Dingbat Fink

Squirmy hassled us severely about people who have been playing "a videogame" late on swing shift. All of us pretended to know nothing about it. I'm sure he figured out we were lying through our teeth. Out of frustration that no one came forward and told the truth and partially out of a petty desire to exert his control over us, Squirmy has contacted site IT. Their diabolical plan is to be here in the afternoon tomorrow to locate copies of Quake 2 on our PCs and eradicate it. I talked with Frau Regenbogen and he agrees that we can't allow mere sub-humans like Squirmy, site IT, and a single dingbat housewife the opportunity to ruin our good times.

Frau Regenbogen claimed he could completely hide the Quake 2 .exe file so site IT could never find the program. He also promised to set it up in the run menu with a command line that only a few of us will know about. I was certain Squirmy was going to follow through with his threat so I asked the good Frau to get on with it and make the necessary changes in the PCs as fast as possible. Goofy as he is, Frau Regenbogen got right on it when no one was looking. Like a pollen crazed bumble bee he went to each PC and made his sneaky changes to the Quake 2 program files. First, he renamed the Quake 2 folder and .exe file to something random like 9t.doc. Then he set it up so it would only launch from the run menu of each machine with a seemingly innocent and completely unrelated command line. Those of us in on the covert plan committed the run menu command to memory. We won't know if this deviousness succeeds until after site IT has arrived and attempted to purge our PCs of evil.

So how did this become an issue? We got kinda sloppy about when we fired up Quake 2. Normally we only did battle with the Network guys after 10 or 11pm when the majority of swing shift employees had gone home for the night. Most of us are so totally hooked on Q2 that we had to get in a deathmatch fix a little earlier in the evening on our nine o'clock break. One of the Precision Group dingbat housewives was still here. I think it was Super Shopper. Anyway, the dingbat saw us having fun and instantly her "no one around me can have fun" switch flipped. She apparently finked on us to Squirmy and he blew a gasket over the whole thing. It's really not a big deal. The Network supervisor is cool with it so there's no reason why Squirmy shouldn't be down. I don't dare tell him about Network though because I don't want to take the risk of him going over there and raising hell with their people too.

Go Read A Phone Book

Eat Monster has been shuffled around the instrument line from job to job and she managed to fuck everything up no matter where she was assigned. In my opinion, she's been a total waste. The other day Supertech caught her sitting in a conference room reading a phone book, cover to cover. He spied on her through the conference room door window and hot-footed it back to the line to tell me about it. Supertech was busting up with laughter while he described Eat Monster's intense concentration as she looked over advertisements in the yellow pages. It never crossed my mind that someone could actually read a phone book like it was a novel or something, but there she was thumbing through the business listings completely captivated. We mentioned the phone book episode to Squirmy. He seemed to like the idea of Eat Monster sitting in a conference room staying out of trouble, and if all it took was a phone book to keep her from ruining parts or causing herself bodily harm then so be it. Squirmy told Eat Monster that if she would like to come in to work and read the phone book for eight hours a day that was okay with him. This week that's all she has been doing and she seems very enthusiastic about it. She is all smiles and happy like when one of us tells her there is free food to be had somewhere in the building. It's entirely wacky. The Nurse and Squirmy are continuing to check on her through the shift just to make certain Eat Monster is alive and breathing. I sure hope Squirmy has some kind of battle plan up his sleeve for jettisoning this freak.

Network vs. Signal

My buddy Dave is on the Network line, I'm in Signal. Our groups don't hate each other or anything, and we work on completely different test instruments. We don't have any opportunity for direct rivalry or competition but we also don't interact much. You're pretty much isolated to the products you work on and for the most part only socialize with the people in your area. Outside of that, each product line is sort of it's own little world. Here at Bill and Dave's company we happen to have a super fast network for data transfer from building to building, and site to site, worldwide. Nobody ever uses it for anything fun. At least not that I'm aware of.

A new game from ID Software came out recently called Quake 2. The shareware demo has multiplayer capability and we have snuck it onto a half dozen of our PCs up here in Signal like it's some sort of crime. The Network guys have got the okay from their boss to screw around playing Quake 2 as long as it's on their breaks or they're off work for the evening. Up here in Signal we haven't bothered to find out if it's cool with the powers that be mainly because Squirmy probably won't be down with it. We're just loading it up and playing. It's been a blast. Late at night before some of us head home we hop on and brawl against the Network guys. Dave and his crew have pretty much handed our asses to us consistently. It's still a good time. I don't have anything to do after work anymore. Nothing going on at home and nobody to go home to, so it's really the only thing I look forward to each evening before leaving work.

Just Another Day

It's been a couple of weeks since Eat Monster sampled some premium voltage flowing through her limbs. Much to my surprise she hasn't managed to harm herself anywhere else on the instrument line. I avoid her as much as I can on the line, but sometimes no matter what I do, I'm forced to converse with this beast. She informed me the reason why she farts all the time is because of her medicine. Eat Monster claims it's a side effect. I never asked nor did I want to know why she is frequently backfiring on us all. Too much information. It took us a few days to notice it, but Eat Monster has developed a new behavior that was as unexpected as her ability to no longer cause herself injury. She has been disappearing from the production area for most of the shift. What she does is sneak off the line when she thinks none of us are looking and she hides out in darkened conference rooms. We have discovered her sound asleep a number of times in random conference rooms on our floor of the building. It's weird. The Nurse comes in at least once every other night to look in on Eat Monster and Squirmy takes up the duty the rest of the time. I hope they are documenting all this junk on her and getting ready to fire her or something. Eat Monster needs to go. The sooner the better.

The rest of the crew on both our lines are up to the usual tricks. Screw Murderer destroys hardware all night long and the horrid squeaking of metal on metal echoes throughout the building. Meth periodically shouts insults at Stupid Guy and throws stuff at him while they brawl. It's like watching and listening to a real live Punch and Judy. Super Shopper runs her dingbat mouth with no pause about which minimum wage retail worker she terrorized at Target earlier in the day and all the other middle aged nitwit housewives chime in their advice and opinions. They have no idea how stupid they sound. Musclehead verbally beats up on J1 and Deadwood with every opportunity they give him. Supertech keeps his mouth shut and his hands busy fixing dead boxes. Occassionally Mister Mo will drop by to yap with him for a few minutes. The only other employee besides myself and Supertech who really gives Bill and Dave's company their money's worth is Wingnut Dan. That guy is one hell of a hard worker. It's impressive. He listens to tunes on his headphones all night and works an honest eight hours. More people should follow his example over on the Precision line.

J1 has started his disappearing acts again. He will arrive at work and then we won't hear from him or see him in here for days at a time. Squirmy isn't wise to it and none of us want to get involved. I guess for the forseeable future he will continue to get paid for doing his job while most of the time never being present and accounted for. It seems it doesn't matter whether he is here or not, we get the same amount of work out of him regardless- zero.

