Getting The Boot

Jennifer doesn't want to have anything more to do with me. I left her a letter on top of the TV next to her precious remotes. I knew there would be no way she could miss it there since she's a TV junkie. We had a short conversation in the hallway at our house on Thursday or Friday and she said that no matter what I did, it was not going to make any difference to her. I had to leave. In a way it relieved me, I was suffering wondering if I could somehow make things all right again. Now I know what I have to do. I hope I can get out of here without Jennifer seeking some sort of petty revenge by destroying my things or stealing from me. I have to find a place to live, quickly. The longer I stay here with her the worse things will be. Jennifer will enjoy taking every opportunity to be cruel.

I offered to go to see a counsellor with her. Jennifer was rude and informed me I was the person that needed a therapist, not her. Somehow I think she is afraid of going to see one, it's as if she has too many skeletons in the closet and she doesn't want that closet door to be opened even for a moment. The bones might spill out onto the floor. Over all the years together I suspected something bad happened to her as a young girl. Perhaps she was sexually assaulted by a family member. It would explain her behavior in bed with me, to a point. Then again, maybe it is all my fault. I have no way of knowing and this causes me to go insane thinking about it. I need to get some answers to all the garbage floating around in my mind about what I've been through. I've decided to follow up with going to see a counsellor without Jennifer. I don't know what to expect. I'm nervous. I have always felt that people who go to counsellors are weak people, they have no inner strength and lack the intelligence to sort their own problems out. Maybe I'm one of those weak people.

Fading Out

Looks like I've done it. After months of neglect and general abuse Jennifer has told me she wants us to spend time apart. I didn't see how we could realistically do this while living under the same roof so I offered to move out. I have been constantly unhappy in this relationship anyway and I wonder why have I stayed this long. The same answer rolls around in my mind. I stayed because I kept hoping things would get better. Never did.

There have been plenty of warning signs over the last year, maybe two years. Jennifer asked me numerous times to go out with her to a movie, or to a baseball game in the city. She even asked me to work out with her at the gym. I wasn't into any of it and I didn't listen to her. I thought to myself, why put in the time to go do stuff with her when the rest of our relationship was so crummy? The sex has always been bad for both of us, we don't have anything in common as far as interests. Being a night owl hasn't helped any, either. I love working at night. I did alot of damage with mishandling my finances. I'm a financial retard. Jennifer is money obsessed. I never have any loot and this has frustrated the shit out of her. Especially when she's had to buy our groceries almost every time we go to the store. I am such a fool. I have the worst fear she's already seeing another guy and that is really what prompted her to mention spending time apart from each other. Would have been better if she had asked me to move out and get it overwith.

I'm stressed out. I can't concentrate on the job and I'm making a bunch of stupid mistakes. Someone is going to notice soon if I don't get it under control. Tonight all I thought about at work was Jennifer. It's like I'm possessed. One moment I want to just get the hell away from her, and the next moment I decide I'm not going to simply fade out and end the relationship. I'll write her a letter and see what she says. I haven't been able to eat since sometime the day before yesterday. All I have been doing the past two days is drink a whole pot of coffee before work in the early afternoon. Driving the car on the way in to work today both my arms went numb from the caffeine.

I feel sick.

Precision Group Idiots

Yep. The rumors I heard were all true. The Precision Group that moved in next door to us really is chock full of clowns. I don't know how they have been able to stay employed here all these years. They're terrible people. Each evening I hear the same routines play out. Early in the shift Super Shopper will show up and begin to describe in an all too loud voice her retail exploits for the day. About a half dozen dingbat housewives in their 40s to 50s will crowd around her and listen to how Super Shopper got over on some poor pimply faced checker at Target, or how she manipulated a salesperson at Mervyn's to get a severe discount. One of her favorite tactics seems to be the one where you buy something, and then weeks later when the item goes on sale you bring it back to get the difference in price. Super Shopper lives for those moments. I think she leads a very unhappy existence and must feel like she has no control over things in general. This is one way she gains some control over other people, I guess.

The women will crowd around Super Shopper as soon as she gets in to work each day. She will declare, "I just bought sixteen pairs of Winnie The Pooh underwear for $5.99!" The dingbats will hollar "Yeah!" Then they'll spend an hour talking about what a great deal it was, with amazement in their crazed consumer eyes. I'm sick of hearing it. I need to go to labstock and swipe dozens of ear plugs. Either that or I'll have to bring my walkman in from home and blast harsh Industrial music into my brain to drown out the female stupidity. I gotta do something, and fast or I'm going to do badness upon Super Shopper. I know she's tough to deal with. I've heard in the past few years she's ruined many employees here. Usually she fabricates an incident of some sort and then goes straight to management with it. She's successfully had full time employees fired, as well as poor unsuspecting temporary workers. Super Shopper is pure evil. I despise her, and I want to fight the good fight somehow. She needs to be put in her place.

Meth is another loser in the Precision Group. I've been trying to stay away from that guy as much as possible. He's a short, goatee wearing fool that's overweight and balding. He's one of the only employees they brought down here from Spokane. He was a temporary worker up there, and his mother was a full time regular employee. Some of the line Material Coordinators felt sorry for the guy, why I have no idea, and they hired him in full time. The only catch was he had to relocate to California. They made a huge mistake hiring him in. He's worthless. Meth is like J1 in that he constantly tells tall tales about himself, but that's about as far as the similarity goes. Meth has a bad temper and he flips out at the drop of a hat. His usual temper tantrum antics involve throwing whatever he has in his hand at the moment. Doesn't matter what the item is or how lethal it might be. So far I've seen him throw torque wrenches, pieces of large hardware, and x-acto knives right at other employees. One night I witnessed him throw an x-acto at another nitwit, and he stabbed the guy. The knife flew straight into the other idiot's shoe and right into his foot. He bled all over the place.

I don't know why Meth didn't end up being strangled by the idiot that was knifed. If it had been myself, I would have dismantled Meth, then I'd make a call to site security and have him hauled out of the area. Management's reaction would be swift. After being notified of violence in the workplace that fuckup would no longer have a job at Bill and Dave's company. It's pretty simple stuff. To my amazement though, the guy didn't stand up for himself and never told a soul. I wasn't the only witness to the x-acto episode. None of us did anything either. Looking back on it now I don't know why I didn't do anything about it. I should have done something. I'm ashamed that I took no action.

