angry with my area on a number of issues and most of them were directed at the day shift team. It's about fuckin' time. The one thing that got me provoked into opening my spiteful mouth of evil was when the boss hit on the day shift knuckleheads not tracking the que of work needed for the Racking area. Unfortunately, to fully explain the situation I have to go into detail about our manufacturing process so you can understand the importance of our que system.

In the Printed Circuitboard business here at Bill and Dave's we rely on a que system rather than a simple supply and demand system. PC boards are sent out onto the floor from PC Stores in lots of a half dozen boards in each box. Each box has a color coded card on it with a tagging system broken down into letters of the alphabet and numbers one through six. This is all done for a critical part of the manufacturing process called Royonics. I'll get to Royonics later. What's important is that before I start a box of boards I have to go over to the Racking area and take a quick inventory of which incoming shelves are empty or low on boards. This way we give them the work that's really needed out on the floor rather than overloading them with stuff they can't use.

When the boards come out to my area, we mask the circuit side of each board with a liquid that when it's baked for two hours becomes a hard vinyl. We then send the boards to the Racking area and those people look at their que to fill work on the Royonics machines. The rackers have to bust ass their entire shift. They take a box of boards and have to mount each board or series of boards in aluminum frames. They look like a picture frame you'd hang on your wall. So they mount in support arms and frame up the boards. Once they've got them secured in the frames they slide them into rolling carts that can handle about 20 frames. The carts are labeled for a certain Royonics machine, and all the boards they racked up in the cart came off their incoming shelves are also labeled the same way, let's say A-6. A-6 corresponds to one particular Royonics machine out there on the shop floor.

The Royonics machines are rather strange. They look like a giant video game, like the ones you'd have to climb inside to play it. Each Royonics machine has a tall swivel mounted chair and an overhead shield that blocks out light from the ceiling. A Royonics operator will take a Racked set of boards from their cart and place it in a tray inside the Royonics machine. The operator then runs a program and hits a button to cycle the program ahead one step. Each time the operator cycles ahead, a small door will slide open in front of them to reveal a tray of components. Simultaneously, a pin-point bright light will shine down from overhead to a specific point on the PC board. This lets the operator know where to place a component. When they hit the button again, the light will move off to another point on the surface of the board, and a new tray will open up with different parts in it. It's all very slow work for the Royonics operators. Because of the complexity of some circuitboards, one Royonics machine and operator might only get through three lots of boards in an entire eight hour shift. On one single PC board there might be hundreds of components that need to be insterted by hand.

So, for example let's say the X-2 Royonics machine has a que of three lots of boards. That means the Racking area has room for three lots of X-2 boards on their incoming shelf, and my area has room for three lots of X-2 boards on our incoming shelf from PC Stores. Everytime we make a delivery of lots of boards to Racking, we are supposed to take a physical inventory of what Racking needs based on the que and then we are supposed to work to fill the holes on their incoming shelves. At an absolute minimum, we are supposed to deliver to Racking every two hours and then fill out a que inventory sheet so we know what to work on over the next couple of hours. Our day shift imbeciles don't bother to check Racking to see what they are low on, and they don't bother to do much work to begin with. That's how all this trouble gets started. Typically, the day shift losers might fill out a que inventory for Racking when they first get into work in the morning and then they do one right before we show up on swing shift, just to make it look like they've been doing something. They are damn lazy.

One evening, a supervisor from an area clear over on the other side of the building came into my area to complain about the lack of work arriving in her area on a daily basis. She apparently had noticed the uneven flow of work coming into her department some time ago and took it upon herself to investigate what was going on. When she got to our area she discovered a backlog of work for her line on our shelves, and also noticed that our que inventory sheet had only been done once that day. She blew her stack. So this manager I guess ripped into my boss sometime before our line meeting where I opened my big mouth. Shamu got busted because she didn't take action against our dayshift and I have no sympathy for her. Anyway, Shamu brought this incident up in the line meeting and I had to say something. I just couldn't resist. In front of fourty people I bluntly said, "The lack of work from our dayshift has been going on since April of 1993." Everything in the room just stopped. It got so quiet in the room that if someone had coughed everyone would have jumped ten feet out of their chairs. Someone else who had their hand up to say something, put it down. A couple of people started snickering. Two of our dayshift losers silently shook their heads in disgust. One or two other people in the room stared at me as if to say, "You speak the truth. That was badass."

Carefully choosing her words, my boss spoke. "I know, Factory Peasant. I don't mean to start a day shift versus swing shift scenario but something needs to be done. Maybe at this point we can have swing shift show the day shift what it is that's done differently, because whatever it is, swing shift works." She was implying that swing shift gain control over day shift's antics. When she finished speaking I felt like I was ten feet tall. None of the day shift miscreants spoke. To do so would have been futile. They just got a serious beat-down.

1.27.1994

This evening I'm writing while enjoying a whiskey on the rocks. One of my roommate's friends, Craig, was nice enough to make me a compilation tape of recent Industrial music groups out these days. Since I've fallen out of touch with a group of friends that were really into this stuff I don't get exposed to much new music anymore. Working nights doesn't really help with the social scene. The comp tape was welcome. So I'm listening to these new bands I've never heard before like Chem Lab, Skrew, Diatribe, and Fear Factory. I like the Diatribe stuff the best so far. It's really really good. Most of these bands are nothing more than grunge with a sort of dance beat to it and I like it don't get me wrong, but it's not Industrial music as such. It seems most people are confused about music these days. No one really knows what is Industrial music anymore. To me, real Industrial music incorporates old machinery and found sounds like pieces of scrap metal being hit with sledgehammers. And of course it should have some sort of a beat to it that is repetative like a machine. Early Industrial music came from groups in the UK like Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, and bands like Whitehouse. Alot of that material came out of the late 1970s and is quite difficult to listen to. Some people refer to it simply as "Difficult Music", or "White Noise". I like this sort of stuff alot, but it's definetly an acquired taste.

The material I'm listening to now is more like dance music I guess, with a driving machine-like beat. That's about all there is to it really. Skinny Puppy is a good example of the newer Industrial stuff I suppose. I like Puppy alot, they're one of my favorite groups actually. But when you compare them to something like Test Department it's easy to figure out what real Industrial music is all about. They're completely different like night and day. I'd describe bands like Skinny Puppy as Dance-Industrial. Yeah.

I was curious about where all this Industrial music originally came from and I spent a couple of years doing alot of research in libraries. I think I was able to trace the English Industrial material back to it's roots in France just after World War II. A group of French guys involved with a radio station formed up a school of Music called "Musique Concrete", or simply Concrete Music. They used tape recorders and cut up the tape and re-arranged it in such a way that it had a beat and some sort of logical composition to it. A good example of Musique Concrete would be a recording of a table saw and a squeaky door hinge. The Musique Concrete artists would record both of these items separately and then cut up their tape with razors, put it back together in a new order, and then re-record it. Interesting stuff. I like it alot, but man is it hard to find. Really obscure material.

I definetly want to hear more of this Diatribe group. I'm going to have to find more of their stuff.

1.20.1994

I haven't felt like writing much over the past few days. Mostly I think it has been due to fatigue. During the past two weeks I worked a maximum amount of overtime which included being in the plant on Saturdays. My work has become much more interesting, making the overtime easier to endure. My boss still has me on loan to the PC board lines so instead of running those noisy robots everyday I'm building more complex circuitboards. Compared to operating the robots, building PC boards is where it's at. The robots have become boring to me and I'd have to say it's because I've mastered operating them. Working on the PC board lines is much more challenging since it's all new to me. I hope to prolong my time on loan for another month. If I'm lucky my supervisor will forget about me and I can escape for a much longer period of time. My boss is a nitwit.

Senor Random let me borrow some of his old journals to read. It's been interesting to see how someone else has approached the task of writing about daily life's adventures and monotony. Some of his writing has been really amusing. It's Senor Random's sense of humor that seeps into his journal entries here and there. It catches me off guard. Sometimes the beauty of his writing style is how he describes something simple like coming down with a common cold. "Stuffy nose of hate", I think is how he puts it. His spelling is absolutely terrible. It's surprising actually because to talk to the guy you realize he's an intelligent and articulate person. It was very trusting of Senor Random to let me read his journals. I'd never let him do that with mine, or allow any of my other friends to read them either.

Gina has been having endless man-troubles. I played matchmaker and got her acquainted with a guy named Ricky Rockanova, and he really turned out to be a dud. I feel bad because I set them up and Ricky Rockanova treated her like junk. This of course makes me look like a chump since I was friends with the guy. So I've learned a valuable lesson. Don't set people up. It could all turn into a disaster. Anyway I don't think I'll be talking to Ricky Rockanova much anymore because his personality is weird and he's pushy. He used to work here at the company about a year or two ago and I think he got fired. I'm not sure what exactly happened. I never get a straight answer out of him when I bring the subject up. He mentioned something about a car accident in the parking lot at one of our other sites, but it doesn't add up. I suspect the real story is he mouthed off one time too many to someone and got drop-kicked out the front door of the lobby.

