Diversity Training: Lesson Two

Today's role playing excercise was "Choose who you least would want to be".

Once again each corner of the conference room had an easel placed facing towards the fifty or sixty employees in our group. I anticipated another waste of an eight hour shift doing this crap. The four easels represented characters no one would want to be in real life. They were: A homeless man living in his car with his two kids, an unemployed corporate executive manager that was gay, a black girl working at a 7-11 with a GED, and the last one had something to do with a Mexican. I already forgot what that scenario was about.

We were instructed by Diane Backwards to choose the character we hated the most, or would least want to be and go stand by that easel. For a few moments the entire room was filled with shuffling feet and people bouncing off one another. As the chaos settled down, our teacher had us tell the rest of the group why we had chosen the particular character. It was so fucking stupid. Do you know how long it takes 50+ people to explain shit like this to a crowded room of disinterested employees? Hours. I could have cared less. Minutes dragged by like an eternity and all I could think about was my customer boxes becoming later and later for their scheduled ship dates. I was angry.

At some point during the session, I made an interesting observation. A technician on the Precision Group named Barley, was missing. I hardly knew him, he was one of the few employees working in the Spokane division that accepted an offer to relocate to California when the instrument transfer was completed. Most of them hated California and refused to leave their Twilight Zone haven of Spokane.

Barley was here during the class roll call, but I didn't remember him returning after our first fifteen minute break. Sneaky. The guy has balls.

The Story So Far...

Well here's the latest.

Squirmy is leaving our line to take over a carrier wave sig gen group in another department. He's making the move as soon as possible. Our new supervisor is a guy we have already nicknamed Garden Tool, because of his last name. You could hang him up in the garage between a shovel and a hoe. None of us know this new manager so we have no idea if he's going to be a good thing, or a bad thing. Only time will tell.

I got an apology from that dayshift manager who showed up the other night during swing shift's Dingbat Hysteria episode. The next day he checked with building maintenance about an electrical fire in the second floor window heaters and everything came up clean. Then he followed up in our area and talked with He-Man about his adhesive curing experiment. It finally dawned on him what I was trying to tell him that night was the plain and simple truth. I was kinda surprised he went out of his way to apologize for throwing me out of the building. I guess he must have felt like a total dumb ass after all.

Deadwood is in serious trouble over the missing noise filtering capacitors on the instrument power supplies. Engineering verified those caps need to be there, but they still don't know exactly how many units Deadwood may have let escape minus those parts. We keep tight records of everything we build and test, and who built it. A Risk Assessment meeting is taking place in the next couple of days with management and engineering to sort the whole mess out. Deadwood is sweating bullets in the meantime, she thinks she might get fired. I have no idea what will happen to her.

Uni-Burn got canned. I heard about it from some guys working in the Vintage department. Uni-Burn was that doofus I had to share a company car with up in Spokane on the product transfer project. I didn't like that guy at all. Anyway, he was cheating on his time and throwing attitude on his boss over the past few months. His manager got tired of it and threw him out. I didn't realize it, but his mother works down in Stores and she's pretty cool. She works on swing shift manning the front desk. Every time I call in a hot part order, she's the person I deal with. Having her son fired from here must be damn embarrassing for her.

Diversity Training: Lesson One

Off to Diversity Training class I go. The whole department was there, about fifty or more employees.

Our instructor was a lady from Texas named Diane Backwards. She was wearing a tight white long sleeve shirt and ankle length black skirt. Her appearance was very conservative. Diane seemed pretty stupid to me as soon as she opened her mouth and I found myself wondering which one of our corporate management fools hired her and the company she worked for. I expected this class was going to be a waste of Bill and Dave's time and money. It was certainly a waste of my time. After going through what I did today and witnessing what happened in that conference room I'd say my expectations were dead on. Here's what went down. We went through a series of fictional scenarios that openly encouraged hate and discrimination along racial, economic, and sexual lines. I have to hand it to whoever scripted the excercises because they packed in a ton of heavy duty shit in practically no time at all.

The first class assignment was essentially "It's okay to hate people"! There were four or five large easels with poster sized paper on them placed around the perimeter of the conference room. Written at the top of each page were titles like "Black People", "Homosexuals", "Unemployed". We were handed large markers and told to write whatever we thought about each group of people on the easels for twenty minutes. It was fairly anonymous to write with impunity because so many people were wandering about the room scribbling stuff. As the papers began to fill up with written comments some people started snickering. They were reading some of the junk before they had a crack to leave their own musings. When it was all done it was fucking rough, man. On the "Black People" page, it was hell with the lid off. Every kind of racist remark you can think of was up there plain as day. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The "Homosexuals" easel had shit on it like "the reason for AIDS", "snappy dressers", and "turd burglars". The hate went on and on. Under any circumstances here at work none of this would ever come up. Employees aren't running around the factory telling each other Nigger jokes or treating gays like they are outcasts. If anything people just ignore each other and get on with the job.

When twenty minutes had elapsed, Diane Backwards took each page from the easels and read aloud every racial slur and negative comment written down. I got the feeling she enjoyed the responses a little too much. Some of the folks became uncomfortable and were visibly pissed off as our instructor continued. We don't have too many employees that are gay, but of the few we've got, they began to cry. One of them abruptly got up and ran out of the conference room. I sat and watched all this unfold and I began thinking that if Bill and Dave's company was doing this to somehow avoid discrimination lawsuits, they just fucked up good. This whole deal seemed like it would blow up in management's face and backfire severely by giving employees a perfect excuse to sue them.