There's a Vietnamese woman working in their assembly area named Ann. I have dubbed Ann The Screw Murderer. Screw Murderer sits at a board mod workbench all night long and kills the hardware she's putting into each and every mod she touches. I can hear individual screws dying the hard death as she places them on a board mod and begins to torque them down. Actually, I can hear her killing T-10 hardware from the other side of the building, it's that loud. "REEEeeeeeeeeT REEEEEEeeeeeeT REEEEEeeeeet!" groan the screws and the metal threads they are going into.

Just out of sheer curiosity one night I walked over to where Screw Murderer was wreckin' shit and I watched how she does it. She takes a poor unsuspecting screw from the part bin and places it at an angle instead of straight up and down with the hole it's supposed to go into. She grabs a pneumatic torque driver and hits the trigger. The hardware only goes in a turn or two before seizing up and the torque driver stops cold. Without any hesitation, Screw Murderer picks up a hand driver and keeps turning until the cross threaded screw is flush to the surface of the frame. I'll say this, she puts in a tremendous effort to get them all the way down. That's where the horrible REEEEEEeeeeeT noises come from, her hand tightening of the destroyed screws. Every turn emits horrible sounds that are far worse than fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard.

I asked Mr. Mo and Wingnut Dan why they allow her to keep wrecking everything she builds. Both of them told me they've tried many times to retrain her to no avail. She's another one of those "I no do." people. When they make the effort to correct her habits she keeps saying "I no do." They also approached their management team about it, but the line supervisors did their patented song and dance around the issue. So it never got resolved. Screw Murderer continues on unchecked and unhindered. Makes me choke when I realize customers are receiving our products in this kind of shape. They're paying upwards of $50,000 per box, easy. Bill and Dave's customers deserve better than this.

Sparky's Overkill Solution

None of this would be happening to begin with if these losers hadn't scrapped out our carts.

Today Sparky and his ergonomic engineering freak of a sidekick showed up in the assembly area to announce his solution to our instrument cart problem. It's only taken him slightly over a month to figure it out, meanwhile Gary and I have been pissed off and working in pain. Sparky's brilliant idea is to spend six thousand dollars on a hydraulic lift that will have to be permanently bolted into the floor. I couldn't believe it. He showed both Gary and I a brochure for this behemoth lift thing. It was ridiculous. It looked like it would have come up to about waist high and had black handled levers and knobs all over it for moving it up and down, articulating angles, and unlocking it to spin in a 360 degree rotation. I looked Sparky straight in the face and I told him this is exactly what we didn't want him to do. And it took him a month. Fucker. There's no way in hell I'm going to allow him to waste that much money on an overkill solution. I told him to place an order at a local metal shop for a half dozen carts that are taller. At most it will cost Bill and Dave's a few hundred bucks. The problem will be solved. I don't understand these people. It's like their whole reason for existence is to piss away company money and resources on extravagant shit that nobody wants. Just cut to the chase and get the shit done, man.

I spend time thinking about guys like Sparky and I wonder if part of the reason why they do shit like this is to justify their jobs somehow to upper management. In a way it makes sense. In his position he doesn't have much oversight so he can act with impunity. If anyone asks him what he's up to at any given time he can show them all these grandiose yet unnecessary projects he has going on. I know how our management teams think and they'll most likely be eating the shit up, not knowing for a second it's all total junk.

Sparky put up a fight about it but Gary backed me up. He feels like I do that the best thing to do is just get taller carts built. Sparky eventually gave in, and then he told Gary to put a couple of our carts in the back of his truck. He was going to take them to a fabrication shop in the next town over to get a price quote or something. Fair enough, but then things got stupid again. Gary asked Sparky where his truck was on the site. The factory we're working in is huge. Multiple buildings ringed by parking lots everywhere the eye can see. Sparky said, "I park out by building 4. It's a white truck. You can't miss it." That was retarded. There's a million white pickup trucks in every god damned parking lot here. Gary pressed him for details on where he parked his shit or what would make his white truck stand out in the crowd. Again, Sparky told him "You can't miss it. It's right there in front of building 4."

After a few more minutes of this crap Gary got pissed off and took an instrument cart from the line and walked out into the massive lot in front of building four. There was no white pickup truck 'right out in front of building 4.' He wandered around for a few minutes and of course he spotted multiple white pickup trucks all over the place. Gary got angry and he did what any sensible angry person would do. He picked one white truck out at random and threw the cart into the back of the truck. He quickly walked away. We don't know who drove home with a cart in the bed of their truck that afternoon. I'm sure it wasn't Sparky.

Computer Termite

We've been having a ton of computer problems in the area. It's becoming a serious nuisance. Doing a little sleuthing I discovered a technician named Mike has been meddling around with our PC software settings. This guy has a superiority complex like I have never encountered before. Real obnoxious. Apparently, in his little world he knows everything there is to know about a PC and mere mortals such as myself aren't intelligent enough to figure it all out. Well, what I do know is this. Every time he puts his greasy mitts on one of our workstations, the thing goes belly-up and it's unuseable until someone from site IT comes out and unfucks the machine for us. I've started referring to Mike as the Computer Termite since he gets inside them like those pesky bugs get into a piece of wood and rip it to shreds.

Computer Termite is a closet deviant of some sort. I'm convinced. He is pudgy, wears rimmed glasses, and his hair is cut in a page-boy style. It's goofy lookin'. Since we got back from Spokane the Computer Termite has become extremely tight with It. That right there raises my eyebrows plenty. I see It and Computer Termite spending quality time together. Makes me wonder if maybe they're an item. Just the thought of it makes me cringe. I can see it now, pudgy page boy holding hands and walking down the street on a sunny day with the post-op transvestite that looks like a dirty hippy. Ugh.

If these computer problems keep coming up thanks to the Termite I'm gonna have to complain to Squirmy. The bossman will have to sit the Computer Termite down and get him under control. Squirmy usually tries to duck dealing with people on the line, but if we continue losing production time just because a super nerd tinkers with our systems his hand will be forced. He will do something about it.

J1 Disappears

J1 has been working on graveyard shift with Musclehead for a little over a month. I stay until two or three in the morning sometimes working mass overtime, which puts me well into the first half of the grave shift. J1 will show up each evening around 11pm and at precisely midnight he will inform Musclehead and I that he is going to lunch. It's strange that he would go to lunch only one hour into his shift. Since I've been staying so late into the night I wondered where the hell J1 was disappearing to. Hours after he should have been back on the production line jaw-jacking us to death I'll realize how still and quiet the test area is. Then I look up at the clock on the wall and I know he should have returned from lunch a long time ago. Musclehead told me most nights he doesn't come back at all. He doesn't want to get involved in the situation by going to management about J1's evaporation act, and to be honest neither do I. I have to assume J1 has enough vacation time saved up to leave work and he must be calling our boss and letting him know by voicemail that he's not working his shifts.