The Bill And Dave Way

As a Christmas present from the company this year we all got a copy of a book called "The Bill And Dave Way." It's all about how Bill and Dave founded the great company I'm now working for. One of our managers thought this would be a really good idea for a Christmas present and boy was that guy wrong. Morale is extremely low across the shop floor for a variety of reasons. The temps are angry that they can't get hired on full time permanent, the permanent people are angry because they have been hearing rumors about losing all their jobs in the near future. The news we've been hearing is that the company is going to try to outsource the entire PC board business to another company. Nobody knows for sure what's going on with that but if it happens it could mean that hundreds of people here will lose their jobs.

Everywhere I go in the area, employees have been quoting passages from "The Bill And Dave Way" and shaking their heads in disgust at our management teams, or laughing their asses off. Either way management here looks alot worse for it now that we've been reading the book. It seems to me that the people who inherited this company from two truly great men only pay lip service to the corporate culture that Bill and Dave created. From my viewpoint, our management is extremely shortsighted and foolish from the corporate level all the way down to manufacturing. In some ways it's amazing to me that the company even functions at all because it's being run so inefficiently.

There's numerous parts of the book that have caught my attention, but one thing that really struck home with me was a meeting that Bill and Dave had in Sonoma, California in 1957. They invited their top managers at that time to a special meeting in Sonoma to discuss problems and make plans for the company's future. They wanted to somehow maintain a small company feel even though the company was becoming so successful that they had over 1,200 employees. The largest to date. During the meeting in Sonoma Bill and Dave identified a number of key items that would later become the corporate culture and guidelines called "The Bill And Dave Way". Item number five on that list is to me, critical. Basically it states that the company must provide good opportunities for the employees, to allow them to share in the company's successes which they realized those successes would not be possible without the employee. Their goal was also to provide job security for the employees and to provide opportunity for job satisfaction through accomplishments in work.

Our current management has demonstrated to me that this core value no longer matters to them. Bill And Dave's company has become hire-and-fire. The employee is now treated as a liability rather than an asset. Item number five on Bill And Dave's list has been abandoned.

1.11.1994

Today was an eleven hour day at work. I got into the factory at three in the afternoon and split the scene at two in the morning. I need all the overtime I can get these days. My bills are starting to pile up and this bothers me.

Production of printed circuitboards has slowed up yet again so my boss, Shamu, has loaned me out for a couple of weeks to the hand load lines. I've worked building PC boards by hand numerous times before, for weeks at a time. The last time she sent me out there I worked for a solid month before coming back to the robots. Sometimes the change is nice. Breaks up the monotony. I didn't miss my boss at all the last time she sent me out there.

Just when I thought I really knew what I was doing, the rug got pulled out from under me. A couple of the grouchy old ladies that work on the PC board lines all of a sudden decided to tell me that most of the PC boards I had been building were coming back for rework, and that's a big problem. Rework makes people frown down upon you. Apparently this had been happening for some time but none of these dummies bothered to tell me about it. How can I learn from my mistakes if you don't tell me about it? They didn't save any of the work for me to repair, which is really the best way for me to learn. It's kind of like when a puppy poops on the floor of your house and you rub their nose in it so they learn not to do that again. Anyway since they didn't save the messed up PC boards I couldn't see what it was specifically that I did incorrectly.

The whole thing bugged me because I thought I was doing solid work, so I decided to investigate on my own. The old ladies weren't being very helpful anyway. I tracked down some of the paperwork on the improperly built boards in Auto-Test and noticed right away that the handwriting wasn't mine. It was some other factory peasant that coincidentally had the same first name as me. Turns out none of the boards they were complaining about had ever been touched by me. Even though I made this discovery and took the info back to the line and showed these pea-brains they got the wrong guy, I got alot of attitude about it from this one sawed-off big mouth named Lorraine. That's the problem with some of the PC board lines here. They're chock full of old women under five foot two with low IQs and big mouths. I like working on their line, but I don't care for most of the people.

They better let that other factory peasant know about the quality of his work otherwise he will continue making the same mistakes, and I might get blamed for it again. It only took me like ten minutes to figure out who was causing the problems on their boards. They obviously are too stupid to get the feedback to the right person.

12.12.1993

I am unhappy because my un-cool room mate Jerry is still here at B Street. He was going to be moving out at the end of this month but he changed his mind. My pal, Senor Random was going to replace Jerry. I was really looking forward to that. I do not like Jerry. I do not like his friends. I do not like the music that Jerry's band plays. The music is 1970s crap. I do not like the fact that they are always occupying the livingroom couches watching old 70s sitcoms on TV for days at a time. I hate the entire decade of the Seventies more than anything else I've ever hated in my life. I will carry a grudge against that horrible decade until the day I die. I lived through that miserable ten years and I remember it all too well. It was truly worthless. Out of every decade this century, the 1970s were truly the low point. Why some people are so fascinated with it I'll never know, but I sure think they are dumb for it. It was pure trash. I guess these kids aren't old enough to have lived through those years so they don't know how truly stupid everyone looked back then. It seems it's becoming popular with the trendy crowd to dress up in disco clothes. They look like they are wearing a costume. A bad costume. People looked ridiculous then, and they look just as ridiculous now dressed up in that junk. Maybe even more so. Victims, they are.

My hope is that Jerry will move out of here soon. Real soon. Realistically, he will have to move out in the near future because financially I can't figure out how he can afford rent. He doesn't have a job. These hippies are all alike. They dress like slobs, their women are ugly (and hairy), none of them are gainfully employed, they seem to live for stinky incense, smoke enough dope to kill a small dog, and yet they live. Why is this? They must be like cockroaches. Not even lethal doses of radiation will kill them.

Being Nice Doesn't Pay

Last week Tina's car broke down on her at work. Her deadbeat man refused to come and pick her up so I offered to see if I could get her car started, and if not I'd drive her home. We went out to where the car was parked and I tried all the basic stuff to see if the battery died or if she somehow flooded the block. The car wouldn't start. I gave her a lift home. As a thank you she wanted to stop into a bar and buy me a drink. We stopped at a local dive and Tina proceeded to down a few beers. I drank a cup of coffee because I decided to ease up on the drinking after my window breaking episode at B Street.

A couple of days after I had dropped Tina off at her house, she told me that her guy thinks I'm fucking her now, and he wants to kill me. Neat. He also took out some of his anger on Tina and beat her down. I felt pretty bad about that. What the hell was I supposed to do? Leave her stranded at work after midnight and hope she could call a tow truck or a cab? How come that slob didn't get off his lazy wife-beating ass and come help out his woman? What a piece of shit. I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle this situation and not make things worse for Tina at home. What a pain.

Tina mentioned to me that she was attracted to me, a few weeks ago. It didn't really come as a shock or a surprise thanks to the ongoing soap opera at the factory. She's been telling coworkers what she thinks about me. It always gets spread around the factory like wildfire. The place is a giant rumor mill. I tried to be as polite and diplomatic as I could by replying that I was flattered and then I left it at that. She has been making alot of sexual innuendo jokes around me on a more constant basis. It's starting to annoy me.

It's funny. I thought that if I went out of my way to be extra nice to people I might get along better in life. So far that course of action has been causing me nothing but more problems and trouble. I think I need to go back to my tried and true ways of being mean. No forgiveness. No compassion. More suffering inflicted upon those who have earned it. It's a mission I must carry out.

I've been day dreaming of Jacinda again today. I guess I'd still like to see her again some time. Maybe beg for forgiveness and see if I could go out with her again. I think the chances of that are close to none, but it's still nice to think about. I'll probably never see her again. Even if I did, she probably wouldn't want to talk to me. I wonder what she did today.

Swing Shift

Working a night schedule has been good for me. I'm sleeping better than I ever did working on dayshift. On days, I always felt sick. Swing shift allows me to sleep into the early afternoon and I wake up when my body can't sleep anymore. For the most part each day when I go into work at the factory I'm totally rested and relaxed. It's cool. Each night is like a Friday night. I can get completely hammered if I want to and still be able to sleep off the hang over the next day before work. There's some other advantages to this schedule too. I don't get stuck in traffic anymore. I have a shift window between two and five in the afternoon. So whenever I decide to head in for the day everyone else around here is still stuck at their jobs so the roads are virtually empty. When my shift is done and I drive home, the signals are always green. I don't miss all the cars and idiots wandering around. I've found there's enough stuff that's 24 hours these days so I can still run some errands at 2am if I want to. Pick up my mail at the post office, buy groceries, pay some bills. That sort of stuff.

Our swing shift crew running the robots is myself and usually four other people. Sometimes five, if we happen to have that many people trained up. A couple of guys have quit recently so we're down people right now. Miss Dish has been there working on the robots for a couple of years and when I got hired in, she was my trainer. Great lady. She's from American Samoa, which is an island somewhere out in the Pacific. Miss Dish is alot of fun because she's always talking junk about the people we have to work with on dayshift, and she's one of the few women I've run across that can handle my warped sense of humor. Most women just want to throw stuff at me or kick me when I open my mouth. So Miss Dish and I are getting along just fine.