Deadwood And The Noise Filtering Caps

Deadwood and I have been alternating on the power supply assembly station for our vintage signal generator line. Usually we build enough power supplies a week or two in advance of customer orders so when we start the instrument chassis we can grab power supplies off the shelf and slap them into the frames.

This afternoon I took over for Deadwood. She left a partially built power supply on the workbench and something caught my eye. Parts were missing. The outer case to the supply wasn't closed yet, there were some more parts and wires that needed to be soldered into place. I couldn't put my finger on what it was that seemed wrong for a while, and then I spotted it. Three red capacitors were not soldered into the ground hub on the chassis and the line module of the supply. It was odd, but I figured she hadn't got to it yet and I went ahead with the install of the missing capacitors. We only add them on the full scale version of this product. The smaller unit doesn't need them, for whatever reason I don't know. On the big box these capacitors are there specifically to filter out dirty power spikes and voltage drops that are common in many other countries.

In countries where the power grid is poorly maintained, it's typical for line voltage to be excessively noisy and dirty. That is, loads of power surges, spikes, and voltage drop. Dirty power can instantly destroy sensitive equipment. We are aware our product might be utilized in a third world country where the power grid is bad and designed the power supply to operate flawlessly under these conditions. But, it needs those noise filtering caps as a first line defense. If they aren't there, the box could take some bad line voltage and crap out.

I walked over to the area where we keep completed instrument chassis and I opened up a few of Deadwood's most recently built boxes. I didn't see the noise filtering caps in any of them. That raised my eyebrows a bit. Deadwood is a nice lady, but her work is consistently shoddy. I had a bad feeling she screwed up these boxes but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I caught her before she left for the day and I asked her to come over to the power supply bench for a minute. I asked her about the missing caps on each of the boxes she built. She looked at me and said, "I only put those on option 003 boxes just like the documentation says to". Okay. I asked her to show me the page in the assembly docs where it says to do that. Deadwood flipped through pages in the documentation binder until she came to the step she was talking about. "There", she said. She pointed to the top line of the page. In red ink it mentioned something about an option 003 power supply, but it had nothing to do with building a full version box. The instructions plainly stated that if you build full version, add the noise filtering caps to the chassis. I guess the way she was interpreting the page she only placed these parts on full version option 003 boxes. We don't build too many of those, they're kinda rare actually.

Deadwood has been building power supplies and instrument chassis for months. I had a bad feeling she's been omitting these capacitors the whole time. I did my best to politely explain to her that these parts have to be installed on one hundred percent of the big boxes. As what I was saying to her sunk in, the expression on her face changed to worry. She was scared. I felt bad for her and I decided I didn't want to fink on her or anything. She asked me, "What do you think I should do"? I thought for a moment about it and said it would be best if she brought this up to management herself and asked them to look into it. Previous experiences have taught me that when something like this happens it's best to 'fess up to it and just get the problem taken care of. When unforseen problems like this creep up and nobody steps forward to say, "Hey, I fucked up" the rest of the group is left to solving the mystery on their own. That means engineers, managers, and technicians are engaged. Scenarios like this can end up costing a company excessive amounts of time and money if no one comes forward to simply say they made an honest mistake. So, I suggested Deadwood approach management on her own and tell them she goofed. She's going to talk to Squirmy about it today.

We'll see what happens. I feel somewhat guilty for catching this, especially if she gets into trouble. I wish her the best of luck.

Diversity Training

Shit around here keeps getting more and more retarded by the day.

We were informed this week that a mandatory class on "Diversity" would be held on site. Diversity Training is a politically correct class designed to teach employees about discrimination in the workplace, and all the forms discrimination can appear in. We've had this sort of mind numbingly stupid stuff before, like last time when they had a professional acting team perform a play in the cafeteria. The play was about homosexuals in the workplace who were verbally persecuted by coworkers and denied promotions by management for being gay, I think. I dunno because I skipped the gig and heard bits and pieces about it from people when they got back into the area. Instead of attending I stayed on the line and got some high dollar boxes out the door.

Everyone in our department was going to have to attend the class on Diversity and each session would be most of an eight hour shift, every day, all week. Ugh. I don't have time for this junk. See, I've got a bunch of hot instruments to ship for big name customers. Those big name customers are pissed off because they placed orders for their boxes twelve to fourteen weeks ago and they want their goods as soon as possible. I already have enough distractions and useless meetings sapping my time away daily around here so this mandatory class was especially bad news. The way I figure it, shipping out completed boxes makes us money and results in our customers being a little less mad at us. Sitting in non-essential meetings and attending goofy politically correct classes doesn't make us any money. And it keeps customers' boxes from shipping out on time which increases their anger factor considerably. I'm not cool with that.

As I usually do with petty classes and frivolous meetings, I attempted to weasel my way out of this Diversity Training garbage but Squirmy wasn't having any of it and practically put a gun to my head. I had to go along with it like everybody else. They would be taking roll call each session, he said. If people didn't take the classes they would be written up and have to go through the entire class again from the very beginning. Wonderful. I can hardly wait.