Woman Problems

J2 showed up in here on swing shift tonight. It was weird seeing him after all this time. He's still in the test area on dayshift, but since I've been working nights for so long now I've easily forgotten about all our dayshift idiots like him. I looked up from my workbench in the assembly area to see J2 walking down the hallway towards the test area in the back of the line. Something was different about the way he was walking and it struck me ass odd. He walked to a bench with a computer on it and immediately began web surfing. Supertech, Dung, and Musclehead also noticed J2 as soon as he sat down and I'm sure we all thought it was strange but nobody said anything. At least not for a few minutes after J2 settled in anyway. Then Musclehead opened his mouth.

Musclehead scooted his chair closer to where J2 was sitting and started in on him.
"What are you doing here at 11pm? You don't work on swingshift. You can't be here. Who do you think you are? A supervisor or something? Well, you're not. You can't just walk in here like you own the place and sit down like you're a manager and start using any computer you please." Musclehead was taunting him.
J2 mumbled some junk back at Musclehead but I couldn't hear anything he said.
Musclehead inched in further on J2 and got even closer. He said in a condescending voice, "Oh I know why you're here. You've got woman problems, don't you? You and the woman had a fight at home. That's why you're here, isn't it? Woman problems. Yep. It's woman problems. Hey everybody! J2 has woman problems!" He kept pecking at J2 with the woman problems angle. An evil grin was plastered on my face. Musclehead was doing an excellent job hassling J2. None of us like the guy.

Suddenly and without warning, J2 stood up red in the face and kicked his chair backwards away from him. A fraction of a second later, Musclehead was up from his chair and heading straight for J2 with his fists clenched at his sides ready to throw down. Supertech and I saw what was about to happen, a real brawl was going to take place. I certainly wasn't going to get in the way and neither was Supertech. Then the funniest thing happened. Dung ran up inbetween the ugly Latino lover and the dumb redneck and put his arms out like he was a scarecrow in a corn field. It was perfect timing, both J2 and Musclehead practically sandwiched the little Vietnamese technician between them. Dung yelled at both of them "Hey! No!" a bunch of times and kept his arms spread like he was crucified. Musclehead and J2 towered over Dung while glaring at each other without saying a word. I practically fell out of my chair laughing so hard at the sight of all three of them. Dung looked ridiculous hopping up and down with his arms out trying to keep these tall belligerents from doing battle with one another.

J2 turned around and left the production line. It was obvious to me that J2 was drunk. Musclehead went back to work laughing to himself. He was amused with himself and in some way felt victorious. I could hear it in his laughter. Dung stood in place where just a moment before two nitwits were going to punch the daylights out of each other. I got up and walked over to him and slapped him on the shoulder. I was still laughing and I told Dung he did a great job stopping the fight. He smiled. While I would have been more than happy to witness J2 being pummeled into the ground, Dung did the right thing. I made sure he understood that his intervention was noble. After the adrenaline faded he seemed pleased with himself.

We went back to work like nothing happened.

Shoot L'Avion

There are people from every walk of life, and from every corner of the globe working here at Bill and Dave's. I take advantage of this by talking as much as I can with employees from countries that I will never go to see. I learn so much from them because I ask questions until they get tired of it and tell me to go away. Most of the time though, once I get them talking you can't hardly get them to shut up. It's fun. Dung has been no exception, but he's been difficult to understand a majority of the time because his English is bad.

Dung grew up in the South of Vietnam during the height of the war. He's told me stories about when he was a little boy, he would walk out of his building into the streets to see people lying face down dead along the roads. I can't begin to imagine what that must have been like, how it made him feel. What would a child think upon seeing death that close? Would they become scared, or would they accept it and become accustomed to the death all around them? I've been thinking about it alot over the past few days. I don't know how I would have reacted as a child experiencing such things and I'm fascinated pondering about it.

As a young man he decided Communism wasn't where it was at. His brothers, both younger and older than he was also wanted to escape Vietnam and hopefully make it to a country in Europe or to the United States. Dung said there was only two ways out of the country, either by crossing a heavily mined border or by boat. One of his older brothers tried the land route with two of his buddies a few years before Dung himself got up enough courage to try to his own escape. His older brother was killed by a land mine, so he decided it would be better to attempt the boat trip instead. For many years I've heard stories about Vietnamese boat people. I didn't give it much thought until Dung told me how many of them never make it to another country. People who attempt the perils of travelling on the open sea to leave Vietnam behind fall prey to pirates. Pirates know these desperate Vietnamese will carry anything of value to use as currency for bribes or whatever when they make landfall someplace else. So the pirates catch their boats, ransack their belongings for their valuables, and then sink their boat and leave them to drown. Dung's trip out was lucky though, he made it to a refugee camp in another country and got a sponsor who invited him and one of his brothers to Atlanta, Georgia. They've been in the United States for about ten years.

Dung is a total screwball. We talk late at night on the line about all kinds of insane shit. I don't know where he comes up with this crap, but it's funny as hell and very strange at the same time. The other night he walked over to where I was working and said to me, "You seeeeee you cannot seeeeee. You eat the shitfish!" As he was announcing this to me he made a sweeping gesture into the air with both his hands. "I eat the shitfish, huh?" He looked at me and said "Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah." This is how most of our evening conversations start off.

"Shoot L'Avion." Dung said to me.
"Shoot the what?"
"Shoot L'Avion. Yeah. Yeah yeah."
"I don't get it."
"Shoot the plane. You seeeeeeee."
"Shoot the plane? Shoot what plane and what do you shoot it with?"
He went on to explain in a very roundabout way that in his home growing up as a little boy he had to share a bedroom with one of his brothers. They had a model plane one of them built and hung it from the ceiling over their beds with string. They would lie there on their beds at night and pull on themselves to try and blow a load, and hit the model airplane with their spunk. I couldn't believe he was telling me this shit like it was all normal behavior. I laughed at him. "Shoot the plane. I get it. Nice." I said to him.
"Yeah, yeah yeah. Shoot the plane!"
Fuckin' crackpot.