We have two girls in their twenties working with us right now. Gina and Tina. I've been here long enough that our supervisor decided to have me train them up as operators on the robots. I've taken them on and tried to do the best job that I can. If I train them right, they won't run into as much trouble as some of us have when we first started running these noisy beasts. Tina is really short and she's already had like three or four kids. Sounds to me like she has a bad life. Her old man is always pulling some disability crap on whomever his last employer was, and he's currently out of a job. Tina's the main bread winner for their household and she's trying to do well here but I detect she's a little intimidated by the machines. Don't know how to help with that, yet.

Gina on the other hand dove right into it and she's doing okay. Her problem is she yaps too much with guys that she is attracted to. So she's wasting alot of time with a few of the wandering "players" of the PC area. It's kinda funny to watch these guys try to pick up on her. They must be on the edge of desperate because to be quite honest, Gina ain't that hot. She's super cool, but not good lookin'. She's about five foot something and skinny as a boiler pipe. No curves, no boobs. Her hair is jet black and real long. Straight all the way down her back. Her eyes always have dark circles underneath them and her nose is big. Real big. She also has this weird speech impairment when she talks. I used to hear some kids talk like that back in grade school but they send them to a speech therapy class and they usually break them out of the habit early on. Guess she missed that class.

There's a nutcase over in the Racking department I've become pretty good friends with. He's Senor Random. Senor Random got my attention one night when he shimmied up one of the support beams to the ceiling and started howling like Tarzan over the PC board lines. Apparently he's done it so often that nobody on the hand load lines notices him anymore. That was the first time I saw it and I was like, what the fuck? I ended up talking to the guy in the cafeteria and he's actually damn funny. We've been hanging out at lunch sometimes, and we've gone out to hit the local bar after work a couple of times. Seems like a good guy. Really crazy though.

11.23.1993

It's fucking cold right now. I haven't gotten around to replacing the heater core in my car so each night when I drive home from the factory, I freeze. One afternoon on my drive into the plant my whole windshield suddenly clouded up with steam. Hot green water puked out of my dashboard from behind the glove box and instantly I knew the damned heater core ruptured. It was gonna happen sooner or later, the car was approaching 30 years of age. I limped the car the rest of the way to work with all the windows down and the heater set to full blast on a beautiful summer day. It was the only way to make sure I didn't overheat the engine block. Later on I bypassed the heater core by cutting the hoses off of it and splicing them in a closed loop elsewhere. I've been lazy about replacing the core even though I already bought a brand new one. It's still in the box. Now I shiver with the cold every night on the way home and I ask myself the same question. Why didn't I fix the car this afternoon? I think I'll just buy some warm gloves tomorrow and keep them in my coat pocket.

The temperature inside the factory where I work gets really hot. I'm on the second floor of the main building and it seems the air conditioning on the second floor doesn't work all that great. Heat rises from the floor below and collects in my department all day long. So at the end of my shift when I walk outside in the parking lot I look forward to cooling off. That was during the end of summer though so it was always nice outside in the evening. Now it's a fuckin' drag. It's so cold that my nose starts to run as soon as I step out the door. I sniffle my way out to the car. Then I have to sit there like a chump while I warm up the engine and defrost the windshield ghetto style so I don't drive off a cliff or drive into someone's house. No heater core means I put my hands on the inside of the windshield about eye level. Takes a while to get a see-through spot burned in the frost but at least it works. In the coming weeks I'll probably have to scrape ice off the windshield with my library card. I should fix that heater core. Yup.

Other negative developments include my other car breaking down on me (motor seized), got my first ever speeding ticket, and my room mates at the B Street house decided I have a drinking problem. They came to that conclusion when I broke a bunch of windows in the back of the house because at the time it seemed like a cool thing to do. I repaired them all the next day while I was hung over. I had to measure the frames, get the new glass cut at the local shop, come back to the house, clean and disassemble the wooden frames, put the new glass in, caulk it, and reassemble the wooden frames. I have never worked on anything like that before so I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing but you know what? I did a kick ass repair job.

On the positive side, I bought a copy of Negativland's banned U2 single along with a couple Nurse With Wound boxed sets. One of the NWW boxed sets I've been after for a long time but just couldn't find it anywhere. It's called "Soliloquy For Lilith". It's good shit. The best news of all is my scumbag hippie room mate Jerry is moving out in January. Jerry is a retro 1970s loser slob dead-head pot smokin' no good organic looking grease ball. He has no job, fills the house with slimy white trash hippie kids, and drives a seventies rapist van. That's one of those boxes on wheels with no windows. Every time he starts up the motor out back our yard fills up with smoke. Hippies sure do show a love for our environment. I have discovered this. They'll go to endless protests to fight for environmental issues and get to and from the protests in vehicles that spew burnt oil smoke into the air. Way to go, geniuses.

Jerry has a hippie band called "Zag". I despise them. I finally got the chance to hear them play live this last weekend- in my house. Boy, they sucked. Hopefully they will never become popular or successful and I will pray to Satan every day to make sure they fail. Zag is a motley crew of burned out grease balls. When they played the house our livingrooms were sparsely filled with poorly dressed homely girls. Not a single one of them wore any makeup and they all smelled funny. Most of them had clothes on that appeared to be made out of rope. I mingled with this crowd of miscreants as a scientist might if he were to study a foreign race of humans while being invisible.

Zag was playing far too loud in our middle livingroom against the back wall. At one point I lit up a good cigar and continued to observe them pound and pluck away at their instruments like a bunch of apes. Shortly after I got a good cherry on the tip of my stogie a particularly unattractive hippie girl came up to me and started saying things. I had no idea what those things were because of the music. Her lips moved but no sound came out. She was confused when I pointed to my ear and I slightly stooped over so she could repeat whatever she had just babbled at me. "I don't think Jerry likes you to smoke that in the house." She said into my ear. I stood back up, took a good puff on the cigar, and blew it up towards the ceiling. Then I knocked the cherry off the end and she watched, horrified, as the glowing ash hit the livingroom carpet. I ground it into the rug with the toe of my wingtip. Her eyes were as white and as big as saucers. She didn't know what to do. I gently leaned over so my mouth was close to her ear and I said, "This is my house. Fuck that guy." She quickly fled the room.

If there's one thing in this world that I hate, it's a hippie.

Paint It Black

Five years ago I was in this room. Those were the nights we drank cases of Ballentine's beer in cans and listened to Psychic TV, Chrome, Bomb, just about any kind of obscure industrial music, and lots of gothic death rock. We'd make beer runs and see if we could make it back to the house on the 23rd minute of the hour. Back then the B Street gang first exposed me to the Enigma of 23. It was an inside joke of sorts at the house.

My favorite thing about this bedroom is the roof access. There's bay windows down one wall and you can open the one up on the far left and climb out onto the roof. At night no one can see you sitting there. During the summer months it's peaceful to sit on the roof with a clove cigarette and a glass of wine and watch people and cars pass by. Five years ago, the street below was one way only. After the bars would close a drunk or two would go down the road in the wrong direction and crash into someone head-on. We saw that happen frequently from our rooftop perches. Traffic flows in both directions in front of the house now. Probably cuts down on the late night drunkard accidents.

The first day I started moving in, I opened up the bedroom closet door and found my name written near the top of the door frame with about five other guys names. They all used to live or hang out here. That brought back a few memories. The six of us used a machete to put a deep cut into the door frame, and we put our names next to the gouge we made. It's all still here.

I was confused when I saw the bedroom was covered in dirt-brown carpet. It used to be bright blood red. I cut up one corner of the carpet and was happy to discover the blood red carpet was underneath. I spent one whole afternoon carefully cutting the brown junk and rolling it up to haul it out. Some fool had laid TV cable all over the place and I had a hell of a time pulling it up from underneath the carpeting and getting rid of it.

The walls in here were a harsh white and made of plaster. I need to sleep during the day because of my work schedule. I threw out the curtains and the sunlight flooded in through the street side windows. It reflected off the walls and made it very bright in the room. My solution to cut down on the sunlight was to paint the walls and the ceiling flat black. It took me a few days as I didn't have anybody help me with the work but it was well worth it. At night it's like sleeping inside a cave. The crystal door knob on my bedroom door gives the illusion of floating in dark space. The pictures I hung on the walls appear to be hovering, motionless. A few people told me that painting everything black would make the room look much smaller, but I couldn't disagree more. At night it looks cavernous. I'm sleeping alot better during the afternoon now. Black paint absorbs the sunlight effectively and I won't have to buy new curtains. The old curtains were disgusting. They were once white but after years of cigarette smoke and dust collecting on them they turned a nasty orange yellow color.

The landlord never comes by the B Street house and her property manager runs the house with a very loose hand. I asked her if I could repaint my room and she said no problem. I simply forgot to mention what color I was going to paint it...