They moved two people to Graveyard for the Precision Group's test area. One of them is an old man with grey hair that Supertech has dubbed The Child Molester. Supertech has been calling the old guy Child Molester because he's one of those ugly Americans that travels to places in Asia where he can pay to have sex with teenage or underage children. I haven't heard him tell stories about his overseas exploits, but Supertech assures me Child Molester thinks it's cool to talk about his sex acts with these kids. None of us want to hear it and I personally think it's really fucking foul. The only thing I've observed about this guy so far is he spends most of the early part of Graveyard writing love e-mails to teenage girls in Thailand instead of troubleshooting broken instruments. What a loser. The other person they brought onto Graveyard is a woman in her late twenties to early thirties, and I can tell by looking at her eyes that she isn't playing with a full deck of cards. Sometimes I think you can tell alot about a person by how their eyes move and the way they look. If the person in question frequently has a vacant, open gaze, or if they are locked into a hypnotized wide stare for minutes at a time you're probably dealing with some sort of dormant metal problems. Or some kind of drug abuse. I can't put my finger on it, but I have this gut feeling something is seriously broken with that lady.

Working here is like getting a ticket to the city zoo. I come here every day and I get to see the animals for free. Sometimes it's like the big top at the circus. I have a front row seat to watch the clown act. Seems like we have an endless supply of clowns these days.

Homemade Cookies And Diarrhea

At work we got a nice surprise. Eat Monster spent her afternoon at home baking cookies for all of us on swing shift. How sweet.

I stayed the fuck away from her and her grub.

Supertech and Mister Mo were hovering around the cookie platter as soon as they discovered it. Mister Mo grabbed a couple handfuls of the treats and started wolfing them down as Supertech looked on. The two of them were bullshitting when Eat Monster walked up to join in the conversation. Mister Mo made small talk with her. As she picked up one of the cookies and started chewing it to bits, she informed the two men about the tough time she had baking cookies earlier in the day. She said to Supertech and Mister Mo, "I had to keep running out of the kitchen to go to the bathroom. I got diarrhea today. Tee Hee!" Mister Mo halted his jaw and dropped the uneaten cookies in his hand. He was furious. Supertech laughed. If Mister Mo could have got away with it I think he would have punched her right there on the spot. I felt wise for avoiding Eat Monster's home cookin'. We warned the rest of the crew and for the remainder of the evening the only person chowing down on cookies was Eat Monster.

Babysitting The Eat Monster

Last night after Eat Monster shocked herself with high voltage at the power supply station the first time, I walked over to where she was sitting and asked her if she was okay. She was stunned but as the shock faded and her motor skills came back, she farted on me. This wasn't an ordinary fart. No sir. This was a fart that would have registered on the richter scale and smelled like a sewer pipe in the building had ruptured. It was awful. As soon as Eat Monster let it rip, she put her hand over her mouth and in a high pitched fairy godmother like voice she said, "Tee Hee! I farted." There was a newsflash.

Before the end of the shift Eat Monster managed to electrocute herself two more times. Each time she screwed up either Supertech or myself walked over to check on her. I yelled at her for not using insulated tools, the proper ones for the job sitting right in front of her stupid face. She ignored me, I have no idea why. And she kept farting. God damn it was loud. We tried to coax her into doing something else in the area for the night but she resisted the offers of a less dangerous job for some reason. Maybe she was determined to beat the power supply station like it was a game she could win with enough effort and skill. Perhaps she felt it was a challenge to conquer as if she was climbing the peak of Mt. Everest. There was nothing we could do but sit back and observe her roast herself with high voltage. At least it didn't seem to stop her heart or cause anything life threatening. She was already wacky so I couldn't tell if the repeated shocks made her any more goofy. She was already super loopy.

Squirmy got our messages about what happened the previous night and he had a short talk with us this afternoon. He told us Eat Monster is on medication for some "problems" but he wouldn't elaborate as to what meds she is taking or what her problems specifically are. It is clear they hired in a certified nutjob with this one. Great. He talked with the Nurse about Eat Monster and for the time being Squirmy and the Nurse are going to alternate coming in at night to babysit her to make sure she is okay. In the meantime, Eat Monster is not to go anywhere near the power supply test rack. It is now forbidden territory and our job is to keep her as far away as possible from it. Easy enough. I just hope she doesn't find something else in our production area to fixate on and injure herself with. If she's that stupid to fry herself multiple times with high voltage what's to stop her from guzzling rubber cement or spraying acetone into her own eye sockets? She will more than likely find some other way to electrocute herself on our instruments. It's all so stupid. They should just admit they made a serious mistake hiring this person and get her the hell out of here.

Electrocute Thyself

Eat Monster has been training on the test and troubleshooting of our power supplies. She's not doing very well with it, I'm afraid. Because our instrument came out of the research and development labs in the early 1970s the wiring and PC board design is complex. It's a hand tuned, hand tested box that can be really frustrating for many of our technicians to deal with. All of the newer generation products we have are more software/firmware controlled making the test process much easier. The power supply module in this old dog does a number of things. It converts 110 or 220 AC voltage to DC, filters the power for spikes and noise, and splits the power into several line voltages that the rest of the box runs off of. Some of the testing has to be done manually while the boards are powered up which is dangerous. If the person testing the supply isn't paying attention to what they're doing, well, they could end up getting seriously hurt.

Located at the power supply test bench an operator will find special insulated tools just for the job of dealing with live high voltage parts. All of this has been explained and demonstrated to Eat Monster but I guess she wasn't listening. She has repeatedly grabbed and used uninsulated tools while working on live power supplies. It's not a good idea to do that. Tonight while I was working in the assembly area building up some board mods and card cages, Eat Monster sat at the power supply test station trying to troubleshoot a defective board. Everything was plugged in and live, of course. Out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was bright yellow sparks coming out of the top of the test fixture in front of Eat Monster. As I looked over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of her whole body shivering and her eyes were tightly shut. In either hand she had an uninsulated tool. One looked like a flathead screwdriver and the other was some sort of a metal rod. Sparks were shooting out of the tip of one tool. I couldn't tell which.

There was nothing I could do for the Eat Monster as she sat there electrocuting herself. I didn't have anything large enough that was non conductive to knock the tools out of her hands or get her away from the test set. So I watched her frizzle fry. The muscles in her hands were constricted due to the voltage she was absorbing. It must have taken her a great deal of effort to do it; she finally let go of the tools. It was like she forced open both hands with superhuman strength and threw the tools away from her. As she did so, she still had her eyes completely shut and she began opening her mouth and licking at her lips. It was weird to watch. With her jaw wide open she licked at the roof of her mouth like she had just eaten peanut butter mixed with grapefruit rinds. I got the impression the whole experience of electrocution was very distasteful for Eat Monster.

Frau Regenbogen

As I mentioned we received two new technicians in our area recently. Eat Monster is one of them, the other one is this totally effeminate goofball German guy who commutes in to work from the city. He's tall and scrawny as hell. His accent is strange since it's not really German sounding nor is it perfect English. As he speaks it almost sounds like he's constantly lisping. His movements are suspect, the way he carries himself and gestures while he's talking to me is entirely limp-wristed and twinkletoed. I think he's fruity, but he won't admit to it.

Yesterday when he arrived to work as soon as I saw him I shouted in my best nazi voice "Gutentag Frau Regenbogen!" That stopped him in his tracks instantly and he began shaking his head. Then he laughed, which was good because it showed me even if he is a homo at least he's got a sense of humor. The English translation of what I said is "Good day Mrs. Rainbow." I was confident my German is pretty solid since he understood right away what I had said to him.

From now on I'll be calling him Frau Regenbogen.