Dingbat Hysteria

Have you ever been involved in an emergency that in reality there was no emergency to begin with? Ever been surrounded by women in their late 40s to early 50s that completely freak out over absolutely nothing? I have. It just happened here in our building.

When I got in to work today, I discovered He-Man slaving away at one of the assembly benches. In front of him there were a couple of unfamiliar looking PC boards that he was covering in goop and placing inside metal clamshell enclosures. I checked out what he was up to. The boards were installed in metal shields and had a large amount of small gauge wires soldered in all over the place. He-Man sandwiched the assemblies into the shields drenched in a silicone like adhesive and then he placed both of these things into our VCO oven. We use the VCO oven to heat the completed assemblies up to 50C to age some of the parts and stress test them. Some of the initial tuning has to be done while they're hot. Why I dunno. Anyway He-Man said the oven was off limits tonight due to his little experiment.

The experiment was partially to prove out a new adhesive. I didn't pay attention to the rest of what He-Man explained. He set the oven temperature much higher than we normally use it for and warned me that the adhesives inside might stink up the area later on in the shift but not to worry about it, none of it was going to outgas toxic fumes or anything. Cool. Basically I could forget about what he was experimenting on and just work, business as usual.

Hours later a strange stink did permeate the production area as advertised. It smelled like a pungeant sweet, heavy rubber. Sort of like Dow Corning RTV, but a little weirder. I walked over to the little blue environmental oven and opened up the door. A wave of stink hit me. What I sniffed was definetly He-Man's handiwork. I closed the door to the oven and sat back down to work on some phase mods. Phase mods are tough to build because I have to surface mount some FETs and some really small metal hardline cables. To do the job right you have to have a steady hand and alot of patience. If you're experiencing a coffee achiever moment or having a bad day, your hands probably won't be steady enough to do the work properly. Once in a while my hands are too jittery so I won't work on delicate stuff like that until another day. It's just not worth all the rework I'd have to do if I mangled up a board just because I was unsteady.

As stink from the oven spread out over our floor of the building, some dingbats on the Precision Group began to get nervous. I didn't notice it at first, but their nervousness turned into serious worry and then reached genuine panic. Attempting to nip this in the bud I got up from my seat and politely yelled at them that what they were smelling was a planned experiment to cure some adhesive in our oven and not to flip out about it. A couple of the dingbats saw me, and heard what I said. I went back to work.

About a half hour later, Super Shopper and her crew of female retail warriors came barging through our line panic stricken and told all of us to evacuate the building. When she got to where I was sitting I looked right into her eyes and said to her, "What the hell are you babbling about"? Super Shopper was already flustered and red in the face. Any time someone talks to her like that her rage switch gets pressed and she becomes even more of a maniac than she already is. She shouted into my face "I saw smoke coming out of the heater vents by the windows over there and do you smell it? The building is on fire! We have to get everyone out now"! Fuck me. These broads are so incredibly stupid. I could probably hit Super Shopper right between the eyes with a small hammer and she wouldn't feel it. Maybe she would blink once, that's about all the reaction I would get. I told Super Shopper that she didn't see any smoke. Then I marched her over to the oven and yanked on the door latch. "There's what you've been smelling. No fire, no smoke, no evacuation. Get back to work ya nitwit".

Super Shopper was instantly possessed by demons, or perhaps by Satan himself. I sometimes wonder if the Devil uses Super Shopper's body as a vacation house from time to time because after all, she is pure evil on occasion. She screamed at me to get out of the building or she would have me fired, and some other dumb bullshit that I didn't pay attention to. When I make Super Shopper that mad at me I know I've won, and I bask in the glory of it while it lasts. Doesn't matter what foolishness comes out of her mouth it still puts a self satisfied smirk on my face. I brushed her off and went back to work right in front of her while she stood there hovering between female hysteria and total anger. I guess she left after a minute or two. I didn't notice. What I didn't know until it was too late, was the dingbats called site security.

Fifteen minutes later I got a tap on my shoulder that startled the shit out of me. It was one of the dayshift supervisors. I swiveled around my my chair to face him and it looked like he threw on some clothes as fast as he could to come into the site. He told me to evacuate the building. I shook my head at him in disgust. Nobody listens to me around here. It's so fucking frustrating, let me tell you. Once again I got up from where I was working and opened up the oven containing He-Man's experiment. I said to the manager, "There's no smoke in here, there is no fire anywhere. The women didn't see anything, they freaked out and made shit up because they all have brains the size of a pea. Here's what everyone was smelling tonight. Sniff for yourself, dude". He checked it out and I shut the door to the oven. No sooner did I close the door he looked at me and ordered me to evacuate the building due to a possible fire coming from the window heaters. What the fuck? Was I speaking to him in Russian or something?

I gave up, and walked outside to the parking lot. Fuck it.