I asked him to start teaching me some Vietnamese. I said to him, "Dung, how do I say in Vietnamese that I like very young women?" He thought about it for a few moments and said, "You say, TIK-CON-GUY."
"Tik-Con-Gai? Just like that?"
"Yeah. Yeah yeah. That mean you like VERY young women."
I practiced saying it over and over again while he perfected my inflection and enunciations of the words until he was satisfied I was speaking it like he would. Didn't take too long and we were both laughing like fiends. Then I asked him, "Okay. So how do I say I like to grab big tits?"
He thought about it for a minute. Then he said, "You say BOB-YOO-BUH."
That really cracked me up. It sounded like clown language to me, not Vietnamese. Then I started thinking to myself, hey what if this shit he's telling me to say is completely different shit and he's just setting me up for a serious practical joke? I had no way of knowing until I tested my Vietnamese out on some unsuspecting victims. I went with it, for the time being.
"Bob-U-Buh." I said it over and over again until Dung assured me I was speaking it perfectly. I practiced it methodically saying it in a low tone of voice as I worked at my benches in the assembly area each night for the rest of the week.

One evening I got a perfect chance to try out my Vietnamese skills. Late in the shift two older Vietnamese women were walking down one of the main aisleways. I spotted them heading towards a coffee station near the cross junction at the center of our floor in the building. I recognized one of the women, but I didn't know her well. Her name was Wah. The other lady I knew as Wah's walking partner, but I didn't know her name. Each night they would walk together around the building to get a little excercise on their two ten minute breaks. I crept over to the edge of our production area and stooped down slightly behind a cubicle wall so neither woman could see me. I listened to them chatter away in Vietnamese for a couple seconds and then I said in a loud booming voice "BOB YOOO BUH!"

Their chatter instantly ceased and I heard their feet pattering around in the hallway back and forth. It seemed they were looking for one of the lecherous Vietnamese technicians that worked in the production areas, and they yelled one of their names a couple of times to see if he was working. Heh. Guess I said it well enough for them to get it and I maybe framed some old guy in the process. Sweet. Just to be sure they didn't think I could ever have possibly said such a thing to them, I calmly stepped out of the area and into the hallway where they were. I pretended to get a cup of horrible gas station coffee from the nearby coffee stand and watched them. For a split second I caught the women looking at me and then looking at each other as if to say, "Could whitey round-eye have said he likes big tits to us in our own language?" But then they dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come and continued looking for old Vietnamese guy.

Man, this is gonna be amusing to no end. My screwball Vietnamese coach will be teaching me all sorts of badness to say to them in no time. Sometimes, I really love where I work.

Sparky

If you complain loud enough, long enough, someone in Bill and Dave's company might hear you.

The Ergonomics department decided to set up an appointment between Gary, myself, and two Ergo engineers to discuss the confiscated Hubie cart situation and come up with a rapid solution. My back and neck were giving me alot of grief since we were forced to work with the shorter instrument carts. I was angry about that and even more angry these people threw out what I considered to be useful equipment without even asking anyone on the line for their opinions first.

Sparky is a white haired man who walks with a severe limp. I see him from time to time waddling down the hallways of our building. I have no idea if his hip was crushed or if he's got a bad leg but I figure his injury was job related. Most of the time he wears a plain white t-shirt and jeans. If he was bald he would look alot like Mr. Clean. He's a senior engineer in the safety department and although I haven't had much if any real dealings with him, I just don't like the man. At our appointment Sparky brought along with him a new-hire fresh out of engineering school. I smelled rookie as soon as I saw the guy. I didn't catch his name. He's got glasses and curly blondish hair and a very boyish face. Looks like he could have still been in high school. I am highly suspect of green engineers. I've seen too many of them come out of college and arrive as a software engineer, or an electrical or mechanical engineer and completely fail on the job in no time. The problem is they're all incredibly book smart and know their theory well, but many of them can't make the leap from their college textbooks and theory into the real world. Those that do make the leap generally turn out to be kick ass engineers. It's a 50-50 chance of trial by fire, I guess.

We explained to Sparky and the new Ergo engineer guy that we were experiencing physical pain on a daily basis because of using our new, shorter instrument carts that are supposedly "safe" from tipping over. And we proposed an immediate solution. Put in an order with a local fabrication shop to build a half dozen carts with the taller specs. Gary and I reasoned that this should only cost a couple hundred bucks. Neither one of us wanted to see company money wasted on some elaborate ergonomic solution that would take many months to put in place. Sparky and his shadow thought it over for a few minutes and told us they'd get back to us soon. This was all they would say to us and I was aggrivated about it. I wanted instant closure and get a timeframe of when we would have proper equipment back on the line. That didn't seem like too much to ask.

Punks.

Ergonomic Freaks

Ergonomics - 1. The applied science of equipment design, as for the workplace, intended to maximize productivity by reducing operator fatigue and discomfort. 2. The study of the design and arrangement of equipment so that people will interact with the equipment in healthy, comfortable, and efficient manner. As related to computer equipment, ergonomics is concerned with such factors as the physical design of the keyboard, screens, and related hardware, and the manner in which people interact with these hardware devices.

Freak - 1. A thing or occurrence that is markedly unusual or irregular. 2. An abnormally formed organism, especially a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity. 3. An eccentric or nonconformist person.

Here at Bill and Dave's company you can never have enough Ergonomics Assessors. There's a virtual army of them lurking about. At any time they can magically appear in your area and descend upon you causing nothing but hardship and woe. What is an Ergonomics Assessor, you ask? It's a no-good one legged human with red eyes and a single yellow fang. Did I mention they are henchmen of Satan? Actually, it's a handicapped person whose full time job is to investigate the circumstances that lead to an employee's on the job injury. Or, they can investigate potential injury situations and make necessary changes to equipment and tooling so no injury ever takes place. Sounds good so far doesn't it? In reality, these people try to hoodwink you into thinking you're being hurt on the job every day. And they attempt to get you to buy in to their schemes. If you don't go along with them for whatever reasons, no matter how sound they may be, Ergo Assessors will come down on you hard like a ton of bricks. Basically, I've determined them to be nothing more than a dangerous nuisance.