Deadwood

Our instrument line is heavily concentrated with human mutants and freaks. The Precision Group gave up one of their assemblers to help on the Ghost Box transfer and she's now part of our line. She's kinda freaky. She's a large woman with short blonde hair and she has dark circles under her eyes all the time. Maybe she doesn't get any sleep at night or perhaps someone has been punching the shit out of her daily. Looking at her I often think of MAD magazine because she reminds me of a character that came to life from their cartoon pages. She would be the overweight buck-toothed woman with rolling pins in her hair and she would be wearing a polka dot dress. Under her arm she would carry a handbag stuffed full of bricks just for the purpose of hitting some poor unsuspecting guy over the head with it. He may or may not deserve the beating.

Let's just say this woman is difficult to look at.

Musclehead is the technician assigned to the Ghost Box project so he has been working closely with this particular lady, and he doesn't like her one bit. He accuses her of doing poor assembly work each and every time one of her boxes fails in the test process and Musclehead has to fix it. He always yells at her that it's her fault and he makes a big dramatic production about what a pain in the ass it is to fix her broken instruments. Sometimes I have to admit his antics are comical. He nicknamed her Deadwood because in his eyes she's a worthless employee. It's especially harsh for her because he calls her Deadwood to her face instead of using her first name. I'm not working with either of them on those Ghost boxes but I have a feeling it isn't all Deadwood's fault. Musclehead is a green technician as he just got out of tech school last year and he doesn't have much prior work experience. I figure it's a combination of both of them screwing up the boxes.

I know Deadwood has a tough time in here at work as it is without someone like Musclehead constantly fucking with her. I feel bad for her. The other day she came over to the phone near where I was sitting and made a call. She was leaving a happy message for someone, or so I thought by eavesdropping on her. About the same time every day she comes over and makes a similar sickeningly cheerful call. Out of curiocity I asked her who she was calling to leave such a disgustingly happy message for. Deadwood told me she likes to call home and speak to her weenie dog through the answering machine every afternoon. Her only friend in the whole wide world is a little dog. That seemed kind of fucked up and depressing to me. I asked her if she had family of her own or a husband or anything and she said she never has. She's got to be in her late 40s by now so I would imagine it's too late for her. What a horrible way to live.

Front Gate Traffic Jam

This afternoon on my way to work it was hot outside and I was in a very bad mood. As I was pulling up to the front gate I saw two container trucks in the left hand entrance lane being signed in by security guards. It takes them a few minutes to sign in delivery trucks and to direct the drivers where to drop off or pick up freight. I didn't have the patience to sit behind them idling the engine so I opted for the right hand lane which only had one employee car in it. As I moved over into the right lane, I noticed the person driving the vehicle was having a difficult time moving around in the car and seemed to be searching for something. Since I wasn't going anywhere until the person used their proxy card to get through the gate sensors I ended up paying particular attention to the inside of that person's ride. It was an abomination. The entire car was filled with trash all the way up to the head rests. It reminded me of what the county garbage dump looks like. There appeared to be broken pieces of furniture, shredded cardboard boxes, tons of loose papers, and other items. It was spooky, like a homeless person had been living in the vehicle.

While I sat stuck behind the nitwit a few more cars piled up in the right lane. Someone hit their horn. The person in the trashmobile ahead of me was frantically looking for something and then it dawned on me. She was trying to find her proxy card which was obviously lost in her automotive trash heap. I rolled my eyes and knew I was screwed. In the left lane, the first container truck had already moved on and the second one in line was being processed through security. Two cars behind me pulled out of the right lane and eased over towards the security shack. I did the same as soon as I could. Eventually I moved up and held my proxy card out towards the security sensor and was waved through. I looked out my passenger window to the right and saw the person responsible for our little traffic jam was the Eat Monster. I watched her in my rear view mirror as I drove down the perimeter road towards the main buildings on site and I wondered how much longer the security guys were going to let her sit there blocking the lane before they gave her a dunce badge and let her through.

Breakdown

I've been continuing on with counselling. Some of it has been useful to me, some of it hasn't. Couch Potato thinks that I have a great big hole in the center of me, as she puts it, and I keep trying to fill that hole with whatever relationship I can sell myself short to get into. I'm needy. I seem to find myself in bad relationships because just having a woman around, even if she is a headcase is better than being alone. Inevitably I'm not happy anyway. As she puts it I am a "wonderful co-dependant." When I go to a restaurant, I always feel like everyone is staring at me because I'm eating alone. I don't have the cute lady sitting with me at the dinner table. The Couch Potato told me to bring a book when I'm eating out from now on. She also said I should go see alot of movies by myself until I become more comfortable being alone and confident in myself. Another thing she said I should do is not actively look for a girlfriend for a while. It's all sensible advice, I suppose.

Tonight at work Musclehead was hammering me about my split up with Jennifer. He could tell I was hurting when I got in to work this afternoon and like a shark smelling blood he was after the kill. I've done a pretty good job keeping a front going but today for some reason I let it down a little. Just enough for Musclehead to figure out I was depressed. Ever since his altercation with J2, the "woman problems" comment Musclehead made has become somewhat of an inside joke on our line. Is your TV broke and your car dead? It must be woman problems. Did your cat die? Woman problems caused its untimely death. Can't troubleshoot your test instrument? It's woman problems. So, Musclehead started in on me with the woman problems routine. After ten or fifteen minutes of his constant hazing he saw I was about to lose it, and he split. I walked over to the assembly area where no one was around. I broke down. No one saw me, at least not as far as I can tell. I sat there for a good long while and cried. I felt a little better afterward.

I really am a mess.

Eat Monster

Thanks to Squirmy we got two new technicians on our line, one male and really weird the other female and really weird. They both started this week. The female technician is horribly overweight and speaks to us all in a high pitched sing-song voice. It grates on my nerves. I have nicknamed her the Eat Monster because of her insatiable desire to consume any kind of food she can get her pudgy mitts onto. Supertech has noticed her food fiending habits and he makes a point to tell her when he's noticed food leftovers in a conference room or on some other instrument line. Eat Monster's eyes light up as soon as he's told her where the goods are and she loses no time heading off the line to go get some. It's kinda funny. After she comes back to the area and resumes her work Supertech and I have snuck out to go see how much of the free food she fed her neck. It's impressive. There's basically nothing but crumbs and empty soda cans left behind in her wake of destruction.

There's two kinds of free grub to be had here at Bill and Dave's. Actually, there's a third kind of free grub but we don't get that too often anymore. The first two kinds of free grub fall into the corporate catering category, or the factory peasant potluck category. The third kind (now becoming rare) is the Beer Bust category. Corporate Catering free grub is supplied by the cafeteria to management type people when they are hiding out in a conference room somewhere on the site making business plans that don't matter. The cafeteria apparently only charges them for the amount of food and drink that they consumed during their meeting. If there are any leftovers when the cafereria employees come to clean up the mess, those leftovers are deducted from the total bill. Being the helpful employees that we are, we like to show up before the cafeteria staff and haul away the remaining goodies to munch on for the rest of the shift. And the management staff gets charged for the full catering bill. It's a win-win situation as far as we're concerned. The potlucks I generally don't participate in because I don't feel like cooking food for people I don't like. Sometimes I'll bring them a bag of corn chips or a two liter bottle of soda, but that's about it.

Systems Rescue

He-Man found me in the assembly area. It was late. He said to me, "Put together a set of your tools. We have to go make some modifications to some boxes at another site. There isn't much time, they are shipping out to Saudi tomorrow morning." Fuck. That really wasn't much time. I did as He-Man suggested, I grabbed an empty red toolbox and shoved all of my most used tools into it. No sooner had I done this, He-Man told me to grab my coat. We were headed off to another site, another division.