Boredom For Meth

Tonight I caught Meth sitting at one of the workbenches with a large microscope we call the Mantis. Meth isn't a technician, he seemed out of place sitting there with his face buried in the microscope visor. Techs use equipment like the Mantis to rework tiny surface mounted components that are damaged on PC boards. Or they do delicate repair to traces, like when they've burned a pad or found a lifted circuit trace. I didn't say anything to Meth. I kept on my way and stayed busy building a bunch of vintage boxes over on our side of the cubicle wall. Hours later in the shift I ran across him still seated in front of the microscope. I knew he had work to do on the Precision boxes and as usual he wasn't doing a damn thing. I walked over to where he was and looked over his shoulder. On the table in front of him there was a microcircuit that had been eviscerated. Meth had one side of the case open and he was inspecting the microcircuit itself. It was weird because he doesn't build them nor does he know anything about how they are tested and tuned. He's got the IQ of a pumpkin, the fucking dunce. So why was he screwing around with a microcircuit?

Just to his right at the workbench there was a trash can and something shiny inside caught my eye. Peeking into the can I saw a half dozen gold plated microcircuits that were totally destroyed. We don't throw out microcircuits, they're too expensive so they must be sent back to the micro lines that supply them to our instrument lines. They either recycle or scrap out the parts. It's their call to make, not ours. A typical microcircuit might cost Bill and Dave's company a few thousand dollars per copy to build and test. An average test instrument might have anywhere from six to ten microcircuits so the overall cost of the box adds up quick just on microcircuits alone.

Curiocity got the best of me so I asked Meth what he was up to. He looked over his shoulder at me and said, "I was bored so I broke open one of these". He gestured to the little gold box lying gutted on the workbench and continued. "I've always wanted to see what's inside so I broke it open with heavy duty clippers and channel locks". Ah. As I thought, he's sitting around doing absolutely zero while everyone around him picks up the slack. Asshole. We normally don't have scrap microcircuits just lying around the production area so I asked, "Where'd you get that from"? Meth got up from the bench and walked over to the bin stock drawers where we keep all the brand new microcircuits. He opened up one of the drawers and pointed, "In here". I cringed. "How many of those did you wreck"? Meth sat back down at the Mantis scope bench and told me he busted a few open and when he was done ruining them he brushed the mangled bits off the table into the trash can. I couldn't believe it. That shit is going to cost his line tens of thousands of dollars and throw their inventory counts way off. Accounting and Finance is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks when they can't explain where those new parts disappeared to.

I confronted Meth about delibrately destroying expensive parts simply because he was bored and told him to knock that shit off immediately. He didn't listen to a thing I said. Meth dumped his latest victim from the workbench into the trash can and threw some papers and other junk on top to conceal the wasted microcircuits. Then he wandered elsewhere in the production area like nothing had happened. What a scumbag. I swear to God I'm working with some of the worst people I have ever met. How in the hell did all these fuckups and losers end up here?

Medical Disability

Squirmy did it. I was beginning to have my doubts, but he was sneaky and pulled the deal off. He eliminated the Eat Monster. She was sitting in conference rooms for weeks, hanging out reading the yellow pages. The whole time Squirmy was covert working with the Nurse and Human Resources. He documented everything so Eat Monster couldn't hit Bill and Dave's company with a lawsuit. That's the main motivating factor here, lawsuits. This company is so deathly afraid of lawsuits that you can get away with almost anything as soon as you threaten management with a lawyer. Doesn't matter if you actually have a lawyer. All you have to do is meekly utter the word "lawsuit" to them and they are instantly shivering in their boots.

Eat Monster got thrown out on a medical disability of some kind. I assume she will be paid a settlement or a severance package hefty enough to keep her from dragging the company into the courts. All I can say is, good riddance. It's just too bad we're paying her to leave. She never should have been hired here to begin with. If anyone should be fired, I think the person who interviewed and hired her in here should be let go with a vengeance. Total lack of judgement. Squirmy got her for our product line but I don't know if he is responsible for interviewing and hiring her in. If I ever do find out who hired her in here I'm going to punch them. Hard.

Lifetime Buy

We're running out of components to keep our instrument line alive. I mentioned that we contract with companies we call Sunset Houses, and we've had troubles with some of these shady businesses. When we know that a trusted manufacturer of a certain kind of thru hole component is going to cease production we usually try to book what is called a Lifetime Buy. Lifetime Buys are a final bulk purchase of a known, good part that should carry us on for years after a component has been discontinued. Employees called "buyers" maintain on hand inventory of parts and try to figure out what our useage will be for years in advance even after a product line is obsoleted. So far, none of the buyers have done a very good job predicting what a particular part's demand will be and we inevitably run out of supply years too soon. Then we're in serious shit.

The moment our in house stock of an item is depleted, we end up scrounging around for any suitable replacement part. Many of the Sunset Houses promise us good components but when we get the stuff in and start testing it, frequently it turns out to be junk. It's a real mess. I don't know if there is a better solution but what I do know is that the longer we support this vintage product family the more hassle we have trying to keep it alive. In the meantime our marketers price gouge the shit out of our customers that buy these boxes. If the finished unit costs us $11,000 to build and test, they sell it for $60,000 to $70,000 to the end user. That's one hell of a markup, and a cash cow for Bill and Dave's company.

Prove It

Musclehead and I have been perplexed. Deadwood has been telling us that she used to be skinny, and Wingnut Dan says he's happily married to a totally hot looking woman. Neither Musclehead or myself are convinced about their stories so we've challenged both of them to cough up with the proof.