Welcome To B Street

When I got the keys to the house and the room I was excited to see what kind of shape the place was in. It had been years since the last time I had walked through the front door. The carpets are all dingy and stained from years of beer spillage and knocked over ashtrays. Carpets like this are instant death for vacuum cleaners. In the two livingrooms there is an assortment of broken bar signs, odd artwork, a Nixon/Agnew campaign banner, and tons of other random shit. The livingroom between the front door and the kitchen has one whole wall dedicated to Elvis Presley. They call it the Elvis Shrine. Nobody in the house knows who started it or how long ago it came into existence, but it is impressive. It's a mish-mosh of everything Elvis tacked or taped up on the wall so thick that you can't see the paint behind it. Every inch is covered. Across the room in the back corner is a life sized black and white standup of Marilyn Monroe in her famous white dress from the 50s.

Couches are plentiful here. All of them are entirely moth eaten and mangy but very comfortable. One of the couches is an early 1970s eyesore, it's metallic lime green with a low back and it has two black top tables built in, one on either side. The rest are your garden variety discarded couches that show up at the local thrift store or appear out on the sidewalk with a crudely written sign on it that says "Free". The other livingroom usually has a pool table or a ping pong table set up and ready for anyone who wants to kill some time. Ping pong has been bad for the windows though. Some guests have been a little over enthusiastic about making a slam shot and have put their paddle (and arm) through the glass. The window that got broken the most now has a piece of wood nailed across the window frame to hopefully stop any further ping pong paddle destruction from happening.

The kitchen is barely useable. A puke green refrigerator that lives against the orange wall sort of works. Nobody has defrosted the freezer in years so it's become a solid block of ice. You can still see some packaged food items deep in the ice that no one bothered to retrive. Some of the burners on the stove don't work, and the dumbwaiter has been filled with hundreds of paper grocery bags. We have a dishwasher but ivy has grown through from outside and spread inside the dishwasher itself so it's wrecked. A few ivy branches are poking through the dishwasher door and into the center of the kitchen. I think a couple of the guys here have taken it on as a kind of mascot or house pet.

Out back there's a storage room, stairs to the basement and a door that leads out to where we all park our cars. It's loose gravel and empty beer kegs everywhere you look around by our vehicles. A tree off to the left of the back door has a tiny metal shopping cart someone placed in it's branches 20 years ago. Some of the branches grew through the wire mesh of the cart and forced the metal aside. It's cool. There's a two car garage, if you could call it that. Really it appears to be a chicken coop that now holds two cars. The garage is sagging over on one side and probably will collapse in the near future. Why it hasn't already crumbled to the ground mystifies me.

There once was a front yard here at B Street. Instead of a couple of trees or some lawn and a nice walkway up the front porch we somehow ended up with a portable building that serves the elderly and dingbat housewives as a hair salon. So if we want to use the front door we have to walk a little way down our driveway, make a left just past the portable building, and then walk up improvised stairs to the front porch. The front door to the place is huge. It's solid wood with a one way mirrored window in the center. The address is in gold leaf on the glass. There's a brass Chevy bowtie looking handle in the door right about waist high and that's the door bell. When I say door bell I don't mean some new-fangled electric ding dong sounding contraption either. I'm talking DOOR BELL. This shit is hooked up to a big brass bell and when you pull on the lever I guarantee it will wake up everyone in the whole house. Including the dead.

11.2.1993

More downtime. I didn't have to go in to work today. The plant was closed due to a computer mainframe switchover that effects the whole site, and we have another miserable inventory going on so no one can work in the production areas. Every time we have an inventory all production is shut down until some nerdy bean counter from finance or accounting gives each area the all-clear. I haven't had to actually work an inventory yet and I feel damn lucky for it. Looks like it's a headache.

11.1.1993

I'm still at Bill and Dave's. I didn't get laid off.

I moved out of Joe's place. He was getting too weird. The place I relocated to is only a block away, on B Street. It's a dive I used to invite myself over to alot during my high school years. If you've ever seen the film "Animal House" that's the best way I can describe my new residence. I hung out there with a group of death rock/punks back then. One of the guys still living there coincidentally works at Bill and Dave's. Some other department though. I bumped into him in the cafeteria at work and he asked me if I knew where one of the former room mates was these days. He wanted to rent him his old spot again, if he was interested. I had no clue where that guy might be since I lost touch with him but I did mention I'd like to rent the room if it was available. He gave me the OK to move in a few days afterward. I got the biggest room in the house. The house is an old Victorian in run down condition. It's very cool to be here compared to Joe's. The bedroom needs alot of work. I have serious remodeling plans. It needs new paint and the carpet is destroyed. The curtains look like they haven't been cleaned since 1974. It's tore down. I have roof access and a great view of the street below though.

It was nice living at Joe's as long as I did, but I'm very happy to have moved out. I honestly believe Joe has some mental problems. Before I left Joe's I had a couple of opportunities to kick his dog, Rex. I finally got even with that worthless mutt. Rex was peeing on the livingroom furniture and chewing up everything it could get it's paws on for months. I'll never forget how much I hate the little orange sack of shit. Nor will I forget watching Rex clean his tiny balls and butt, then run into the livingroom to lick Joe's face. That made me cringe. Good riddance to Joe and his filthy dog Rex. May they both be struck by lightning.

I'm more anti-social these days. Been drinking alot of booze lately in large quantities. It must be done. I ordered a keg and I've been suckin' beers off of it for a week. My hair is mangy. I let it grow out longer than I should have and now I look like I have an umbrella on the top of my head. The only thing that will make me feel better is a new girlfriend but the more I try to find one, the more everything backfires on me. A friend told me I've been barking up the wrong trees. Well, I've done that to alot of trees lately. Eventually each woman ends up throwing rocks at me.

9.10.1993

I skipped out on work again today. It's been so slow at the plant that if it continues much longer I'll be laid off by the end of this month. I'm unhappy and depressed with the way things have been going at Bill and Dave's. I'm already tired of it. I'm tired of scrounging around the factory looking for something to do in different departments. The only good thing that has come out of the slowdown so far is I've been cross-trained on a bunch of PC board lines. I've been out there in the hand load lines for weeks. Now I know how to build boards from the ground up. It put everything I learned in my week long training class to good use. Building PC boards is sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I like it. If business picks back up I'll have to go back to running the robots.

Things around the house have been shaky. Joe has been getting bent out of shape over every little thing. Instead of talking about what's bugging him he holds it in until it festers. The main reason why he's agitated so easily is he's still unemployed. He's got way too much time on his hands sitting around the house thinking about the way people relate to him. Frequently he gets into debates with me about what he calls "social interactions" between himself and any given person. It's like he's being far too introspective and I think he's going insane. Most likely it will be a long time before Joe finds a job again, if at all.The last few jobs he had didn't seem too bad to me, but as soon as something happened that Joe didn't like he walked out the door from each place. No one told him he had to go. He quits. I really don't see him trying very hard to improve his situation.

8.16.1993

I didn't go in to work today. Things have become very slow. I think it's a part problem, they don't have enough stock in-house to continue production. This is happening more and more often. Actually I'm worried because it's been like this for two weeks straight. Each day we call in to find out if there's work and if not we stay home. Last week I only worked one day. So at the moment I'm totally broke and I have to wait until this coming friday for my meager paycheck. Somehow I've got to make it until then. One of my cars is totally out of gas and the other one (with the big block in it) only has a quarter tank left. Ugh.

Lunch Thieves

I don't believe this shit. Security is installing video cameras aimed at the refrigerators because some employees have been stealing lunches. Or worse, a dirtbag will take a huge scoop out of a casserole or cut a big piece out of someone's cake. That's damn low. If security has to be involved to protect employees' food the problem must be out of control.

I'm working at the circus. Send in more clowns, please.

A Class Struggle

There aren't many full-time permanent employees left in this department. Bill and Dave's company doesn't seem to value the employee much, anymore. My experience has been completely different from what I've heard about this place over the past few years. People always told me how well they were treated and how much Bill and Dave prized the people who worked for them, but I'm just not seeing it here. Most of the people they've hired in are actually on a one year tour only. They get a slightly higher hourly wage but no medical benefits. Oddly enough they are employees of the company- not temporary workers from an outside agency. I'd call them contract workers. You get hired on and your contract is for one year. If at the end of that year they like you, maybe you get to stay on for another year. However if you work for two years straight they force you to take a few months off. I'm not sure how all this works or why it's a benefit to the company. To me it all seems like a bad idea. Doesn't make much sense to me. Our management should either want employees to be here- or not. Pretty simple.

Resentment runs high among the contract employees. The reason is because many of them have been employed here for much longer than two years. Management at Bill and Dave's won't hire them, instead they continue to dangle the carrot in front of them that they *might* get hired if they keep doing a good job. Alot of the people seem to know that's a lie and question why they've been strung along. Nobody trusts the managers. Managers love having meetings to tell us all what's going on but I've noticed something in the few short months I've been here. The managers actions are totally different from what they are telling us. It's all spin. I'm not paying any attention to them as a result. I started boycotting their meetings. I'd rather just stay at my station and keep working. If you can't stick to your word and do what you say you will do, I have no time or respect for you.

A backlash from the few full-time employees has erupted. The full-time people are angry that the contract employees get paid more per hour than they do for essentially doing the same work. It's funny that they are so mad about it since they have full medical benefits and a bunch of other perks that contract employees will never get. Some permanent employees are withholding key information when they are training the new people who happen to be on contract. They are probably trying to remain indispensable rather than expendable. It's counterproductive to say the least.

