The Spokane Crew

Before I continue much further with what's been going on up here I should do a proper job of introducing the main players in this factory soap opera.

Sharon is a red headed lady in her late 40s or early 50s. She's really pleasant to deal with and so far has gone out of her way to make me feel welcome. She has been doing an excellent job showing me the ropes in the product area and she's been very up front and honest with me. I've asked her alot of tough questions in the past couple of weeks and she has come back on me with some brutal honesty. I'm grateful to her for that. Sharon has been in the company for some years and she is a veteran on this instrument line. Out of all the Spokane employees I deal with every day, she's my favorite.

Don is another of the SKD employees. He's also in that late 40s to early 50s age group. He's got a slight southern drawl and he's a Vietnam veteran. During the war he worked on mini guns when the U.S. military first experimented with them in the field on attack helicopters, and later when they began installing them on tracked vehicles. He's a mini gun guru of sorts. Don has told me alot of stories about working with the mini guns and one of his favorites took place when they installed some on a light armored vehicle and started firing them into the jungle tree line. His account of that day is vivid, the trees and foliage disintigrated before his eyes. Trees exploded and were chopped in half by the volume of fire. When they were finished all of the plants left standing were only a few feet tall. Don is in constant pain. He did alot of heavy lifting while working in the military and he crushed a couple of the discs in his back so badly that he says he was a little shorter after the injury. I get along with Don well. Seems like a good guy to me.

There is a hideous mutant in our midst. This individual is one of the strangest looking women I have ever seen. Remember those cartoons from the fifties where a character is shown a pair of really hot female legs behind curtains, a moment later the rest of the curtains are pulled back and the woman becomes completely visible. Only then the hapless cartoon victim is thrown into complete terror by what he sees. The woman's face is hideous and makes the cartoon character flee screaming into distant hills. That's what this mutant is like. She comes in to work almost every day in black nylons and spiked high heels. The mutant usually wears a miniskirt and tight top which I wish she would never do. It causes my eyes much pain. Her face is stretched back tight like she's had too many face lifts and her teeth seem to poke out of her mouth uncontrollably because her skin is under so much strain. She wears coke bottle thick glasses and I suspect went totally bald. The hair on her head looks unnatural, like it's a long wig. The mutant gives me the creeps and I talk to her only when I have to just to remain polite.

Then there's Chuck. Chuck is a fucking nuisance. He's a good old boy from Ohio and he used to be an electrician for Bill and Dave's company here in the Spokane site. Bill and Dave's went through some serious turmoil a few years ago. They employed their people for building maintenance, groundskeeping, electrical maintenance, and custodial work. Someone in upper management got rid of them all and went to outside contractors. Many of them lost their jobs outright but Chuck was one of them that somehow squeaked through. He was a building electrician but he is now just an assembler on the product line. In his eyes this was a huge insult and a major step backwards. He's very bitter about it to this day. Chuck is also ignorant, racist, condescending, and completely fucking rude to me. He's my trainer at Final Assembly, and I hate him.