Sure as shit, Deadwood brought in dozens of pictures from the seventies when she was in her early to mid 20s. My jaw dropped. Instead of being the 300+ pound beast that she is today, she was thin as a rail and wearing skin tight clothes. In one shot, she had on a fire engine red minidress with matching long sleeve coat. She looked kinda hot, actually. I kept staring at the photo in my hand and the beast standing in front of me. It was like all data was lost. It didn't compute. Skinny broad in the picture, behemoth lurking a few feet away. They were the same person. I could see it. Somehow none of it made sense to my puny mortal brain. But there it was. Deadwood was treated poorly by one guy from the sound of things. One guy only. That changed her life forever and she never dated again. She told me a little bit about that night. There's a remote road near the coast called Coleman Valley. I've been there and hung out drinking myself into total oblivion on a couple of occasions. The road is a great place to hang out at night because you can see out to the ocean on the ridges and about sixty miles South. From there you can watch jumbo jets come in for landings at SFO on a clear night. For Deadwood on her fateful night out there I guess something evil happened. She's been alone ever since.

Wingnut Dan fired up his email account and showed Musclehead and I a few pictures of his wife. I couldn't believe it. His wife is totally fine. Absolute drop dead gorgeous knockout. Both of us were gawking at the photos on the computer screen before us, and looking at one another like, "Is this shit for real"? I don't know how Dan pulled it off, but I have to give the guy props. She's damn beautiful. They met in high school and he's been with her ever since. Lucky motherfucker. Boggles my mind though, why she's with him. I mean, he's a straight up goofball. I don't know how guys like him get away with shit like that.

Doria

There is a woman over on the Precision Group assembly team that does two things in life exceptionally well. She falls down, and she rolls her cars. The falling down routine is delibrate, flipping her vehicles isn't. Doria has a physical disability of some sort which causes her a great deal of difficulty when walking. I haven't asked her why she refuses to use a wheel chair or a cane because it isn't any of my business. I find myself wondering why she prefers to smack the floor. Doesn't seem like much fun to me. Anyway, she has such a tough time walking in a straight line with no obstructions in her way that the slightest thing fucks her up.

For example, you know when you walk into or out of an elevator there's a gap between the floor and the elevator car. On either side of the gap there's a metal strip a few inches wide. Doria manages to get caught on those metal strips and lose her balance. Then she goes into stunt man mode and falls to the ground professionally. Tuck, cross arms over chest, roll, land on side. It's something she takes pride in and tells everyone about, her skill to fall to the floor without getting hurt. She can't get up by herself once she's taken a spill though. Any employee in the vicinity of where she's collapsed has to stop what they are doing to help her back on her feet. I think her shoes are part of the problem. They're a chocolate brown leather stub-toed shoe style with ridiculously thick ass soles. They look like frankenstein platform boots or something similar and probably are much more likely to get caught in machinery such as department store escalators or industrial elevators like we have here at work.

Rolling your car isn't an easy thing to do, really. You have to work at it under most circumstances and the chances you'll actually have all four tires facing skyward are slim. Doria has it pretty well nailed down however. Recently she's managed to completely roll her car twice on her daily commute to the factory. She didn't injure herself, either. I'm sure her ride is seriously jacked up with the external redecoration it's been through. Probably looks like the heap from The Rockford Files.

Doria seems like a nice enough woman, but she's one of those females that's extra dangerous to work with because she's so easily offended and will run to a supervisor with tears flowing down her cheeks. Everyone has to be aware when she's around. She's constantly listening in on other employees' conversations and the moment she hears anything she doesn't agree with, she becomes emotional and combative. I found this out the hard way. One afternoon I mentioned something about a religion that wasn't Christianity. I don't remember the specifics of the conversation I was in or which religion I talked about, it doesn't matter. What happened was, Doria flipped out and looked like she was on the verge of tears. She's a serious bible thumpin' woman of God that won't hear of anything other than Jesus. I felt like I was dealing with a pesky child when she went bonkers on me. Other people in the area have apparently done worse to her either inadvertantly or on purpose with their conversation subject matter so I don't feel too bad. Meth messes with her on purpose. Makes me speculate how much longer he will last before her complaints to management result in his termination.

VCO

VCO Diodes must be between -3 to +3
Example: +2, +1, 0 = +3
'A' slot always has largest value diode