Another group of employees that were here full-time permanent bailed out in recent years when they were offered a lucrative severance package if they volunteered to leave the company. Sort of an early retirement deal. I've talked to alot of the people who participated in it and they all seem to say the same things. They left Bill and Dave's with a huge chunk of cash, started their own businesses, failed miserably at it, and came back here to work on contract with their tail between their legs. Many of these guys are pissed off about their situation and harbor ill feelings towards the company. I don't have much sympathy for them since they put themselves into this mess to begin with. Greedy chumps.

Animosity between permanent and contract employees reigns supreme. I feel like I'm working with a bunch of Dr. Seuss' Sneetches around here. Some of the contract employees have begun to sabotage company equipment and/or their work. Petty revenge...

8.11.1993

Every night when I get home from the factory my room is unbearably hot. I come home and immediately open up the windows, then lock the door and head downtown on foot. The main library is some blocks away so it takes a while to get there and back. People still drop off books at the back entrance late at night so I go there and raid the donations. I never know what I'm going to end up taking from them since it's different every time. The weirder the book, the better I guess.

I've bumped into some of the local heroin addicts rooting through the boxes of books. I've known some of them since high school. They got hooked, and to support their habit they swipe books and sell them to the used book stores downtown. Seems better to me than breaking and entering people's homes to steal stuff and pawn it. When I see them at the book drop-off I step aside and let them root through the boxes first. That way maybe they get the rare books worth fat loot. I feel sorry for some of them. I really do. Sooner or later each one of them will go pro on the heroin and move to the city, to be closer to the source. Most of them I knew that moved out of town for the H are already dead. They've either overdosed or been murdered. What a way to go.

After raiding the library I usually pick up my mail, swing by the coffee shop and see who's around, then head back home. My room has cooled off enough by then. The summer heat in that house is severe. We don't have any air conditioning. Not that I'd use it if we had it anyway since air conditioning always gives me nosebleeds. Joe has a swamp cooler he puts up in the livingroom window and that actually helps keep the temperature down.

Things at the job are ok. I've learned alot more about the overall manufacturing process of PC boards and I've become much more familiar with our pesky robots. There's a couple of things about the robots I've started to hate. Changing out the goo tank is one nuisance. Resetting the stepper motors when they get off-zero is another. The goo tank holds about 5 or 6 gallons of the junk and when I re-fill it I have to sit there and wait over an hour for air bubbles to rise to the surface. They don't want air trapped in the line because it causes the needle to spit crap all over the PC boards you're working on. When the stepper motor(s) get out of whack it's usually by just a fraction of an inch. That might not seem like much, but when you are dealing with tiny circuitboards a fraction of an inch might as well be a mile. The needle will dump junk everywhere it's not supposed to be. I've tried to manually reset the machines a few times with an allen wrench but I just end up making things worse. I have to call the maintenance guys to come up and mess around with it. They are usually good about getting up to our area quickly but sometimes you have to sit around and wait for hours until they can show up. I don't know where they come from. Must be some hole in the wall or factory dungeon basement.

All the raw boards we work on come from the Stores area across the hall. It's all women in there, and the one that seems to run the show is quite bossy. A few times I've walked into their area to ask a question or pick up some boards and before I can even get a word out of my mouth she yells "What in the hell do you want?" Uhmmm, I... well. "Speak up or get outta here!" she says. Damn. She's rough. I don't know whether or not the lady is serious, all I know is when I leave I hear alot of giggling coming out of their area. I think they have three or four of them working the board stores on night shift. They seem to own the domain with iron fists.

5.29.1993

We had a minor problem at the house last week. It could have become a big problem but we got lucky I guess. My room mate Shane is an aspiring actor. He was recently cast in a local production of "The Music Man". Apparently the director of the production got thrown out of the place he was living. I didn't get the details but I'm sure it had to do with money. Joe, being the big-hearted guy that he is, let the director move in temporarily at our place. I wasn't asked how I felt about it. The director was there one day and moved himself into the attic. He was going to be here with us until the end of the month. I didn't like the idea too much but I kept my mouth shut about it.

Turns out this "director" was a crack addict who was borrowing big items from his close friends and then pawning their belongings off for quick cash to buy more drugs. I think he did some straight up robberies too. Not sure though. We were lucky none of our stuff got stolen. Joe threw the guy out just before some of this came to our attention. Joe went out and changed all the locks on the house, just in case. I think the worst part of this was Shane realizing the director used him. I think Shane feels like a chump right now. There's nothing worse than feeling stupid after you discover you've been duped. Hope he drinks a few more of my beers in the 'fridge to feel better.

One more of the bums from the mission around the corner just walked over and started picking up some of Joe's cigarette butts from our driveway in the back yard. There be hoardes of bums here, matey. I'll never understand bums and after that attempted rape incident in the back alley now I really hate bums. I never gave bums much attention before that night, but now I'm watching them. The other night when I came home from work it had just finished raining. The car sounded extra vicious because the air was so still and quiet. I was kinda drunk. As I drove up the side of our block that has the easier entrance to the back alley I delibrately woke up all the bums sleeping in their cars. I burned out and fish-tailed around that corner and slid sideways perfectly into the alley entrance. The dual exhaust bellowed into the night and all the sleepy bums were startled awake. Hehe.

I got loaded that night at Bill and Dave's. We had a celebration with all you can drink beers for a few hours to celebrate something. I don't remember what it was for. They do that at Bill and Dave's company alot though. Oh yes now I remember what it was for. We were accepted into some ISO 9000 program. It's a European thing I think, and it's a set of standards we have to adopt in order to sell our stuff in the European market. So that's what the celebration was for. I guess the ISO 9000 certification was a big deal for the company. I had a good old time at the gig and I didn't leave work until two in the morning.

5.21.1993

Jacinda has been on my mind alot lately. I can't escape it.

I miss the comfort of having a woman that cares about you, and will help you through the depressing times. Jacinda was really good at that. I can't sleep at night. As I lay on my back in my bed with the lights out, staring at the ceiling for hours at a time, I remember the intimate times between us. I remember how raw and animalistic we were together. She used to make me cover her in oil and punishfuck her on the floor of her livingroom. I remember one day when we were in my room. She was on top of me, in another world. Jacinda threw herself back slightly, my hands grappling with her chest. I was watching her long red hair sway gently off the nape of her neck and down her shoulders. I could see her reflection in the glass door. It was partially open and the angle of it allowed me to see all around her body. Her silhouette was beautiful.

I don't know what happened to her or where she is now. I do know I will never see her again. Realizing this I ache, and sleep never arrives.

5.16.1993

Things are going well for me at Bill and Dave's, but our dayshift is causing some hectically shitty problems for us. They aren't doing much work at all during their day. The quality as well as the quantity of work is poor. It's frustrating on swingshift because I have more and more employees coming to us from the PC board lines complaining about the work they received. I suspect Retardo is the main culprit. In an eight hour day he gets five boxes of boards out. In comparison we get about 40 boxes out each night. I can't imagine how someone could go that slow unless they were doing it on purpose. He's lazy as hell and there's nothing I hate more in this world than a fellow employee that fails to do his share of the workload. Everyone around him has to work harder to compensate for it and that's not fair. This reminds me of a bagger I worked with at Petrini's, named Damon.

Damon was a kid that never really fit in. He got a job at the store because his family personally knew the store director. Damon always had something about him that was off-center. He would show up for work and his bow tie would be all crooked. Or his shirt wouldn't be tucked in all the way. Sometimes he looked as if he just woke up because his hair was stuck up on one side. He probably did just wake up. Every shift that Damon worked, he screwed something up. He would consistently fail to collect shopping carts from the parking lots in front of the store. He would bag customer's groceries and always put the soft items on the bottom and pile cans into the top of the bag. Stuff got crushed. Instead of working, he would come up to you and say things out of the blue that didn't make any sense. "HEY MAN YOU WANT TO BUY MY RADAR DETECTOR?" Damon would say shit like that to you as if he was an android with down syndrome. Every year at tax time he would say to each employee "HOW MUCH DID YOU GET BACK ON YOUR TAXES I HAD TO PAY." Oh man, what a social albatross.

The thing that irritated me the most about Damon was he never dumped out the mop water at the end of the day. In the utility room right across from the milk box there were a bunch of supplies and tools for the baggers to use in cleaning and maintaining the store. It was our job to do "spot mops" every 15 to 30 minutes and there were two big industrial sized orange buckets that we rinsed the mops in. At the end of the day we had to dump the mangy mop water out and clean the mop heads. Well, he was the one guy on a closing shift that never did it. Not once. It was horrible stuff. In one afternoon the clean water in the bucket would turn black and stink. There would be floaters in it too, like dead flies. Dumping the filthy mop water out at the end of the day was a way to keep the stink down. If it was left for the next day the whole utility room would reek. I hated that.