Ergo Assessors work in devious ways. First, they'll inform you that your company area/site/division has the worst injury record in the company. I've had them approach me like this in a few different divisions and it's all bullshit. Next, they will inform you of an extremely important change they have to make in order to keep those injuries down and save the company loads of money. They will tell you that your most effective tool, or your best chair has to go away immediately because you're "at risk". Swiftly, they will spirit away your equipment no matter how much you protest and replace that equipment with substandard garbage. You're stuck with it, there's no recourse.

This scenario is what some of us refer to as "tell mode". Tell Mode is where the Ergo Freak comes into your space and tells you what equipment you're going to use, when you are going to use it, and how you are going to use it. Complain all you like it won't make any difference, their ears are closed. Ironically this is to a large extent the exact opposite of what their job really is. They are supposed to listen to the operator's input and take recommendations from the people actually using the tooling or equipment. "Work smarter, not harder!" is what they will holler back at you with a fiendish smile over your protests as they seize your best torque drivers and favorite comfy chair.

With few exceptions almost all of the Ergo Freaks have been seriously injured at one time or other on the job. They have crushed hips, bum legs, or blown out wrists from carpal tunnel. Bill and Dave's company thinks it's a wonderful idea to hire on the job injured employees as Ergo Assessors because it makes them passionate about keeping other employees from suffering the same injuries and pain that they have had to go through. What I have observed is that these Ergo Freaks have a vendetta against the company and instead they try to help questionable employees falsify questionable injuries so that they in turn can claim lucrative disability packages. It's a really fucked up revenge scene. Someday I'd like to catch one of them red-handed and have them busted down. It's a dream of mine...

The hunt for our prized tall Hubie carts seized by the Ergonomics team came to a sudden halt. We called their department to discover that they hauled the carts off site to be scrapped. Bastards. They told us the reason why they removed them from the production line is they were too tall and a 100 pound instrument could tip over and seriously hurt someone. Oh dear. It's never happened once on our line, and to our knowledege it's never happened anywhere in the entire company. Gary and I are now on a mission to make the Ergo Freaks pay for their crimes. Thanks to them we are in pain on a daily basis and we want our Hubie Carts back, God dammit!

Hubie Carts

Instrument lines at Bill and Dave's company all use a kind of in-house engineered mounting cart for building and testing our boxes on the shop floor. Some people call them Hubie Carts, others call them R2 Carts, after R2D2 from the Star Wars movies. No matter which name you call them by, everyone on instrument production lines knows what they are. Each cart is made out of rectangular metal tubing that has been welded into a frame with two arms that stand approximately 4 feet tall. The bottom of the cart frame has four wheels spread out in such a way that the carts are almost impossible to tip over, especially when they have a heavy test instrument mounted on them.

In the assembly area Hubie Carts are king. It makes boxes easy to work on and push around between test and the assembly groups. Myself and my dayshift counterpart Gary have really come to appreciate these carts. While we're doing the final assembly of the boxes we have a instrument chassis that we load up with close to 100 pounds of electronics. A box on the cart can be accessed at almost any angle by spinning it end over end or in a 360 degree circle. To lock the box in a good position for soldering or bolting up a board mod one of the cart's mounting arms has a sprocket gear and a spring loaded catch. Makes it easy and fast to get the right angle and hold the unit there.

Gary and I came in to work one day recently to find all our Hubie Carts had been removed from the area and replaced with a new model, but they were about a third of the size. Both of us were like, "What the fuck?" We asked around to try to find out who took them away and get them back, but nobody knew anything. We had no choice but to begin using the new, shorter Hubies. After a couple of days working with these midget carts I started to notice my back and neck were causing me some pain. I suspected the pain was being caused by the shorter carts. I had to stoop over in my chair to work on the units, or strain my neck to see something on the boxes I was building where previously with the taller carts it wasn't necessary. Gary was having the same problems it turned out. Both of us were pissed off. Our anger grew at whoever was responsible for taking away our original carts.

In the next few days Gary and I kept digging to solve the mystery of the missing, taller Hubies. We finally got a break in the case when someone mentioned "Ergo" to us. Ahah! Those dirty Ergo bastards probably had something to do with this. It all began to make some sense to me, I should have known. Those shifty, evil, Ergo Assessors probably had noticed our tall instrument carts months ago after we arrived here from the Spokane division. They must have hatched a secret plan to eliminate our equipment for some dumb reason or other. I hate those guys. Nothing good ever happens when the Ergo freaks are involved. Like thieves in the night they appear and remove equipment and tooling under the guise of protecting you from yourself. They've already taken away my superior pneumatic pistol grip torque drivers and replaced them with weak electric torque drivers and mounted them on overhead booms that keep hitting me in the face at my workbench. I'm still mad as hell about that one. Anyway, we finally had a lead on the missing carts. Now all we had to do is start making some phone calls to the Ergonomics department and get our shit back...

8.13.1997

Nothing really new is going on at work. Downright boring, actually. I did have enough to stay busy tonight though. I even milked two hours of overtime out of the joint. To amuse myself during the shift I've started terrorizing Wingnut Dan over on the Precision line next to our area. Dan is in the Army Reserves and he knows J1 got out of the regular Army in the last couple of years. I noticed J1 has been talking Army stuff to Dan every chance he gets, and Dan doesn't like it. During the J1 lectures Dan doesn't tell him to shut up and go away because he's trying to be polite. I've been making fun of Dan while J1 is jaw-jacking him to death. I usually lurk somewhere behind J1 but in plain view of Dan and I point and laugh or make stupid faces to try to get Dan to lose his composure. God, how I love to be a nuisance to some of my coworkers.

Lately I've been telling Dan that J1 is going to re-enlist in the Army Reserves just so he can hang out with him on weekends. Dan doesn't think it's funny. He's been trying to downplay it but I've been doing a great job staying real serious as I talk to him. I think I have Dan pretty concerned that J1 will be in his unit soon. Dan already went to Musclehead and Supertech to find out if I'm making all this shit up or lying about it, but I got to them first so they're playing along with me nicely. They're helping build the tension. I hope to have Dan thoroughly stressed out on this by next week.

Saw Dave at lunch today. Talked a bunch of smack with him.

I've been slipping with my mouth again. I gotta get control of it pronto or someone's gonna overhear me in the area and I'm gonna get fired. The problem is Musclehead. He's really loud and crude and he gets me started talking crazy shit and I forget where I am. And that J1 guy, I hate him so much that I say abusive stuff to him all the time now. He's so annoying. My new tactic with J1 is to walk away from him while he's in the middle of telling me one of his dumb stories. It's because I don't care about a damn thing he says. He will be mired in mid-sentence and I will do an about-face and leave just to be as rude as possible. He seems hurt by it but if I don't abruptly walk away he will keep me there for a minimum of 30 to 45 minutes while he babbles away in my general direction. It's pure junk.