Prefabbing boards - Done training
After prefab test board with multimeter

-Hold red probe to bottom and touch each perforated square on top with black probe
-On top touch each row red probe behind one square of black probe. Looking for bridges. If multimeter sounds short to ground.
-After test visually inspect boards for any solder bridging or damage.
-New fixture for folding boards. Mickey Mouses toward you (diode side) board number always faces up. Start fold with fingers, then use fixture to get good crease. Fold membrane to cover traces by board number. Next, fold in to diode side. Leave diode side up.
-Load diodes. 'A' slot first (largest value) polarity stripe down into fixture. Smallest value goes into the left hole of each lettered pair of holes. The remaining value goes into the left hole of each lettered pair of holes. The remaining value (next largest) goes into the right hole of lettered pairs. POLARITY STRIPE DOWN.
-'A' slot has 122 board on fixture. Open membrane over traces before loading onto fixture. 118 board goes on the other side of fixture. Close fixture. Do not overtighten. Just finger snug.
-Load connectors into end of traces (membrane end) with hooked part of connectors facing up. Clamp into fixture snug.
-Load 3 bare wires. See doc for location.
-Begin soldering. Hold bare wires in until solder cools. Use fine solder wire. Do diodes, the connectors last.
-Clean all boards with acid brush and Acetone. Then inspect. Q-tip and Acetone inside of board. Double check polarity on diodes.
-Trim 3 bare wires even with diodes, then close clip diodes and connector leads.
-Clean fixtures with big brush and Acetone when done with soldering and inspection of boards.
-Fixture 158679 shown in doc with board facing you, use it facing away.
-Prefab steel board by folding in half and roll flat.
-Inspect plastic blocks for good threads and tuning holes. No cracks or bad threads for tuning slugs. Load 118 board first.
-Steel board fold one open end like airplane and load into fixture on top of 118 board. Fold little flaps back into center of steel board.
-Load 122 board into fixture on top of steel board. Close fixture.
-Nylon screws in counter sunk holes of plastic block.
-Flip fixture so diode leads are facing up.
-Load threaded studs with nut 1/4in. on side with deep allen socket up. Studs go into plastic blocks. Top row first.
-Load aluminum board with shiny half of cut outs facing up. Now load remaining three studs. Center board and tighten nuts by alternating.
-Trim fabric membrane on 117 board. See doc. Use small ruler for straightedge while trimming.
-Fig.1 after cut fold over to topside.
-Use big tip for soldering large flap of 117 board to 304 board. Use Q-tips to keep flap straight while solder cools.
-Use small tip to solder underside of traces. Seq. 17 clean with large brush and Acteone on sides, then little brush on top. Then Q-tip and Acetone on inside and top again. CLEAN FIXTURE.
-When soldering diodes, point leads in toward copper pads.
-Cut nylon tip almost all the way down to circuit side of 584 board. Check toroid wires. Inspect board for bridging and long leads.
-Add surface mount part 0160-5971 to 584 board. Before sequence 28.
-Solder sockets on circuit side of board with fine solder. Tack side rails in 3 places, then solder whole rail with fixture lifted.
-Solder tab last. Seq. 29.

Glass Pin Diodes

As the years have passed on from the 1970s, thru hole components are becoming more difficult to obtain. Few parts manufacturers are still making thru hole components because they've switched their manufacturing processes over to surface mounted PC board parts. Thru hole PC board parts have little metal legs extending from their body and have to be soldered to metal holes in the PC board. Surface mounted parts have no metal legs, only tiny metalized pads instead. They are soldered to metal pads on the surface of the board. When surface mounted technology first appeared, there were some serious problems. One problem was temperature. As electronic devices are powered up and running for long periods of time they generate heat and cool down rapidly when turned off. Surface mounted PC boards would bend slightly, or flex somewhat causing tremendous strain on the metal pads. Solder joints fractured or broke completely causing the instrument to fail. Thru hole PC boards on the other hand are almost bullet proof, they are much more resistant to temperature changes and such. They are extremely susceptible to Dendrite crystals and contamination, but I will cover that another time.

Most of our new generation test and measurement instruments are all surface mount PC board technology, but there are some with mixed technology boards, that is thru hole and surface mount parts on the same design. The stuff I primarily work on is all thru hole. These days, we just can't get quality components anymore. The only places we can buy vintage components from are what we call "Sunset Houses". A Sunset House is a part factory that will take on dead technology and continue to manufacture it for a dwindling customer base at a premium price. They are much like a print shop in so far as the more quantity you purchase from them the larger discount you get. If you require a limited run they delibrately price the parts so high that it's not worth anyone's money or time to place an order. This is the recurring situation we find ourselves in dealing with this vintage product line of RF Signal Generator.

Every couple of weeks another manufacturer of thru hole components throws in the towel and that leaves us holding the legendary empty bag. Our engineers and senior technicians have to scurry around in the component world for a suitable replacement part and trigger an MST (Manufacturing Special Test) to evaluate the new part. It's a mess. For the past year one of the parts that has been a thorn in my side are the glass pin diodes for our Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCO) that go into each box. Without the VCO, the test instrument is entirely worthless. And without good glass pin diodes, the VCO is junk. It's a vicious circle of component hatred. We did have a backup plan although it's a rather shoddy one. It's called a Lifetime Buy. I'll get into that some other time as well as the Dendrite scare of the 1980s.

Diodes are a fairly basic electronic component. They are like a water valve that only lets water pass through the valve if it's at a certain level, and it only allows the flow in one direction. We need 17 or 18 matched value glass pin diodes in the VCO and if they don't meet our specs, we have serious problems. Serious. Nearly a year ago our primary diode manufacturer bailed out on us and we were left with taking whatever we could get. The Sunset House we are contracting with has sent us thousands upon thousands of diodes claiming they meet our specs, but the reality is the things are complete ass. I've never seen such shitty measurements. Almost entire production lots from these guys are totally out of the value range we expect. Since there is no other supplier, we have to go with what we have. We're totally fucked.

Compounding my problem with building and testing good VCOs is my sometime nemesis, The Squirrel. We know the diodes are funky, we know we have no choice but to use them, and we know each and every diode has to be tested for it's value and sorted out. There are thousands of them here on the line to sort through, and Squirrel will only test enough diodes to build a few VCOs at a time. If anyone else comes along to build VCOs, there are no diodes in the sorted bins ready to use. I know she's doing it on purpose because she is 1) lazy and 2) trying to fuck with other employees. I would like to strangle her on a daily basis for this.