One evening Damon did something that made me snap. I had enough of him. I conspired with one of the checkers, Greg, to exact my revenge upon the bane of my bagging existence. I took a dozen eggs in a carton and I smashed them against the floor of the utility room. I used a broom handle to push up and over one of the ceiling tiles in the roof of the room. Then I grabbed one of the mop buckets containing the putrid water and I climbed into the ceiling back by the meat freezers. I had to work my way back to the utility room. Once I got there and into position I used an overturned milk crate for a chair. I was ready for my hapless victim to teach him a lesson. I had time. I was off work for the day and I was willing to wait for hours, if need be.

Greg went out onto the salesfloor and found Damon. He told him there was a mess in the utility room that he needed to clean up, but he wasn't going for it. Greg came back into the utility room and whispered up at me "He thinks it's a practical joke, man. He won't come back here to clean it up." I was disappointed. I thought for a second and said, "Well I don't care what you have to do to get him back here. Keep working on him." Greg shrugged and left. A few minutes later I heard The Colonel, Damon, and Greg just outside the hallway. They were arguing. The Colonel burst through the double doors and popped into the utility room. He saw the eggs on the floor but he didn't look up into the ceiling or anything. He had no idea I was there. The Colonel went back out to where Damon and Greg were and said, "Nothing is going to happen to you. There are eggs on the floor. Clean them up now." This was an unfortunate complication. Now that my boss was involved I had to decide to commit or not. I would commit and take the consequences.

Damon sheepishly walked into the utility room and turned on the light. As he stooped over to pick up the egg carton, I struck. I heaved the entire bucket of disgusting mop water onto him. Vengeance was mine! I quickly grabbed the mop bucket and fled the scene back to the ladder I put up by the meat freezers. Just as I was about to put my foot on the first rung of the ladder, The Colonel popped up, spotted me, and shouted "YOU!" I was caught.

The Colonel dragged me down the hallway to the men's bathroom. Damon walked out and The Colonel said to him, "Here he is. What do you think I should do with him?" Damon was drenched and smelled like dirty mop water. He had covered his shoulders with paper towels and they were soaking into the fabric of his shirt. Damon thought for a few seconds and said in his dumb-guy voice "I THINK HE SHOULD BE PUNISHED FOR WHAT HE DID." Yeah, right genius. The Colonel looked at me and said, "You heard him. I'm writing you up. Come with me upstairs to the office." Bummer.

When we got into the office The Colonel sat me down, and I watched him fill out a form. When he was done with it he handed it to me and told me to read it. It said:

Written Warning
The following is an outline of a specified problem discussed with the above mentioned employee. Facts: As Damon entered the utility room to clean up some eggs he was doused by water from a fellow employee. He was up in the ceiling when he poured water upon Damon.

Ways To Improve: Do not throw water on employees who are performing a job duty. Due to safety hazards, and the respect of the other employee. Signed, The Colonel.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I still hate that guy. The Colonel looked at me and started laughing. He had been right outside of the door to the utility room loading up cases of sodas to take out on the salesfloor when all of a sudden he heard this WHOOSH noise and he saw a wave of water rush out the doorway and across the hall into the milkbox. Damon came out into the hallway, stunned. Because The Colonel had inadvertently helped get Damon snared into my diabolocial plan he felt at the very least he had to write me up for it. But, on the side he thought it was awesome. The write up wouldn't have done much anyway.

In the weeks following this incident Damon started changing out the mop water. At least he finally got the message...

Retardo And Crew

I'm exhausted. I've been putting 50 to 60 hours a week in at the job. My boss, Shamu, doesn't seem to have much going on upstairs. She's a nice lady but she doesn't pay enough attention to what her dayshift crew is actually up to at any given time. Shamu is responsible for three groups in my area. Manual Part Assembly (MPA), the robot goo dispensers, and a metal press operation. Our dayshift guys take tons of smoke breaks and wander around in hallways. Since the dayshift crew isn't pulling their weight we have to bust ass every night to get the area caught up. The lack of output from our dayshift miscreants causes a chain reaction out on the rest of the shop floor. We feed boards to the Racking group. If the dayshift guys here don't do shit, the swing shift Rackers don't have much to work on until late in our shift. If the swing shift Rackers don't have stuff to do, the PC board lines they give work to on the following dayshift will be dead, and so on. This is causing the flow of work from our area to pulse out of here rather than be steady. It's gonna catch up with my boss sooner or later if she doesn't motivate those chumps to get with it.

The worst one on our dayshift is Retardo. That's what the swing shift ladies call him anyway. He's got to be the biggest god damned Mexican I have ever seen in my life. For real. This guy is taller than I am and he's built like a freight train. Never seen anything like it. He's a real doofus too, just like his nickname implies. During his shift he sits at his station and uses the yellow goo to doodle with. He writes his name with goo (he actually misspelled his own name) all over the robot, the computer case, and his station bench. Most of the time he roams the hallways and wastes time flapping his gums at his pals. Sometimes he hangs out in the exercise equipment room and does hours of weight lifting. Retardo can easliy burn an eight hour shift that way. It screws us though when we come in at night. People lean on us to get stuff out as fast as we can. It pisses me off. I have to work twice as hard so our doofus can screw off.

Retardo's wife works just across the hall from us in MPA and she's really weird. Her job is trimming and bending the metal legs on PC board components all day long. She will bend the leads on hundreds of inductors and then grab hundreds of LEDs and clip them for hours. That's all she does, 40 hours a week. There's a deaf-mute-blind guy that's her partner, doing the same work. It's an absolutely mind-numbing job and sometimes I think the deaf-mute-blind guy does a better job than she does. Retardo's wife appears to have the I.Q. of a hubcap so the work is perfect for her. There's something about her that is creepy though. Whenever she is walking in a hallway, no matter what time of day it is or how many people are around, she nervously looks over her shoulder as if someone is about to drag her into a dark alley and mug her. She seems to be living in fear. It bugs me. I try not to talk to her, or follow her in the hallways. She might mace me or start screaming. My only crime would be walking behind her with a donut in my hand.

The guys we have next to us run Haeger presses. A Haeger press is a big machine that uses hydraulics to install hardware like standoffs and rivets into PC boards. They're dangerous to use though because some of them are semi-auto. It's a hydraulic press plus it senses electrical contacts. When the press makes a circuit between the part you're installing and a board, the press automatically punches hardware into the PC board. If you happen to have a ring on a finger and you put your hand in the wrong place at the right time you could make a circuit. Then you'd get a finger crushed off. Or you could have a rivet punched through your hand and fasten you to a PC board. That would be fun to explain at the emergency room. Anyway the haeger press guys are strange indeed. One of them looks like he got hit in the face with a shovel. He seems to be constantly sunburned. I think he did way too many drugs back in the late sixties 'cause he isn't all there. His pal George is a part time janitor someplace else on graveyard shift and he likes to tell us about everything he found in the trash or in dumpsters over the past few days. George brings home everything from small pieces of furniture to food... for his family. Furniture I can understand fishing out of the trash. Food, I cannot.

Playing With Robots

I was assigned to an area in the printed circuitboard department that uses robots. I wasn't expecting this. In my mind I imagined I'd be sitting hunched over at a workbench toiling mindlessly on little green slabs. Instead I am standing up over a robot and toiling mindlessly on little green slabs.

The job is simple, but repetative. I grab a box of half a dozen circuitboards and bring it to my station. Place one board upsidedown in the robot and select the appropriate program on a computer next to it. The computers we use are jacked up. It's a really old model with a touch sensitive screen and none of the displays work well anymore. They told me to use a pencil eraser on the display because fingers don't seem to register. You can tap on the screen item all day and it won't do a damn thing, but a pencil eraser does the trick. These clunker computers are grimy and at first glance look like an old Apple IIe because of the monochrome green displays. Once the selected program is running the robot jumps into action. It's essentially a syringe needle that can travel in X, Y, and Z axis over the boards and dispense a light yellow or pink goo. The goo covers up metal plating that they don't want to get solder contamination on. When the group of circuitboards have been gooed, we put them on oven racks and they get baked for a couple of hours. After baking, the goo is a hard vinyl and solder doesn't adhere to it. The boards get re-boxed and sent on to the next step in the process. Little droplets of yellow and pink goo are dried up all over the place. It's sloppy here.

There's six of these needle robots in our area. The stepper motors in each one of them are very noisy. When all six are running it's sounds like industrial/white noise music from the late 1970s. It's kinda cool. Apparently a bunch of the workers close to our area think it's un-cool though and they complained so much about the noise that maintenance put up a 7 foot tall wall around us to try and dampen the robotic cacophony. The wall doesn't seem to have actually reduced the motor noise. If anything else it has amplified it and bounced it back across the hallway at another area. Those guys haven't complained about the noise pollution though. Maybe all the people across the hallway are deaf. Anyway I'd like to put up razor wire along the top of the wall and add a couple of searchlights at either end. It would help to keep some of the nitwits and kooks from the PC board lines out of my area. I've discovered a high kook-and-nitwit concentration here at Bill and Dave's company.

