The New Guys

We got two new guys on swing shift this week. Gabe and Dave. They've been friends since high school and they both just graduated from a technical school together. This is their first job in the tech world. Gabe is stuck working with Hammerhead on the other side of the building. I feel sorry for him because he's gonna have to deal with her as his trainer every god damned day. Hammerhead seems to have a thing for us guys in our 20s so I'm sure she's going to be hitting on him non-stop. Dave is a long hair dude that's real quiet. He's gonna be in the Closed Area with us but he has to wait a few months for his clearance to come through. In the meantime he's stuck in the hallway at the exiled workbench like I was when I first started. He's getting all the grunt work. Kind of shitty but I think he will manage OK. Seems like a good guy.

There's another product area I don't know much about and we got an ex-Army guy working in there now. I've been picking his brain about his wartime experiences since he was in Iraq and saw some action during the brief ground war. He tells me he feels sick alot of the time but he's not sure why. I asked him if he was around any burned out Iraqi tanks and he said no. That rules out contamination from depleted uranium rounds shot into them by aircraft or M1 tanks. I also asked if he was around any chemical agents that were either dispersed over his group or detonated by our guys to eliminate them. Again he said he wasn't. Then he tells me about these pills they were forced to take. I hadn't heard anything about that before. From his description they sounded like some horse sized pellet that they had to take under orders. I got a bad feeling about it. Reminded me of Vietnam-era shit where they ordered some of our guys to take pills that they didn't know anything about. I'm curious about this now and I'm looking into it a little. Anyway the poor guy is sick alot of the time. He will eat dinner and be fine one minute then the next he's puking his guts out for no reason. He says it happens all the time since he's been back Stateside and it always happens at the worst times. Like when he's trying to take a woman out on a date or something. I feel sorry for him.

I'm getting to know the wafer cutter guy a little more. He's a really tall scrawny guy with jet black hair named Dan. I think he said he used to be a Marine. He's very quiet and always busy working. He's into techno electronic music and keeps telling me about this mp3 shit. I don't have a computer so I don't know what the fuck he's talking about but he's really into it. I have a few techno CDs at home so I've been trading compilation tapes with him at work. That's one really cool thing about this job is they are OK with us listening to stereos and stuff while we work. Bill and Dave's place was always really shitty about that. They told us we could not have walkman tape players out on the floor because it would pull in radio frequencies and screw up what we were working on. I think it was all a lie since all we worked on then was raw PC boards.