I have no control over The Squirrel. In fact if I even try to ask her to start testing more that a couple dozen diodes at a time she will more than likely run to management with tears in her eyes and tell them I harassed her. She does this to get out of work responsibilites constantly. I could lose my job so it's not worth the risk. This week I decided to bite the mother fuckin' bullet and test every last one of these god damned shitty diodes. Thousands of 'em. Let me honestly tell you, it made me want to die. Imagine yourself sitting in front of an eight foot tall test rack loaded with cutting edge equipment and you place one diode at a time into a fixture, take a value reading, and place the part in the appropriate bin. Repeat this hundreds of times. Then you come back the next day and do it again. And again. While you're doing this you discover that these diodes are so fucked up, so far out of specification for the application we need, that you know most of them will not work properly. But it's all you've got.

I have a few thousand more to go. I am in diode hell. Maybe this is going to take another week of eight hour shifts to get through but by God I am going to do this. I am going to do it just to spite The Squirrel even though I know I'm playing into her game. What she doesn't know is, I won't forget and I will have my revenge...

Miss V

Supertech has codenamed a Romanian woman who works on the Precision Group "Miss V". She's a strange lady that has an insatiable hunger for young men. Particularly guys in their twenties. Nothing wrong with that, but she's in her late fourties to early fifties and not attractive. Fortunately for me she isn't after me or anything, but I think something odd is afoot between her and Wingnut Dan. I'm not sure though.

Miss V likes to wear incredibly tight tops and mini-miniskirts like she's some bubblegum chomping high school girl. It's not cool. It's actually so bad that her appearance is comical. I've observed when she's walking down the hallways and she happens to pass by some of our blue collar workers like building maintenance guys or electricians, they laugh at her. She never notices so no harm done I suppose. Miss V sticks out even worse these days as she just bleached her hair blonde. It's shoulder length and entirely bright white blonde. Nobody can ignore it.

Rumor has it Miss V's little boy looks just like the vampire kid Eddie Munster from the 1960's television show The Munsters. I can kinda see that possibility because Miss V's eyebrows are goofy looking and she has this weird widow's peak in her hairline. Huge skateboard skidplate of a forehead she's got, too. I talk to her a little bit every now and again, she seems pleasant enough. She's not a great worker or a poor one, she just occupies space while she's here and does a little man-hunting when she can. It's amusing to watch her in action as long as she never pulls that crap on me. If she does, it will be like that moment in a Tex Avery cartoon where the main character thinks he's about to get busy with a totally hot broad, only to have the curtains lifted, or the veil pulled away revealing a woman with the features of a horse. And then the hapless cartoon guy flees for his life screaming into the hills. That's what I'll do. I'll flee the building screaming like a madman and run for the open fields in front of the factory parking lots.

'It' Quit

It bailed out of here, finally. I didn't know, but Deadwood was pretty tight with It since the Spokane product transfer. I thought the only friend It had here was Computer Termite. Anyway, Deadwood figured it was okay to spill her guts about every detail of It's past. I wasn't interested or asked to know but Musclehead on the other hand, he was all ears. Apparently It wanted to be a woman but couldn't afford sexual reconstruction surgery in the United States. So, It went to Germany to have the operation done. From what Deadwood says, the surgery was bungled and they cut It too deep. Everything was mangled. Yuk. Deadwood continued, she told us what It's real name was before becoming a female, and a bunch of other personal information about It nobody should know. Ever. When she was finished, Musclehead yelled at her, "With friends like you Deadwood, who needs enemies? I ain't tellin' you shit about myself now 'cause you'll just spread it all over the plant". He was right of course, she definetly would spill her guts. I don't think I'm going to talk about personal things while she's around, either.

Upon hearing the news that It quit Bill and Dave's, Supertech told me about a website that It started some time ago. The site is dedicated to the history of transistor radios and showcases hundreds of vintage radios that It has collected over the years. I was curious, and asked Supertech if he remembered what the site was called or if he could find it for me. He sat down and conjured it up pronto. I spent some time digging around through all the photos and I have to admit some of the old radios looked totally cool. What a nerdy hobby though. I'm not sure which hobby is more nerdy, people who collect glass insulators from telephone poles or this transistor radio junk.

Losing My Glasses

I'm so fucking hung over today. I can barely move. I think if I do move, I'll probably puke. I'm trying to lay here in bed perfectly still. Everything is blurry. Last night I was in a pretty good mood so I went downstairs to bug Leaky Pete and see if he wanted to go bar hopping. We've got three dive bars within a five minute walking distance of B Street so we can get totally hammered and not have to worry one bit about driving home. We simply stumble our way back bouncing off of every parking meter, telephone pole, and tree along the way. It always works out.

At the first bar we hit, no sooner had I bought myself and Pete our opening round of drinks, the guy that Jennifer was fucking walked up to me out of the crowd. He was so gone, so completely stinking drunk that his legs appeared to be barely holding him upright. As soon as he was standing in front of me he started talking. "Jennifer got me fired", he said. I didn't know how to react. He continued. "She forgot to lock up the coffee shop one night after her closing shift. The next morning when the girls came in to open, they discovered the door unlocked and the alarm not set. The district manager opened an investigation. Jennifer said it was my fault and blamed me for everything, but she was the last person there that night". Yeah, that sounded like something she would do. She fucked up, and instead of taking the hit she burned someone, anyone else for her stupidity. I suspected she was just using this guy like a weapon to make things more difficult for me before I moved out of her place. What a whore. Little five foot two skank whore.