In the middle of the night we were driving in a company car to another factory on a rescue job. He-Man filled me in on the details as we drove on back roads through the county to the other site. Recently we had some DOA units returned to the factory from Australia. They were a new special option box that had a rear output RF connector of a certain kind. Apparently during the overseas flight the equipment was subjected to vibration, probably from turbulence and the main RF output cable came loose at both ends. So the boxes were effectively dead when the customer received them and turned them on. He-Man came up with a simple fix, just add a tie-wrap at both ends of the cable internally to the units. This was what he wanted me to do tonight on three boxes. Problem was, each of the three boxes were already installed into eight foot tall instrument racks. I was going to have to remove them from each system, disassemble the boxes, and add the modification. I was a little stressed out. Since they were shipping out for Saudi early in the morning and it was already well after midnight it really was going to be a race against time. There was the possibility I might screw up a box doing the rework.

As soon as we arrived at the other site, He-Man lead me to the Systems Group. No one was there. It was as if everyone in the building had died. The only sounds on this floor of the building were the quiet hum of cooling fans in test racks and soft clicking noises of mechanical attenuators stepping through frequencies. Red LED displays on the racks randomly flickered numerical information. Green monochrome screens cycled through peak signal strengths and harmonics. The overhead flourescent lights cast a harsh light on everything. In a way it reminded me of some of the imagery from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

To my dismay, I discovered that all three of the units I needed to pry open were installed at the very bottom of each test rack. They were only inches from the floor. This was going to make things worse, it's terribly awkward to try and remove a one hundred pound piece of test gear from a fully built rack that close to the ground. There's no clearance. Not to mention I didn't have any mounting arms or carts for the boxes once I started surgery on them. I was going to have to lift each unit multiple times so I could access the underside as well as the top. What a pain.

The first box was a disaster. During removal I jammed a couple of my fingers against the rack and crushed them as I slid the unit forward out of the bottom slot of the test rack. With one arm I got the box up to a rolling table and started to open it up while the pain subsided in my other hand. He-Man had left, he went to another part of the building to get us sodas from a vending machine. After removing the top outer cover I began adding the two tie wraps to the unit. Nothing is easy in these suckers. It's like working in an engine compartment and there's no room for fingers or tools. It can be frustrating. After successfully adding the restraints to the black hard line cable I closed the unit back up and got ready to install it back into the first system. Even with He-Man's help, we ended up scratching the front panel paint on the box. Bolting it back into place in the rack hid the cosmetic damage. Whew.

The next two units went much more smoothly. I came up with a method for removal and repair that made more sense and didn't put either of us at risk of injury. He-Man told me the Saudis were sending up some satellites at the end of next month and they really liked our equipment so they asked us what we could put together for them to test, communicate, and troubleshoot their satellites. That's where systems comes in. Our engineers look at what the customer's needs are and based on that they prescribe complete solutions with all our gear in them. I think I can dig it. A few hours later I was having trouble seeing straight and we were driving back to our home site. He-Man told me I did a good job, and he was going to make sure the company bought me dinner at a restaurant of my choice, soon. That was cool. The last time anyone at the company offered to take me out for dinner and or drinks on Bill and Dave's dime was up in Spokane and that was over a year ago.

Checking For Polarity

Power supply testing is something every instrument line has to do, one way or another. Some lines have come up with nifty ways of making power supply testing fast and easy. Ours is cumbersome to test, and we do it in sections or modules. Next door to us the Precision Group has a faster, much more stylin' method for pre-testing all their power supply boards. They've made some custom fixtures that fit onto Hubie carts (the instrument carts we push boxes all over the shop floor on) and they drop assembled power supplies into these safety fixtures. One side of the fixture has a plexiglass door with a hinge on it. You can access the boards inside if you need to, but mainly the plexiglass is there to act as a shield just in case one of the main capacitors decides to blow up.

Normally, big electrolytic capacitors don't just "blow up". Sometimes they are defective, sure. But to get them to really explode you have to feed them voltage in the wrong direction. The Precision Group instruments use some rather large capacitors on their power supply motherboard. An assembler installs them to the board by putting two good sized phillips head screws through the circuit side of the board and then torques the screws down which brings the big capacitors snug to the component side of the PC board. Under each capacitor there is a hole in the board big enough to see through. What you're looking for is a plus sign (+) to show up through those holes. If the plus sign isn't there, you have installed the capacitor with it's polarity reversed. That's going to give them the juice in the wrong direction and then you get to experience some unusual things. Sights, sounds, and smells, to be more specific.

Meth is always picking on this stupid guy that works in their assembly area. He's mentally slow and an easy target for ridicule. I don't like talking to Stupid Guy and I try to keep my exposure to him limited to an absolute minimum. He's got coke bottle thick lenses on his glasses and he has to wear hearing aids even though he seems to hear people just fine without them. It's weird. Often, he refers to himself as Slut Puppy. It's obnoxious the way he blurts out "I'm a Slut Puppy heh heh heh" to whomever is around. Anyway, he doesn't pay attention to what he's doing while he's working. Many times his job on the evening shift is to build and test power supplies. He's managed to blow up a few of 'em tonight. The first one startled me because of this sudden loud popping noise, and for a split second I thought I saw a bright blast of white light illuminating the ceiling over their product line. When I got up to investigate what had happened, I saw Stupid Guy walking around with a dumb grin on his face and he was yelling. His clothes were spattered with liquid stains of some kind and as I walked closer to him and the power supply test set I smelled a stench of burnt fish oil. He blew up one of the big capacitors. Those meaty ones really stink when they burn up.

Stupid Guy wandered around with a handful of shop towels brushing at the stains on his clothing while I took a close look at the cooked PC board inside the test fixture cart. Clear, oily liquid was blown all over inside the plexiglass shield and some of it had already seeped out onto the floor below the cart. I peeked through the hole under the largest capacitor on the board and sure enough, I saw no plus sign. He put the shit in backwards. Fool. Later on in the shift I was walking by in the hallway and I got lucky. I actually saw him blow up another one of the big caps. It was amazing, like watching a pure white light for a fraction of a second engulf Stupid Guy and the power supply test set. It was like a massive flashbulb on a vintage camera had discharged. As the light erupted from the test fixture, his shadow and the shadows of the equipment around him were cast in jet black perfectly on the ceiling above. A fine mist belched out of the test fixture and landed all over the floor. It was awesome. Well, except for the burnt fish smell.

Waves Of Technicians

Every six months or so we've been hiring in dozens of new electronic technicians. The tech industry is picking up steam and we need qualified people badly. Problem is, everyone else in the industry also needs people so the competition is becoming fierce. Squirmy is on an interviewing team of managers that flies around the country to universities and job fairs to try and recruit fresh meat for Bill and Dave's grinder. It works out well enough for us here on the shop floor because while Squirmy is out for a couple of weeks doing screening interviews, we get alot more work done without him being in our hair.