Tomorrow I have to be at work by two in the afternoon for that useless "line meeting" with Squirmy and the Dayshift freaks. It's gonna suck real bad.

J1 Stories

I knew J1 was a genuine weirdo when I first met him in the Spokane site, but I had no idea how truly screwed up this guy was until I've been stuck dealing with him late at night. J1 shows up for Graveyard around 11pm, or midnight to start his shift. I've been working so much overtime lately and I start my shift late in the afternoon so I've been partially working into the early Graveyard hours. In the past couple of weeks I've been exposed to the nonstop rambling of J1's mouth. I get the feeling from listening to him every night that he was one of those kids who got beat up alot in school and tried to make friends by telling lies, instead of just being himself. I'm already so tired of hearing him that I've been seriously considering wearing earplugs or bringing in a walkman so I can drown out the sound of his voice. I'm not the only one getting tired of hearing him. Musclehead is about ready to dismantle him limb from limb. I can't wait to watch the bloodbath. It's gonna be fun.

The other night Musclehead and Supertech were at the back end of the line and Musclehead was talking about how many DUIs he's gotten in the last few years. He seems kinda proud of the fact he's been busted multiple times for driving extremely drunk. He's an idiot, but anyway all of a sudden J1 busts into their conversation and says something like "I got a DUI." Musclehead got bright red in the face, yanked the ballcap off his head and threw it on the floor so hard that it made a loud slapping noise. He stayed in his chair and pointed his finger right at J1's face and practically screamed at him, "Shut the fuck up J1 you ain't got no DUI!" Then J1 tried to speak again and Musclehead repeated himself, even more forcefully, "Shut the fuck up J1 you ain't got no DUI! Just shut the fuck up!" From where I was sitting at my bench I could see everything and I was laughing out loud. J1 kept trying to tell his story only to have Musclehead shout him into silence. After a few minutes J1 meekly said to all of us as he was staring at his feet, "You're right. I never got a DUI." Now we knew for sure what we suspected for a long time. J1 makes all this crap up about himself hoping that we will like him or something. Pathetic.

So here's some of the J1 stories we've had thrown on us so far:

-J1 got hit in the head with an Abrams tank round. Apparently J1 was in the Army and got out two years ago. He claimed he was hit in the head by the recoil of the M1's main gun firing and this he says, now gives him seizures. I can believe the seizure part, but most of us are quite certain if he got hit in the head by the recoil of an artillery tube that he would simply be dead. It's just too fantastic, and idiotic to be true.

-J1 is the only survivor of his Army unit. He's told us that at a US Army training excercise a few years ago, everyone but himself was killed by live fire artillery rounds while they were on manuvers. Uh, yeah. Right.

-They don't make condoms big enough for J1's size. He's told the women on the line over and over again that they don't make condoms big enough for him. Slobbering Mouth Kid brought in a wind sock and put it on J1's tech bench. On the wind sock he wrote "J1's condom." That was funny, but it didn't get him to shut up about it, sadly.

-J1 rescued his current wife from a child kidnapping ring back in New Jersey. Whatever. He also used to be a bouncer at a strip club and a race car driver. Here's the thing you have to know about this puke and keep in mind. He's over six feet tall but he's so scrawny he'd blow away in a light wind. He's got no muscle, no mass whatsoever. He's like a balding, blonde haired Ichabod Crane with a huge hook nose and beady little eyes. So do any of us take him seriously when he tells us he was a bouncer or a race car driver? Fuck no. We just laugh at him every time his back is turned on us.

-J1 holds the world's record for how many times he's been in the theater to see Star Wars. Um, no. We did the math on how old he is, and we figured out his age would have had to be about three years old when Star Wars first came out. Who in the hell would let a toddler hang out in a movie theater that many times? No one would. He's chock full of poo.

-He fought the New Jersey mob and exposed their illegal toxic waste dumps, somehow. That's just too kooky to take seriously. Ever.

Line Attrition

People have been leaving our area as fast as possible. Each employee who came on the Spokane transfer committed to working a minimum of 18 months before being eligible to look for another job inside the company. Management was afraid that if they spent the time and money to train us up on these products, employees would split whenever they felt like it and waste the tremendous investment they made in each of us. Some of them discovered a loophole though. Bill and Dave's cannot prevent them from taking a job in a higher position, that is a promotion. Since they discovered this some of our more unreliable and useless workers have been bullshitting their way into higher level jobs. And there's nothing our supervisors can do about it.

On one hand I'm glad to see some of these people leave because I personally don't like most of them and I'm happy to be rid of them. On the other hand I'm worried because the replacements they've brought in so far are pretty fucked up. Some of them are brand new to the company and got hired in straight out of school, others seem to be deadbeats that were problem employees in other areas. Now we've got a dangerous mix of green technicians, problem employees, and lingering weirdos from the Spokane days.

Swingshift and Graveyard on my line has become much more colorful. By that, I mean confrontational and explosive. The new technicians we got at night are Dung, and Musclehead. Musclehead is a young redneck that recently finished up his technical degree in electronics at a local junior college and Dung came from some other part of the company. I forget where. Both of them are real green as technicians. We unfortunately are stuck with J1, but he's moved to Graveyard shift. Supertech and I are getting along great, and the two of us are sitting back and watching all the mayhem between these guys. There's also some interaction on swingshift now with the Precision Group next door which probably won't be good for us. Too many losers, goofballs, and freaks on that line.

VCO Hell

Well, it's finally happened. I've been trying to avoid working on the VCO assemblies on this product family since I got hired in. They hit me up recently and now I've got to train up on them and take over for Slobbering Mouth Kid. He's leaving to work on another product transfer so I've been tapped on the shoulder to be one of the VCO gurus. Squirrel is also working on VCOs but she sucks at building and testing them, like most of the assemblers. The VCOs are the real heart of this instrument. Each box gets a matched set of the Voltage Controlled Oscillators and it's what gives the units their impressive phase noise characteristics. VCOs are a motherfucker to build though, believe me. All of the parts are tiny and very delicate. I've already mutilated, crushed, and burned some of the materials trying to build my first couple of sets. You could practically sneeze on these things and completely destroy them. It's that easy.