I'm surrounded by 50 copies of my mom in this department. I'm over six feet tall and scrawny, so the ladies here are always trying to feed me. It's kinda funny. They come up to me in the hallways or out on the shop floor and shove snacks and stuff in my face because I look like I must be starving. Poor me. I have to come up with more and more creative excuses to politely decline their offers of whatever they made at home that day. Sometimes I think I just dodged a culinary bullet when I get a close look at their kitchen concoctions. I have to come up with some plausible reason why I can't eat any. It's tough work making shit up all the time so I don't have to sample their grub. Whew.

So far I like the job. Hope it lasts...

Dad Strikes Again

Dad has really been pushing me to go to Court Reporter school even though I just got the job at Bill and Dave's. I'm not as interested in it now that I am employed again. Nevertheless, I went back down to the school this week and sat in on some of the classes to see if I really wanted to enroll or not. About ten minutes into the first class I was checking out, there was a commotion at the back of the room. The teacher stopped what he was saying and as we all turned around, I cringed at what I saw. It was Dad. He had followed me down to the school just so he could yell at me. I was completely embarrassed. I got up as fast as I could and got out of the classroom. As soon as I hit the hallway Dad started ripping into me and then stormed down the hallway towards the main office. I guess I was supposed to follow him? I stayed about ten feet behind him as he fumed his way through the school's buildings back towards the administrator's offices.

Students in crowds ahead of him must have figured out an angry weird man was coming through. I could see people parting to either side of the hallways to get out of his way. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. I got alot of snickering and beady-eyed stares from them. When we got to the main office Dad barged into one of the head administrator's rooms and interrupted whatever he was doing at the time. I think Dad was trying to put me on the spot and get me to sign paperwork enrolling me in the school but I refused. After his antics at the school I never want to set foot in that place ever again.

In recent weeks Dad has taken every opportunity to yell at me about the same dumb stuff. It's always about work, or school. I've started calling him "Broken Record". He's been fighting with Mom alot. About what I have no clue, but he's informed me their fights are always my fault. Whatever. When I was a kid the guilt-trips he laid on me were harsh. After so many years of being guilt-tripped it doesn't have any effect on me anymore. I've mentioned he ought to drop the act 'cause it no workie no more but it went in one ear and right out the other, as usual.

He and I had another big showdown on Tuesday afternoon. At one in the afternoon I was just waking up from working the night shift. It was my morning. So I go upstairs to get some grub and not ten minutes after I sat down with a bowl of cereal in front of me, Dad comes out of fucking nowhere and starts laying into me about stupid shit. "Now that you have a job again you can start paying us rent. About 100 a month" he says. I didn't look up at him from the table and I said, "How about I move out". I didn't say this to him in a sarcastic tone of voice or anything. I just said it to him plain as day. "Oh. So you can go live with that eight-foot tall bald headed petunia?" said Dad. He was referring to Joe. Joe has been a good friend and a great person to live with. I ignored Dad's comment. Anyway I told him I was already moved out. He blew his stack and ranted about how I couldn't afford food or utilities, and other ridiculous junk. Dad has no clue how stupid he sounds every time he opens his mouth.

Dad hollered at me "After you're gone I'm going to fill that room of yours with cement!" I looked at him and said that once I'm gone it's his to do with as he pleases. I cared not. He muttered something about putting a 2x4 in my mouth and I asked him if he'd like me to put a 2x4 through his dopey skull. "Get up and try it so I can break a few bones and drop you off in front of the hospital." was his reply. Hey at least I'd get a ride to the E-room. Weeee.

4.17.1993

I have survived my first week of working at Bill and Dave's company.

From the week long training course I went through I'm certain I will be working in their printed circuitboard business, but I'm not sure where in that department I will end up. Training was more than tolerable because they actually had us doing stuff rather than just sit there and rot while some instructor droned on for hours at a time. All of us in the class had to do alot of wiring, learn how to solder, and become comfortable working with different kinds of PC boards. The majority of the week we were relentlessly drilled on component identification. There is alot to know about the individual parts packed onto a PC board. Many more than I would have ever figured anyway.

We were all issued a large sized binder in the training class and over half of it is stuff about identifying components. How to tell the polarity, what each part should look like, other unique markings, and the internal part numbering (reference) system that someone at Bill and Dave's came up with. We also spent alot of time this week learning how to read color codes on resistors and inductors. At first I was really intimidated by learning the color codes but after we got into it, there was nothing to worry about. I picked it up right away. They had some easy excercises with little sayings to help us remember the order- and number value of each color. The color code is black 0, brown 1, red 2, orange 3, yellow 4, green 5, blue 6, violet 7, grey 8, and white 9. On some parts with a % of tolerance that color band will either be gold or silver. So they have these little sayings like "Big Business Rarely Offers You Great Big Valuable Gifts Willingly". The first letter of each word in the memory phrase is the order the color code falls in. They had us write a bunch of our own and my first one was "Big Boys Raped Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly". Violet is such a slut, I swear.

Wiring was a bit difficult. We had to wrap very small gauge wires around test pins and then solder them to the pins. The shit is tricky because you are only allowed a certain amount of wraps around each pin. It's usually like one and a half turns. No more. Soldering is fun but that's also dicey because of the heat involved and the small diameter of the wires. The insulation burns off the wire like cannon fuse when it's lit if you lay into the connection with the iron for too long. And too long might only be two seconds. It takes alot of practice to get that straight without BBQing the shit. They gave us all a blank PC board with nothing but little gold plated holes in it and tons of test pins and wires. We had to go at it on the board and keep soldering in test pins and then wrap a wire or two around each one and zap it with the iron. I boogered up quite a few before I started to get the hang of it. I kind of like the smell of solder smoke.

All of us were issued a little red tool box and they took us to a place called labstock where we were outfitted with just about every kind of tool or supply that we would require in our jobs. They told us that anytime we ran out of something or broke a tool to go to a labstock center and grab whatever we needed. Very Cool. I got all kinds of crap. Weird lookin' pliers and copper twine that acts like a solder sponge when you heat it up. It's like magic. Let's see. I got a cool penlight flashlight, tons of screwdrivers and pens, lead clippers (great for trimming my fingernails), giant Q-Tip looking things on wooden dowels (great for cleaning my ears), and all kinds of other shit that I don't even know what to use it for yet. I finished up my first week putting in 44 hours. This coming week I will start someplace out on the floor but I have no clue where yet. Hope they don't throw me into something mindless.

4.7.1993

Fuck yeah man! I'm all set up in my new room at Joe's. No more attic. I liked the attic but it had some drawbacks. Heat being one of them, dust was another, and most notably- bugs. Lots of bugs. Spiders, wasps, mosquitos, and silverfish. The silverfish pissed me off the most. They irritate me just by cruising around on the walls and the ceiling.

The new room is great. I've moved in a bunch of my grandmother's antique oriental furniture and got almost everything out of storage. It's good to have it all back. I think I did a pretty good job not using up too much floor space. Didn't want to clutter the room up and end up tripping over shit. I've got a few of my grandmother's things but I wish I had her liquor miniatures collection. My dumbass dad gave them away to one of his co-workers. I caught him in the basement at his house one day taking all the boxes of her liquor miniatures out. When I asked him what he was doing with them he said he was giving them away. That really made me angry, and I asked why he was doing it. He snapped "If you have them you'll just drink them". Fucking imbecile. Some of those were from the 1930s and the booze in them, if there was any left probably would have been poison. They were really cool though and me and my sister should have gotten them. It was some feeble attempt to buy his co-worker's friendship I suspect. Nevertheless those should have stayed in the family. Dad has always treated everything that belonged to my mom's side of the family as his, as soon as he got his hands on it. Over the years he's pissed most of it away. Fucker.

I can't describe how much better it is over here at Joe's. I sleep better, and nobody is here trying to piss me off or fuck with me like at home. I should have made the move over here a hell of a lot sooner. Whenever dad is home from work he always expects me to be up at the crack of daylight and if I'm not up first thing in the morning he stays in a shit mood all day. Who the fuck needs it?

Dad made me a deal the other day. He said if I went to court reporting school and graduated he'd buy me a 1963 Mercury Monterey. I seriously doubt he would keep his word on it and besides that I've learned time and time again that accepting anything from him has way too many strings attatched to it. It's not worth it. Any time you accept anything from him, no matter how insignificant, it's like you are obligated to him at his whim. And if you don't appear and perform when he expects it you'll never hear the end of it. So, no thanks pal.

Joe seems to be in a depressed mood again. I predict he will lose his job soon. It will probably be his own fault. As long as I've known him over the past few years there's been many decent jobs he's had but he always seems to quit them in a little snit over things that people say to him. He's really anti-authority.

My unemployment situation has finally come to an end. There was a message on the board for me at my parents house today from Bill and Dave's company. They hired me. I start this Monday at 3:30 in the afternoon on swing shift. Right now I don't know yet if I will be working in micro or printed circuitboards. I have to call in tomorrow to find out the details from them. What a relief. I'm pleased it's going to be swing shift too since I like being up at night. This is gonna be good.