Bill and Dave's company enjoys a healthy advantage over most other big electronics employers. Here, we have an almost legendary reputation for treating employees extremely well. This is true if you compare us to other employers right now, but our culture of good treatment and exceptional benefits is fading fast. Lately the plan of attack at job fairs has been to offer prospective technicians a lucrative relocation package and a high starting wage. This is all sensible until you realize what happens once these new employees show up on the job for their training. The technicians that train the new people are making much less salary than the new hires. Inevitably the techs we hired in six months ago get to talking with their trainees and they discover how much more money Bill and Dave's threw down on their hourly wages to woo them over. It's pissing alot of people off.

There's a backlash brewing. Veteran technicians have complained to their supervisors about being paid less than the starting salary of new-hire technicians. Because Bill and Dave's management won't address the issue, some of our best people have already quit. Growing discontent is becoming common in the ranks of the technicians that stay on with us. They resent being paid significantly less than the people they have to train, and why shouldn't they resent it? It's wrong.

Dinner With Dad

Dad gave me an update on the whole firehouse deal after dinner at my parent's place tonight. During the "briefing" Dad pulled out some files he had collected in manila folders. One of them contained a letter from a fellow fireman about a threat he had received from an administrator at the house where Dad and this other fellow worked. I wasn't really interested. The whole deal seems blown out of proportion to me, the basic gist of it is Dad went on a personal crusade against a Chief in the department and a firehouse administrator that Dad hates. His crusade seems to have backfired on him somewhat, and his solution to the whole ordeal was to try to commit suicide- a couple of times. In Dad's misguided world suicide is a heroic thing. I see it as the ultimate act of cowardice. Dad figured if he was dead, this Chief and the administrator wouldn't be able to sue him for his assets. Things don't work that way in the real world. People can still sue your estate, I believe. I don't know how Dad has been able to get through this many years of life and still not be aware of things like this.

As Dad was thumbing through the rest of the papers and manila folders he had strewn across the kitchen table, I made a discovery that caused me to do a massive double take and almost spit up my drink. On one of the folders I saw the Couch Potato's name written in giant letters. I kept my composure and I asked him about his counsellor. It seems, my father has been seeing the same therapist I am...

Farewell, Bitch

I did some snooping in Jennifer's room. Her dirty laundry basket was full. I found some of her panties loaded with dried up cum. I knew she was fucking that coworker of hers. Whore.

Before I began the move out, I hopped in the shower and beat off. I got a huge load of spunk and I dumped it into Jennifer's bottle of hair conditioner. That should keep her hair looking nice and shiny over the next couple of months for her new boyfriend. I thought about storing some fireworks in the kitchen oven. I've got some of those really loud Black Cat firecrackers and it would have been a simple thing to duct tape a few packs to the top inside of the oven and wrap the fuses around the heating element. I chickened out on that prank at the last minute due to possible fire hazard issues. Would have been badass though. I also considered dropping a huge poo into her bed pillowcase, but that seemed too malicious so I didn't do that one.

Senor 23 helped me move everything to B Street and I will owe him one bigtime. Not only for the moving assistance, but also for saving me a room back at the B Street house so I had a place to go. Sometimes good friends can really come through for you. During the chaos of the furniture moving, one of Jennifer's Siamese housecats escaped. It made a successful yet crazed break for freedom to the outside world. "Get hit by a car!" I yelled at the cat as it sped past Senor 23 and I on the front steps to the house.

Since I figure Jennifer is not going to return my $400.00 deposit I decided to confiscate the bootleg cable box I bought her from a mail order company back east. I replaced it with the real cable box from the local cable company that only gets channels 2 through 13. Both boxes look identical. I was sure to place it exactly where the other one was sitting on top of the entertainment console in the livingroom so hopefully she won't figure it out until it's too late. She's never been good with household electronic appliances. She should be easily confused as to why the pay per view movies don't work anymore. I'm confident Jennifer will shriek in anger as soon as she tries to fire up HBO and it comes through all scrambled. Too bad I won't be there to see it happen.

Bye Bye Termite

Computer Termite just couldn't resist the temptation to ruin more of our PCs. Squirmy had enough of his antics the third or fourth time site IT had to come out and fix them. The first time it happened, Squirmy took the Computer Termite aside and gave him a slap on the wrist. The second offense earned him a verbal warning. The last one was a written warning, and Computer Termite was banished from touching any of our PCs for the forseeable future. Well, he did it again last week and got caught red handed. Every time he touches a PC keyboard the poor computer it's hooked up to instantly turns into a piece of shit. The software won't work and the box practically belches smoke out of the case. I don't know how the Computer Termite does it but he sure is convinced of his superior PC skills. It's really quite ridiculous.

Squirmy fired him. I laughed.

One of the dingbat housewives in the Precision Group next to our line told me today that she ordered a pizza over the weekend and the pizza delivery guy was none other than the Computer Termite. He was startled and embarrassed when he recognized her from his former job. I wish I could have seen the look on his pasty page boy face. That was poetic justice if I've ever heard it. He was such a fucking arrogant dog dick of a technician. I hope this whole ordeal has knocked him down a bunch of pegs. He definetly needed a reality check. I reckon none of us here will miss him, except for It.

Ghost Box, Stealth Box

We've been tasked with picking up an older product from a sister division located in another part of the state. In recent weeks a few of our people have been diverted from our line to train up on the Ghost Box and begin production here at our site. I'm not involved in the project but I have been poking around in the Ghost Box assembly area to peek at the guts of these monsters and ask some questions. I'm naturally curious when it comes to oddball products of ours. We have many. From what I can tell so far, the reason why it's called the Ghost Box is because it simulates things like bad weather and rugged terrain. You can set it up to completely ruin an RF signal by simulating mountains or by having the unit emit a constant jamming frequency. Customers would apparently use the Ghost Box to test and prove out their RF equipment under adverse conditions like these. It's kinda cool actually. I was clueless we even had something like this available.

Assembling these boxes seems to be a headache. At least that's the idea I've gotten from overhearing all the cursing and yelling coming out of their cubicle. The techs are having a rough time of it too, but right now I think that's due to the inexperience of the guys working on it. It isn't so much that the box is really that hard to test and troubleshoot. They just don't know what they're doing. The inside of the Ghost Box is radically different from anything I build and test. All of the circuitboards are stacked like pancakes one on top of each other in two rows and then a mess of spaghetti wiring is routed all over the fucking place in the chassis. There isn't any real front panel, instead there's just a blank faceplate with a few input and output connectors. I'm glad I didn't get roped into building these things. I did get hit with having to take on another product though.

Recently I was tapped on the shoulder with learning an obscure instrument dubbed the Stealth Box. It's a slim line unit that rides piggyback on the main product we sell and is available as a special option. The Stealth Box is a military encoder/decoder for a programming language used by the US Air Force called MATE. As far as I can estimate this unit was once a big deal for the military, but in the last three or four years it doesn't look like we've built and sold a new Stealth Box at all. I can tell by the amount of dust that has collected on top of all the bags of parts. They dumped all the Stealth Box supplies on me and as I started digging through everything I became covered in dust bunnies and dead bugs. I've been told I am now the last employee in Bill and Dave's company worldwide that knows how to work on these suckers. Strange.

Since there were no orders to build a Stealth Box and there are no employees who know the product I decided the best way to self-train on them was to build one or two of them up from scratch, and then tear them back down again. It didn't take me long to make that happen and it was a good thing I did. A few weeks after I built up a couple of them, some barnacle scraping seaman in the Navy decided to bounce a Stealth Box off the ground. They mangled it up pretty bad and sent it back in for repair. The warranty group made sure I got the unit as soon as it came back in from the field. I was laughing when I saw the physical damage on the box. It looked like the brunt of the force from the hit was on the rear panel of the unit. Multiple connectors were crushed, missing, or had been forced back inside the chassis. It was ugly.