Each VCO is about the size of the palm of my hand. It's a little rectangular box that's made up of 17 or 18 glass pin diodes that are soldered into two identical paper thin copper plated boards. They have to be soldered into pairs and then the copper boards are folded carefully to form half a box shape. Under them are placed clear acrylic blocks and a mounting plate with a few copper threaded slugs. On the top of the whole assembly there's a single tiny thru-hole PC board that has to be mounted together. Then the whole thing has to be tested by hand and tuned. The tuning process is mainly just running the copper threaded slugs up and down inside the acrylic blocks until you get the desired radio frequency band out of each section. It ain't easy because making the slightest adjustment to the copper slugs or accidentally bumping the whole thing while it's under test could throw it all out of whack. I've already had to start over from the beginning of the test process a couple of times 'cause I fucked up. Very frustrating.

I was actually afraid of being forced to work on these miserable little cubes and I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. Hopefully if I can get really good at building and testing them it won't be so bad, but that's probably going to take a minimum of six months before I'll be reasonably good at it. Damn that's a long time. The extra bummer is I'm still going to have all my other responsibilities on the line. This is just one extra job that's now on my daily plate. So I've got chassis to build, power supplies, board modules, card cages, front panel displays, phase mods, frequency doublers, and the evil little VCOs. Oh yeah and I almost forgot about the "Stealth Box". I build that now, too. I'm the only person left in the entire company that can build or repair it. Sheesh.

6.1.1997

Man I'm in a weird mood. I think it's a combination of stress and depression. Throw in a little boredom, and that's where I'm at. I've had alot on my mind lately. Dad's totally had it with the Oldsmobile so he's paying to have it towed out of his garage tomorrow morning. He was rude as usual on the phone, and like most of our past conversations he hangs up on me without saying goodbye. I despise him. When he called today Jennifer answered the phone and Dad made a comment to her that she "broke his deck." A few weeks ago when Jennifer and I were at my parent's place, she went out on a second story balcony deck off of the livingroom to pet one of their cats. As she walked out to where the cat was sitting, a board gave way under her weight that was rotten and her foot went through. She could have been seriously injured. So, she broke his deck. What an asshole.

5.26.1997

Still haven't moved the Oldsmobile. Mom just called me here a little while ago to ask if I was moving it out of their garage today. I hadn't planned on it and I told her there were three cars blocking my driveway so I wouldn't be able to get it positioned up against the garage here at Jennifer's place. She got mad and hung up on me. Before she did though, she said Dad did a drive-by to see if my driveway was blocked with cars parked out front and said there wasn't. That was yesterday. Dad didn't stop to say hello or anything, he just drove on down the road. Petty jerk.

I'm increasingly unhappy here with Jennifer. Nothing is ever going to change between her and I. So, I talked with Senor 23 and Eddie again about moving back to B Street with them and they were optimistic about the idea. Those two white trash room mates with the meth/tattoo action are being evicted by the property manager so they'll have two rooms open soon. That's great news for me. I don't know where else I would have been able to move to with rent as cheap as B Street is. In a way, moving into the bachelor pad again will seem like a step backwards. I moved in with the woman because it seemed like the thing to do and I felt like I was growing up. Being with Jennifer has been a disaster though, and hanging out at B Street will at least be fun.

5.17.1997

It's three in the morning and my cock stinks.

I fucked Jennifer this afternoon before work, but I ate her out first. Man, her pussy was extra putrid smelling today. As I was going down on her I spotted some dandruff in her fur. Fucking revolting. I'm amazed I didn't gag. I don't like going down on Jennifer because she never really cleans herself all that great, and she tastes damn bad. Always has. There's this local greasy spoon diner called Ingram's Chili Bowl, and Jennifer's snatch tastes like Ingram's chili smells. That's why I can never eat their chili. Makes me want to puke every time that scent hits my nose hairs. It's okay though, I always order the same thing without chili, two scrambled eggs with hash browns and a hamburger patty fried to perfection. I wash it all down with Miller Genuine Draft in bottles.

Work was junk. Nobody was there except for me and this new guy. He's Vietnamese and no fooling his name is Dung. I can't hardly understand a damn thing he says to me because his English is really poor. So it's like playing charades trying to figure out what he's getting at. He got hired in as a technician and they put him in my area on swingshift. I don't know what to think about this, yet.

I haven't moved the Oldsmobile over here from my parent's garage. Dad's gonna kill me. Oh well, he will probably be dead soon enough anyway and then it won't matter.

5.12.1997

Mom has been having bad luck lately. A while back she fell down at home and broke her toe. She's had all sorts of problems with Dad going screwy mental on her, and more recently she got into a car accident. Oh, and she had another bad fall at her home.

The car accident took place when she was coming home from work. Coincidentally the man that hit her was a coworker of hers, he rear-ended her car twice because he kept fucking around with the tape deck in his car instead of paying attention to the road ahead. The dumbshit. Last week Mom fell down again on the front steps of my parent's house and smacked her head on the concrete driveway. This time she badly bruised the whole right side of her body and she had to go to the emergency room to have about a half dozen metal staples shot into her noggin. It's very nasty to look at. I've seen it twice now, once at work a couple of days after it happened, and then this past weekend at my parent's place. I brought Jennifer with me and I think Mom was enjoying showing off her battle damage to us during the visit.

I've been really unhappy with my living situation. Jennifer has become more of a room mate than a girlfriend and in a way, I'm miserable about it. I've already talked to the guys back at the B Street house about me moving back in with them. Nothing is available there right now. I wouldn't want to be there at the moment anyway, Senor 23 tells me two of their newest room mates are white trash that have turned one of the livingrooms into a makeshift meth/tattoo shop. So when and if I do split from Jennifer's place it's probably going to be someplace else instead of B Street. I'm stressed out about the situation.

Work has been okay. Squirmy gave me a salary increase, $240 a month raise. That's pretty good. But every night when I leave there to come home I always feel like I'm gonna get fired for something when I show up to work the next day. It's all just in my head, I guess. On my breaks, and sometimes after the shift is over I goof around on the internet looking up and printing out all kinds of crap that interests me. I don't have a computer at home so I find stuff about the 1968 Cougar, video games, and Russian mail order brides. Actually there's a few of us on swingshift that have been fascinated with the Russian mail order bride websites. We've noticed the women pictured there are either drop dead gorgeous or they are ugly like I've never seen ugly before. I mean, that kind of ugly is unnatural.