4.3.1993

For some reason I was restless last night and couldn't sleep. There were two beers left in the 'fridge. I got up and started drinking them while watching really bad movies on late night cable. I got stuck on a horrible film that had Adam Ant in it. After that, Brazil was on. Joe came home around five in the morning and sat down on the couch to scarf some ice cream. I called in some bogus orders on 1-800 TV commercials for Mr. Temper Tantrum. So far I've signed him up for free information from the Scientologists, Hair Club for Men, Rogaine treatments, how to become a school teacher, and Robert Tilton's Success N' Life ministries. I'm having all this shit sent to the store with Mr. Temper Tantrum's name on it. I would like to do more to cause him misery but I don't have the means, or the evil creativity at the moment. I'll leave the heavy duty stuff to John.

I still talk to the guys down at the store and a whole bunch of wrong has happened. Sounds like the employees are moving forward with a harassment lawsuit against Mr. Temper Tantrum. John has figured out a bunch of personal information on Mr. Temper Tantrum, like where he lives and shit. Apparently he's been pulling all sorts of pranks on him like ordering shit COD and having it sent to Mr. Temper Tantrum overnight from Argentina. John has been setting him up so the guy can't weasel out of the bills they hand him at his front door. Gotta love it.

4.2.1993

I had an interview at Bill and Dave's company today. I was nervous. I've never seen anything like it before. The interview seemed to go well, but I'm still not optimistic that anything is going to come of it. Part of the interview was a test to see if I could read instructions, follow them, and display good manual dexterity. The test was dopey. I had to build a Tinkertoy forklift by following an instruction booklet the Human Resources people put together. Each page was color coded and you had to build the forklift in sections in a certain order. Then you had to piece it together, again in a certain order. It wasn't at all like the instructions that probably came with the Tinkertoy kit. It was, weird. Anyway the time limit to complete the forklift was twenty minutes and I did it in seven. A Human Resources lady was watching me the whole time and taking notes. Before I started this test I asked the Human Resources lady a question and told her she didn't have to answer it if she didn't want to. I wanted to know if anyone had ever failed the Tinkertoy test. She said people have failed it often. That scared me because it was so simple to build. They must use this as some sort of screen to keep out people who can't read English.

After my initial interview and Tinkertoy test, someone came and got me for a tour of the facility. It is so god damned big there. It takes minutes just to walk from one building to the other. And it was really sci-fi. It's all high end electronics stuff and there's hundreds of people busily working in light green lab coats surrounded by tons of electronic lab equipment. People in the hallways generally seemed to be well dressed and all have name badges on. They took me through two departments and I got to meet some of the people working in both areas. One area seems to be all Micro electronic stuff, and the other one was all printed circuitboards. Both areas were massive and churning with activity. I don't know which area I might work in if I get hired here. Either one looks cool to me. I was real impressed with the overall layout of the site. They have a restaurant, a 24 hour gym, just about every kind of sports equipment you can think of, a basketball court, a baseball field, volleyball, and a soccer field. Some of the restrooms even have showers in them. It's amazing.

When I got home from the interview at Bill and Dave's I got a call from Joe. He accidentally left his glasses here at the apartment and he asked me to drive them over to him at his work. It was a couple of towns away but I didn't have anything else better to do so I took them. When I got there he took a few minutes to show me around the newspaper offices. Seemed like a nice enough place to work. It's a printing shop that has a skeleton crew on graveyard shift to design, layout, and shoot plates for the printing presses. Joe is still trying to get me a job there but I'm skepical it will happen.

3.27.1993

I slept in late today so I wouldn't have a hangover. Senor 23 and I went to the park by his house late in the afternoon yesterday and drank beers there, then we came back to the apartment and I made us some grub. We were hammered.

Joe gave me some bad news today. He can't get me a job where he works. Joe has been working at a newspaper office from five in the afternoon until two in the morning for a few weeks now. I was hoping they were looking for more people to do art-prep work before the paper heads off to the presses. Looks like it's no dice. There isn't much left for me here in the area and I can't think of any reasons why I should stay. I've even been thinking about joining the service. I'd probably go Army but I haven't talked to a recruiter yet. The fact is I can't find a job here to save my life. I'm fucking tired of looking. Now that Joe can't get me in at the newspaper office the last hope I have for a job is with Bill and Dave's company. I have a bad feeling that isn't going to work out either.

I finally found out what was bothering The Colonel. I was supposed to hang out with him in the evening after Samson and I were out car hunting but I was too tired. We postponed hanging out until tonight. The Colonel was seeing a Chinese guy in the city for two months and the guy pulled the "I think we should see other people but we can be friends" thing on him. The Colonel was upset about it and we spent hours talking about it. Colonel feels comfortable enough talking to me about this stuff but at the same time I think he realizes I don't fully undertsand everything he's talking about and going through because I'm not a fruity guy. The Colonel and Joe don't bug me much because they aren't your typical fags. Typical fags talk with a lisp and wear dresses and go to dog shows. Interior decorating is top of "to do" list of your typical fags. Not so with The Colonel or Joe. Actually, Joe does have a slight lisp but I've never seen him wear a dress so he's OK in my book.

Joe worked on Mark's old room for me most of the afternoon today. Someone had nailed a bunch of ugly wood planks into the walls and Joe spent the day pulling them all out of the walls. It looked like a tough job. I went in to check it out and Joe had a large pile of scrap wood sitting in the center of the floor that he pulled from two of the walls. I'm going to help Joe get it all out of here when he's done with the project. I've been really down about my job prospects and Joe told me to hang in there and do school or something. He advised me not to "escape" things by going into the military. He did that in 1962 and joined the Navy. I get the feeling from hearing him talk about it that he regrets going into the Navy then, but I am not certain.

3.24.1993

Samson came back into town from Cal Poly on his spring break. Sunday afternoon I happened to be over at my parents house. Dad was in the basement building another classical guitar. I heard the door from the kitchen to the garage open and close, then someone walking downstairs. I didn't think anything of it at the time because it must have been my sister Brandy, or dad. Turned out it was Samson. He let himself in.

It was good to see him. We hadn't written to each other in a while so we spent some time yapping and getting caught up. I keep most of my personal correspondence in an old metal two drawer filing cabinet and Samson's letters are some of my favorites. As Samson and I were getting all caught up he mentioned he wanted my help in finding him a new car. We planned to start car shopping Monday morning at ten.

On Monday morning we met up and headed out car hunting. Samson was interested in Pontiacs, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles in the 1978 to 1985 range. Those are all pretty worthless in my opinion but hey, it wasn't going to be my next ride. We checked out one Oldsmobile that was owned by a singing telegram broad. She came out to meet us when we got to where she lived and she wouldn't stop talking. I thought to myself that if I had to live with a woman like that I would go insane. She talked in a loud tone of voice, very quickly, and continuously interrupted us when we were trying to ask questions. The car wasn't in very good shape.

Just what exactly Samson was looking for in his next car wasn't clear to me. He wanted something big with power, but got good gas mileage. That's a contradiciton if I ever heard one. I tried a number of times to explain to him that you can't really have your cake and eat it too in that situation. He was going to have to make a choice to either go with the V8 power and take the gas mileage hit or get a V6 for the fuel economy. He didn't seem to grasp the concept well.

It was fun watching Samson deal with these people and the cars they were trying to sell. The first car we looked at was a Pontiac. We took it for a test drive and Samson punched it a few times to see what kind of acceleration and handling the car had. Then he would slam on the brakes as hard as he could and he did it without any warning for myself or the owner of the car who was sitting wide-eyed in the back seat. I got thrown about in the Pontiac a few times and the car's owner mentioned to me he had been out drinking fairly late the night before. He was looking kinda green after Samson started his random braking tests.

Every car we looked at, I asked for the service records. I checked the engine and transmission on each vehicle and carefully inspected the tires to see where they had been wearing out. I asked lots of mechanical questions and tried to get a reasonable idea about the overall condition of each car. Samson on the other hand was interested in making sure the heating and air-conditioning worked. He also methodically inspected the trunk of every car as if he was trying to get an idea of how many bodies he could fit into it. I think he creeped a few people out.

By the end of the day Samson was curious about checking out a lease on a brand new car. He was always fond of Cadillacs and in high school he had two Coup De Villes. So I drove him to the Cadillac dealership. We went into the dealership and Samson sat down with one of the salesmen while I wandered around doing nothing. I overheard Samson's conversation with the sales guy. It went something like this:

"I'm interested in leasing a car".
"We have many different ones to choose from. Which one did you have in mind?" the salesman said.
"Well, I don't know. That one". Samson quickly pointed to the nearest car on the salesfloor. It was a red convertible.
"That car costs about $750 a month to lease" said the salesman.
There was a long pause and then Samson said "I think I'm in the wrong place".

At this point I looked up and noticed one of the other Cadillac salesmen was also eavesdropping in and he was laughing. We left quickly. Our visit lasted less than five minutes. We went to a Lincoln/Mercury dealer after that. Samson was really into the idea of leasing a car for two years and then bringing the car back and just walk away from it. I was beat from all the auto mayhem and by six in the afternoon I wanted to call it a day. I drove Samson home and we made plans to go out looking for cars the following day.