I tore open the box and went to work like a surgeon. Unfortunately about halfway into the repairs I discovered that I didn't have some of the replacement parts in the area. I was going to have to order them, which I did even though it was going to be a pain in the ass. Days later when the parts arrived from stores, I couldn't get them to fit where they were supposed to go in the chassis. It was like square-peg-round-hole time. After tinkering for a while it finally dawned on me that in the years since the parts were first manufactured, mechanical engineers must have improved the designs and these newer replacement parts no longer fit properly in the old chassis. Nice. I spent the whole night wandering through other product lines assembly areas stealing hardware and liberating parts until I eventually put together a parts combo that worked well mechanically and electrically in the wrecked Stealth Box. I shoulda been an engineer. That's one of the greatest advantages to working swing shift. No one is around to stop you from swiping other instrument lines stuff when you really really need it. Anyway, I was pleased with the way the repair job came out and a few days later I shipped the fucker back to the Navy.

September Meeting Minutes

I'm still stuck doing this crap. Someone is going to pay for their crimes...

Assembly
-Squirmy says no more eating of food in the production area. *Customers don't like finding chicken bones inside their test instruments, huh?*
-Deadwood is training in assembly and still working in VID. It takes her 4 to 6 hours to complete a Ghost Box.
-Documentation change coming up regarding rear output RF connectors.
-Toothless is leaving the area. *Fuck yeah! Good riddance!*
-Lia is leaving the area. *Fuck yeah! Good riddance!*
-Slobbering Mouth Kid is still on the VID project.

Test
-Four DOA units were returned back to the factory from Australia. He-Man investigated the problem and found the rear output RF cable on each box had become loose during overseas transport. He-Man retested the boxes after implementing a fix and they all passed.
-H72 options are hot. J2 said the first H72 box was at Mod Cal and being difficult. *Yeah it's always difficult to test a unit while you're eating a bag of potato chips, isn't it J2?*
-Ghost Box orders are slowing up.
-Techs feel repairing dog boards doesn't seem to be worth the money. *Lazy fuckers* He-Man says work them and if you can't fix it hand the board off to an expert and they will solve the problem instead of scrapping the board.

Squirmy Stuff/Questions/Rumors
-Squirmy says our jobs are not going overseas. There are no new products to replace the ones we're working on now and the company just purchased nine years worth of parts for our group.
-Squirmy wants to get the quote time for an ordered box to ship out from 10-12 weeks down to 8. *Good luck, fool.*
-23 instruments scheduled to build for next month.

J1's Baby

I'm sick of seeing J1 display his human larvae of an infant at work. He drops by the line at least once a week with his baby and wastes as much as two hours of time showing off his kid. Once or twice a year, I might be able to handle a baby show-and-tell visit. But once a fucking week is beyond annoying. It makes me thirst for his blood. I don't really care for babies. I especially don't care for dingbat housewives who just HAVE to see J1's kid everytime he shows up in here with it. The women start talking to it in obnoxious high pitched baby voices. I want to mow them all down with a World War One water cooled trench machinegun when they do that.

Today J1's visit was even more weird. He brought his young wife in with him to work. I was real curious about what she looked like because she seemed somewhat mentally ill by the way she carried herself on the phone. She calls up almost every night in a panic about something stupid that happened to her in their apartment and only conferring with J1 will solve her domestic emergencies. She seems unable to think for herself. Sure enough she looked as mentally ill as she sounds on the phone. Her eyes were wild and wide open as if she was on the edge of hysteria. Her blonde hair was long, unkept, and kinda greasy. She didn't say much to anyone, instead she let J1 do all the babbling. He does that to all of us anyway.

As J1 and his family left the production area this afternoon I started ranting about how fed up I am with J1's baby visits. I cornered one of our dayshift assemblers and shot my mouth off for a good three or four minutes. Near the end of my monologue to him I said, "Man, I can't stand J1's kid. It's all goofy lookin and shit. We've seen it so many god damned times now it's not like it changed or grew up or anything. It's not special. Did you see his wife? I knew she was gonna turn out to be a screwball. I mean, how could she put up with living like that? J1 won't let her have a car or a job. She's stuck at home all day everyday and he won't let her do a fuckin thing like she's some kind of prisoner. Those people are messed up I tell you. Messed the fuck up."

My coworker didn't say a thing. He didn't even blink, which was odd. I stood up and turned around to pick up some parts I needed from a bin right behind me. As I did so, I came eye to eye with J1. He was standing on the other side of the cubicle wall that separated our line from the main hallway in the building. Apparently, J1 and his wife hadn't left the area yet and they heard everything I said. I done fucked up, hard. For a split second I thought about saying something weak, like an apology. Then I realized it wouldn't do any good and I hated J1 anyway, so fuck it. I went with it. I grabbed the parts I needed and I went back to work without saying a word to J1. I figure the reason my coworker sat there frozen while I ran my mouth was due to the fact that he saw J1 walking by and stop in the aisleway to listen to my diatribe. Oops. Next time I'll have to give him a few minutes worth of a head start out of here before I talk that much shit.

9.20.1997

I've been doing a balancing act between two companies for the past few weeks. I got my job back at TDS with my former supervisor who is a really cool lady. Mornings I work on smart weapons there, evenings I'm doing battle with test instruments and idiot coworkers at Bill and Dave's. TDS has been hurting for qualified people especially bad this past year so when I asked if I could come back on dayshift they were quick to snag me. All they had to do was reactivate my DoD clearance. That only took a couple of weeks, instead of the months it takes to get one when you've never been cleared before. Working both jobs has been tough but it has kept me out of the house and away from Jennifer. It's also allowed me to make fat stacks of cash so I can afford moving someplace else. I'm tired every day. When I finally get to go home at night I count up the hours I've been on my feet. It's generally been in the neighborhood of 17 to 18 hours each day.

Some evenings I come home to find Jennifer sitting on the livingroom couch snug up against this guy from her work. They ususally look guilty as sin when I walk through the front door. I'm certain Jennifer made a point to have him there just to rub things in and make me feel worse. She's the queen of manipulation. There's nothing I can do about it, the first night I came home and found them together I asked them what they were doing and Jennifer sarcastically told me they were just "watching a movie." Then they both laughed at me. I wanted to choke the life out of her, and slug the guy sitting next to her. What good would it have done? I more than likely would have been taking a ride in the back of a police car to jail and maybe even lost a fight. It burned me up inside thinking about it, but I let it go. The other thing Jennifer has been doing to torture me is to make sure I see her looking good. Lately she's been doing all the things I asked her to do over the past couple of years, but refused to. She's been wearing alot of makeup and putting on tight tops that really show off her tits. And she's been wearing tight short skirts. Bitch.

With any luck I will be back in at B Street with Senor 23 and Leaky Pete by next week. Senor 23 had a vacant room come up at the B Street house and I asked him to save it for me. He's on a trip to Colorado Springs right now but as soon as he arrives back in town he will hand off some keys. I got to get out of here, the sooner the better. I wonder if I'll get my old room back.

Just Ten More Minutes...