4.10.1997

I've been working massive amounts of overtime lately. Last week I got 62 hours in, this week is easily going to be another 60+ hour work week. All I do these days is work, surf on the internet when my shift is over, come home to drink beer and eat, play videogames and sleep. I repeat that in the same order every day. Jennifer has been pissed off that I've been working so much because she doesn't see me much anymore. At least not when I'm awake anyway. It doesn't really matter, we've grown further apart rapidly since my return from Spokane. We have very little in common with each other and all she wants to do is watch TV. When I'm home all I want to do is fire up a videogame console on my own TV and drink beer.

Daydreaming About Toothless

Toothless has really been pushing me over the edge lately. Every day when I come in to work I find her sitting at her bench with all her personal bills spread out on the tabletop in front of her. She spends most of her shift balancing her checkbook, doing her finances, and yammering away on the phone. Her calls are personal, not business related. All of her activities are being done on company time and she never makes this wasted time up. This doesn't include all the other time she pisses away wandering around the hallways of the building bullshitting with her friends and her man, Golden Boy.

She leaves at the end of her eight hour shift every day like normal and we get close to zero work out of her. It's crippling the assembly area. She's supposed to be building PC board modules, power supplies, card cages, and front panel displays. The last straw for me was just the other day. She got the idea she needed to have a Walkman CD player at her workbench so she could listen to tunes while she's doing her bills and shit. She left work and drove two towns away to go buy one, came back to work hours later, and then left at the end of her shift like she had been there working all day. I can't believe she gets away with this shit. If I tried anything like that I know they'd haul me out of here by the scruff of my neck and toss me out the front gate to the site.

I can't help but notice all of this chronic nonperformance because it's so blatant. I'm disgusted and angry on the inside as I watch Toothless sitting there each day in her shiny minidresses, sucking down enough Slim Fast to kill a small dog, fucking around filing her nails at her bench doing nothing but talk on the phone while hard workers like myself pick up the slack for deadbeats like her. I despise people on the job like nothing else when I have to carry their weight as well as mine. I daydream of employees like her being viciously fired from their jobs, or even better, I daydream of having them wiped out. It's the only way I can get through the workday. Sometimes I have visions of pointing a death ray gun at Toothless and pulling the trigger. She would be vaporized in a ball of blinding white light and I would be joyful about it. She's such a waste of skin and space I'd like to make her shed every last molecule of her blood. It's a good thing I don't have any superpowers or anything because I certainly would make her body explode with my telekinetic brain waves, if I had them. If I had super strength I could simply crush her like a scrapped automobile. That would be fun. I feel better already just thinking about it.

3.15.1997

Dave got hired in here at Bill and Dave's. So did Barney, but he's a temp for now. It's cool they've made the leap here from TDS. Barney will be working in stores on dayshift and Dave doesn't know what product line he's going to end up on yet. I guess a week before Dave quit TDS, he mistakenly told some of the engineers we worked with there that he was going to be making close to twenty three dollars an hour in a technician position here at Bill and Dave's company. So the engineers were pissed off at TDS management because Dave would be making much more loot than they do and he's in a lower level job compared to them. TDS isn't very competative when it comes to industry wages.

I thought it was hilarious their engineers were angry about Dave's starting wage here and the fact that they brought the issue up with TDS managament. It's not like they can really do anything about it because TDS corporate is keeping tightwad control of their spending. Nobody at TDS can ever be eligible for more than a 4% wage increase once a year, and that doesn't mean anyone would ever actually get that whopping 4%. Most of the time they give totally weak 1%-2% raises. That's why I quit. Working in some sectors of the Defense Industry (even if it is high end electronics) doesn't mean you're going to be paid well. In reality, Dave is going to be making about fourteen bucks an hour to start as a tech with us here at Bill and Dave's. Somehow he got confused between his hourly starting rate of pay and his monthly gross salary. Geek.

Work has been a continued disappointment for me. In addition to all the personality problems with my coworkers and political junk with managers, my new supervisor has turned out to be another lemon. The Drunk has been moved to some R&D lab position to bring out a new VXI technology product so the rumor she was leaving turned out to be accurate. Good riddance. Her replacement is Squirmy. Myself and a technician on the line I call Supertech refer to our boss as Squirmy because that's what he does. He squirms his way out of dealing with problem situations and constantly shifts his responsibilities to others around him any way he can. He's adept at skirting line issues. I know more about what Squirmy occupies himself with outside of work than what he really is supposed to be doing here on the job. He's constantly wandering through the production area running his mouth about his personal life. A good amount of that time is spent yapping about golf. I hate golf. Sometimes I call Squirmy the Golf Pro.

Supertech is pretty cool. He was on the Spokane transfer but I never saw him the whole three and a half months I was there. He worked on one of the other product lines that we never had any day to day dealings with. Funny thing is, his product was obsoleted less than two weeks after they de-transfered it to California. All of the employees that trained up on that product line were left holding the bag and had to be shuffled off to other areas practically overnight. We got Supertech and a wingnut assembler by the name of Dan. Supertech seems like he really knows what he's doing. He's got years of experience from working as an electronic technician in the US Navy, and he's been working in the industry for a long time. I get the feeling he's very sharp and I like his personality alot. We've been kidding around on swingshift and having a good time. It's been a nice change from what I've been used to lately.

Our product line was moved on the floor of our building again. I swear this place is like musical chairs. Every time you turn your back it seems some area has been ordered by managers to move someplace else in the building, or someplace else in the factory campus. I don't get it. The latest move put us on the other side of the hallway from where we were before, which was like 20 feet away. We had to stop production, power down all our test racks, and pack everything up just to move the entire line right across the hall. Stupid. Next to us they've moved in the Precision Instruments Group and the only thing separating our two groups is a tall section of cubicle wall. I'd like to put the razor wire on top of that wall and keep those fools away from us.

I don't know many of the people on that line but I've heard nothing but bad stuff about their people since the Spokane gig. Some of their folks turned their line into a Dayshift vs. Swingshift war zone and even managed to turn it into a California employee vs. Washington employee war zone on top of that while we were up there. I was glad to not have been involved in that shit. Ironically, the Precision instruments they build were supposed to replace the ones I currently work on but they have never really matched the performance specs of these older boxes. It's a testament to how impressive this box still is after all this time. It originally came out of the R&D labs in the 1970s and the replacement product line for it came out in the early 1980s. We keep selling these old monsters though, and from what I hear they are a cash cow for the company.