Leaky Pete and I met up at B Street this morning around eight. It was the year 5999. Or maybe, it was already the year 6000. I forgot. It was harsh getting up at 7:30am because I stayed up drinking all night with Senor 23 even though I knew I had to get up early today. I'm a bad person. This morning was important though, Leaky Pete and I were bringing in Eddie for his ECV initiation at precisely 9:36am in an undisclosed location far away from prying eyes. At long last the great mysteries of the ancient and noble order of E Clampus Vitus would be revealed to him. The rub wasn't too bad either. Senor 23 was also supposed to be one of our pukes for the day, but he backed out saying he couldn't get today off from work. Yeah right. Coward. For now, Senor 23 will continue to wander unenlightened and stumble through the darkness.

Eddie was a good puke. He not only chauffered Leaky Pete and I to his initiation, he also bought both of us a case of beer. During the 'doins he kept calm and followed instructions. He's not a shit for brains puke and that's always a plus. Maybe some war crimes get perpetrated upon you if you're not paying attention, and it only took him just ten more minutes. Over and over again, of course. I'm really proud of him. He was an excellent candidate for membership and now he will be an excellent brother Clamper. Eddie was passed the Staff of Relief which he accepted, graciously. The bretheren did say, "Satisfactory."

Home Alone

After work tonight I drove straight home. Jennifer isn't here. I figure she's out with another guy right now on a date or something. Probably one of her coworkers at the coffee shop. It's none of my business and I know I shouldn't care anymore because she's not my girlfriend, but the situation is really fucking with my head. When I walked in the front door I noticed both the fishtank's lights were out but the livingroom light was on. Since it's already two in the morning I'm certain she won't be coming home tonight.

I think Jennifer has been digging around in my room. I don't know what she might have been snooping in here for. I noticed some of the boxes I have packed up were shifted on the floor and their contents jumbled somewhat. My box of videotapes was rifled through for sure. I'm too tired to go through it and take an inventory to figure out what might be missing. Doesn't matter, I suppose. In a way I deserve it. When Nikki was still living here with Jennifer she had a friend pass through the area and leave some of his things in her care. Among the junk her pal left behind was his entire vinyl record collection. Records are sacred to me, I've been collecting obscure ones for years. I never allow my collection of records out of my sight and I wouldn't dare leave them in someone else's care no matter how much I trusted them. One day when Nikki was out of the house Jennifer kept watch on the front yard like an early warning sentry while I picked through this person's record collection. I swiped a half dozen records, some were rare. I knew what I was doing amounted to total vinyl taboo, but I did it anyway. Right now I feel like a dirtbag for that.

If Jennifer steals some of my things out of petty revenge, I guess I earned it.

Second Session With The Couch Potato

This afternoon I had my second counselling session. I don't feel like I got much out of it. All I did was babble about stuff from my past that had nothing to do with Jennifer. I guess I was nervous. Couch Potato didn't take any notes this time and near the end of the session I told her I still felt guilty about how I've acted towards Jennifer. I treated her like she was a damned ATM. In response, Couch Potato became irritated and she got stern with me. She said, "Put a date on when you won't feel guilty anymore." That was tough. Every time I think of Jennifer I feel a stab of guilt run through me. Since I was on the spot the only thing I could think of was October first. That's the date I'm supposed to be moved out of our house. When I'm finally out of there Jennifer will be out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully. Having to share the house with her while she's acting so cold and rude all the time is really horrible. As I feared, it's getting worse by the day. It's all deliberate, of course.

There was another thing we talked about today. I mentioned to Couch Potato that I had second thoughts, maybe I could somehow still save the relationship. She scowled at me and asked, "Why, if there were so many problems and differences between Jennifer and you, why would you want to keep it going? Give me a reason why you should try to stay with her." Honest to God, I couldn't think of a single reason.

Line Meeting Scribe

There are some people working in my area that have absolutely nothing better to do with their time but think of ways to fuck with me. They live for those moments where they can exert some control over me no matter how insignificant it is.

My area knows I hate our line meetings. I have been loud and clear about severely disliking meetings, and that I feel we have too many meetings in general. Nothing productive results from participating in these sessions. Ever. To me, line meetings are simply yet another distraction interrupting my work. I'm also extra pissed off when I have to wake up early and arrive at work way before I normally would have just to make it to one of dayshift's whining and moaning episodes. So I don't show up anymore to any of their meetings. I haven't shown up for months. I got so sick of it I boycotted them all and now I appear hours after any scheduled line meeting was to have taken place. Dayshift questioned me about it a few times with fake concern in their voices. I told them the truth, that I was done with showing up for them and that they suck real bad. Or something like that.

I'm sure they spent many days dwelling on how to trip me up with this. They succeeded. Their diabolical plan was to make me the new line meeting scribe. The scribe has to sit there for the whole miserable, useless, retarded meeting and take down notes. The meeting minutes, generally speaking. After it's all over the scribe has to email the minutes out to everyone. Squirmy thought it was a great idea when he was presented with dayshift's brilliant suggestion to make me the new meeting scribe. He informed me of their idea this week and told me I had better be there for the get together, and he added I better be there on time. Fuckers. I have to be present and I have to pay attention. I don't even get the luxury of being there and zoning out anymore. I can't daydream of feeding my coworkers to the lions or have visions about performing warped Nazi medical experiments upon them or... or... This is going to be pure hell for me.

So I showed up today. I scribbled some shit down in a musty conference room surrounded by people I detest. May lightning strike them all dead. Anyway, here's what I got in my notebook:

Assembly
-Concern over the rework listed on assembly sheet. Call Dee to clean up.
-Suggestion to inspect PC boards briefly when they come in from stores. *you stupid bastards should have been doing this already*

Test
-James displayed graph on August shipped units.
-Ergo freak engineer called Squirmy concerning workstation arms. Squirmy will meet with the technicians to discuss the problem soon.
-The Troll ordered Gary and I two new Hubie Carts with taller dimensions for Final Assembly. *about god damned time they did that*
-He Man is troubleshooting red boards for the power mods.
-Kiet mentioned getting our new electrical engineer to examine a problem with the buffer boards.
-Slobbering Mouth Kid will be in VID until the 26th for most of the time unless we need him to test boards.
-Squirmy thanked us all for getting the phone usage down. *yeah thanks for cutting back on all your personal phonecalls, Toothless* He also said not to worry about our orders dropping off. "We still have our jobs."
-PC literacy class is in the works for folks who are having trouble. The other class coming up is for English reading and writing.
-ISO 9000 audit. Our area did well. Squirmy announced, "During an audit don't be afraid to ask for clarification of the question. Always answer the auditor as simply as possible."
-Training records are up to date, if you have a question see Toothless.
-Squirmy is reviving the tech meeting every other Thursday.

It's all stupid shit. Who cares. I'll email this crap to all of them later minus my sarcastic comments. On second thought maybe I should mail it out unedited. That way I'll get a couple of the losers to cry or kill themselves. Cool.

8.29.1997

Just got back here from work. It's a little after one in the morning. I am scared shitless I won't have enough money to afford moving in someplace else next month so I've been working as much overtime as I can. Problem is, our customer orders for the product family I'm working on have completely dropped off the scale this week. There's just nothing to do, so there won't be overtime available. This is going to force me to do something rather drastic. I'm going to go back to TDS and see if they can use me on their dayshift. If I get back in with them I'll be working a minimum of 16 hour days. I don't know if I will be able to handle working a full shift at TDS in the daytime and then work my normal swing shift hours at Bill and Dave's. I don't know what else to do.

Jennifer is here and awake actually, which was a surprise. She had to let me in the house tonight because I couldn't get the security screen door unlocked. For some reason the key was jammed up in the deadbolt. After I thanked her for opening up the door I scurried into my room. These days I'm trying to avoid her as much as she's been trying to avoid me. Jennifer probably prefers it that way. Before heading off to the factory this afternoon I packed up all my books and most of my video game shit. I jettisoned my stacks of trade magazines and technical journals. I didn't want to do it but I have to lighten my load significantly to move fast when an opportunity presents itself. I tossed out a couple years worth of Evaluation Engineering, Laser Focus World, Defense News, and others.

My ears are ringing and my noggin is starting to feel heavy so I guess it's time for bed. The doctor gave me these teeny-tiny sleeping pills and they work well enough. I can tell when they start to kick in because I can hear a faint ringing noise in my ears. If I didn't have them I'd be lying awake every night dwelling on what has happened here with Jennifer. I have a serious problem letting go of things that upset me. What I have to try to do is realize that I can't control much in life, and I must roll with it instead of trying to fight it. Fighting it only makes everything much worse in the short term.

J1 Returns

J1 has been missing in action for two weeks. We didn't know what the hell to make of it. He got to work around 11pm one night, worked for about an hour like usual and told us he was heading out for lunch. None of us saw him or heard anything from him until tonight. He showed up like nothing out of the ordinary happened and went to work like normal. Before he got the chance to tell us he was gonna grab some lunch and disappear for another couple of weeks, Supertech, Musclehead, and I cornered him. We wanted to know where the fuck he had been.

The night we last saw him, he said he went to a local burger joint and hit their drive-thru. While in the drive-thru line, his car was rear-ended. Big deal. I smelled bullshit in his story right off the bat, so did Musclehead and Supertech. We knew this particular burger joint isn't open after ten in the evening and J1 wouldn't have arrived there at the earliest until sometime after midnight. The three of us didn't say anything to one another but from the looks we shot back and forth it was obvious none of us were buying J1's junk. We started hitting him in rapid fire succession with the tough questions. It was like J1 suddenly found himself in that fabled dingy room with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling and an old wooden chair in the center of the floor. He was getting the aggressive third degree.

Musclehead said, "So you got rear-ended in the drive-thru. They must have hit you at what, five miles per hour? That must have wrecked your car, huh?" He laughed at J1.
Supertech snickered.
J1 became red in the face and sheepishly told us he drove home.
I asked him, "Why didn't you call us that night? Why didn't you call during the past two weeks?"
J1 said, "I couldn't call because some of my neighbors at the apartment complex I live in cut my phone lines."
"Huh? Why would they do that? Okay, so why didn't you call us from a payphone down the street then?" I was angry J1 thought we were that stupid.
"Well, they slashed the tires on my car."
Musclehead rolled his eyes at that. Supertech kept snickering with his hand on his chin.
"No phone and tires slashed. So why couldn't you call a taxi from a neighbor's phone to come in to work?" The tone of Musclehead's voice was taunting J1 as he asked that question.
J1 nervously said, "They tried to kick the door to our apartment down. I couldn't leave. I had to protect my wife."

Yeah right, I thought to myself. This is going to turn out to be another one of his self absorbed hero stories that exists only in his broken mind. I gave up asking him anything more about it. I was disgusted. Musclehead made fun of him for the next couple of hours, I went back to work in the assembly area. The fucked up thing about it is, J1 didn't call in to Squirmy to tell him he wasn't working his shifts. Squirmy won't come in on swingshift or graveyard to check up on us so he doesn't have a clue if we're here or not. Since J1 didn't call in he got paid like he was here the whole time, the bastard. He also hasn't been vouchering all the time he took off when he has left for lunch after only working one hour each night. J1 is basically ripping off the company. None of us have finked on him for it, at least not yet.

Bill and Dave's company gives all of us alot of freedom in the workplace. It takes a great deal of character and personal ethics not to abuse those freedoms. The method here for logging your time off is called vouchering and it's nothing more than a honor system. To voucher your vacation or sick time you normally have to tell your manager by voicemail or by notifying your supervisor in advance. You can do this by writing down the time/days you take off on your supervisor's desk calendar if he's not around to talk with about it. Employees also have to go into a computer system and log the time there. Some of our management staff are completely lazy and they rarely bother to audit employee's hours they've vouchered or even check on them to see if they are present and working. Miscreants like J1 take big advantage of that. I think I'm going to start calling J1 an F-Dude. The F stands for failure. Since he fails to appear and perform on the job it's a perfect nickname for him.

Conversations With A Couch Potato

Jennifer has been avoiding me like the plague. If I'm in a room of the house she wants to go to, she waits until I've left it before she will go in. She's like a shadow. And she only speaks to me when she absolutely has to. The rest of the time she is completely silent. It hurts. Especially when I hear her talking on the phone all cheerful to one of the guys she works with at the coffee shop. She used to talk to me like that. Not anymore though. It's rough.

My first counselling session was last week. To my surprise I've discovered that talking with a therapist doesn't make me feel weak at all. It's like talking to a professional friend about what's bothering you. The advice she has given me so far is sensible. She likes to call herself a Couch Potato. Must have something to do with all the comfy couches she has shoved up against every wall in her office. The sessions with her are scheduled for just under an hour and she has accepted my medical coverage co-pay so it's only costing me thirty bucks per visit, which is outstanding.

I tried to be as honest and blunt as possible about everything negative I've done to Jennifer during the years we have been together. I was up front about my reason for seeing a therapist. All I wanted was to figure out how I got myself into this mess, and to help me prevent it from ever happening again. I wasn't interested in being hypnotized or exploring all the dark secrets hidden in my subconcious. Nor was I interested in having every aspect of my childhood dissected. I explained to the Couch Potato there was nothing I could do to save the relationship with Jennifer and I asked for her to help me deal with the feelings of guilt and regret I'm experiencing. To put everything in perspective I described the situation from the beginning. I talked about when Jennifer and I first met, why we seemed to like each other, what we did and didn't do together, and my overwhelming obsession with her. I also mentioned Jennifer's inability or lack of desire to have sex with me. Jennifer didn't like it when I touched her, or if I playfully tried to man-handle her. She never initiated having sex with me, I was always the one who wanted to be intimate. Jennifer would just lie there on her back like a dead person waiting for it to be overwith. It made me feel like trash.

The Couch Potato's response was she thought Jennifer must have been molested at some point during her childhood. In the back of my mind I figured something like that may have been the case. Hearing that from a professional was a big relief. I had a fear the sexual problems with Jennifer were all my fault. Coincidentally about a year ago my Mom said the same thing to me about Jennifer. One night when I was visiting with my Mom I complained to her about the lack of intimacy between Jennifer and I. I asked her what she thought about it. Mom had some insight into what was going on. I almost fell off my chair with what she told me that evening. She said that when she was a little girl, her stepfather molested her at a very young age. So she could relate, or see why Jennifer was acting strange towards me because she figured something similar must have happened to Jennifer. It was an odd moment for me because Mom never told me about this before and she has not brought it up again since that night.

For now, the Couch Potato's advice was for me to stop drinking coffee, to take the sleeping pills my doctor gave me, and to write more often in my journals. I'll see her again next week.