After listening to the ex-coffee guy's story I didn't have anything to say. He bungled his way back into the mess of bodies in front of the bartender. I sat down at a table with Leaky Pete and told him what I just heard. He said I should forget it and just pay attention to drinking, but I couldn't get my mind off of it. As the night wore on I became more agitated and angry. I was rapidly slipping towards angry drunkeness.

By the time all the bars were closed, Pete and I were walking erratically in the streets towards the house. As we passed the Donut Slut I spotted a mangy pay phone in front of the place and I had a thought. I should call Jennifer and tell her what a stupid fucking whore-bitch she is. Yeah! That would make me feel much better and since she had a caller ID box if I used the pay phone she wouldn't have my new, unlisted number to call me back and whine about it. That would be coolness for sure. Pete continued onward towards the house. I was pulled towards that filthy pay phone like a moth to a flame. I viciously rummaged around in my pockets for change and slapped a couple dollars worth of quarters onto the top of the phone box which was at my eye level. I began pumping quarters into the fucker like it was a videogame at the arcade and punched Jennifer's number into the keypad. There was no ringy noises. Instead I got some pre-recorded mumbling that I didn't understand.

I hung up and put more quarters into the phone. I dialed again. Still no ringy dingy stuff. More mumbling. Clenching my fists and grinding my teeth I slammed more quarters into the phone. By God, this shit was going to work, I was going to unleash verbal retribution so fierce on Jennifer that she would cry all week or else. It had to be done. I was in such a hurry to call that I screwed up her number and had to start over a couple of times. I made myself more angry in doing so. Then it hit me, like out of the blue. I couldn't see straight. Everything was out of focus and hazy, sort of. I reached towards my eyes to feel the wire frame of my glasses, but they weren't there. I squinted at the top of the phone box and leaned in close. All I saw was dimes, nickels, and the few remaining quarters. No glasses. Puzzled, I looked around on the ground. I thought for sure I had them with me. Where could they be? This was bad. I need my glasses. Well, one problem at a time I thought. I still had to make this call and terrorize Jennifer. Then I'd worry about the missing glasses.

Alcohol is a peculiar thing. Along with affecting motor skills, clouding judgement, making ugly people of the opposite sex appear attractive, it can also affect hearing. Making another attempt to spew poison into Jennifer's answering machine, I finally heard in plain English what the pre-recorded mumbling was saying. "This number does not accept calls from pay phones". Fuck! I raged on the poor phone. It was kicked and punched, cursed, and spat upon. I scooped up my remaining change and stormed back towards B Street.

Pete was awake sitting in his livingroom with his front door open. I asked him if I had left my glasses anywhere about. We both looked around, but they were definetly missing in action. I went upstairs and searched everywhere in my room. Nada. No spectacles. I grabbed a flashlight and scurried out to the back yard and rifled through my car. I came up empty handed. Frustrated, I walked down the driveway back to Pete's and sat down in one of his easy chairs. Pete looked at me and said, "Couldn't find 'em huh?" I shook my head and said "Nope". Pete laughed and bellowed at me, "Right now there's probably some bum following the railroad tracks and he's got a nice pair of gold wire rimmed glasses on his face"! He laughed at me some more, the bastard.

B Street Sanctuary

It's been about four months since I moved out of Jennifer's house and fled back to B Street. Things are much better for me, but sometimes I still have a bad day or rough night thinking about her. I become severely depressed and the only way to keep my mind from dwelling on our failed relationship is to find something, anything, to instantly occupy myself with. Sometimes there's nothing to do but sit and stare at a wall. Then everything is the worst and all I can do is ride it out. B Street is much better now than it was in the last two years. Senor 23 was able to kick out the riff raff, I am back and Leaky Pete moved into the side unit downstairs. We have total control of the house again, save for that fucking bead shop in the front yard. I hate that dirty hippy bead lady. Really, I do.

The B Street house is a beautiful Victorian that was built in 1888. In the 1906 earthquake the house was demolished, but a few years afterward the owner rebuilt it and attatched a small surviving portion of the original house. It's our back room, just off the kitchen. You can instantly notice something is very different about the back room when you walk into it. The construction is odd compared to the rest of the place. Instead of smooth walls you could expect to be covered in wallpaper, the walls are made out of sturdy wood paneling and coated in harsh white paint. Senor 23 sleeps in a room that was once the second story balcony. It was converted into a tiny room with two storage spaces, one at either end. The larger of the two spaces is where Senor 23 somehow managed to fit his single bed and he used his black high school graduation gown as a curtain to conceal the entrance. It's a miniscule space to occupy, the ceiling is just inches away from his pillow. He has to crawl on all fours to get in or out of there.

Leaky Pete occupies what was once part of the main living room. Back in the 1940's the house's owner closed up two of the downstairs doorways, removed the fireplace, and converted two rooms into a doctor's office. That's what Pete lives in. He's got a small porch of his own right off the gravel driveway that faces the street, a small livingroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a shoebox sized bedroom way in the back. Occassionally Pete complains of car exhaust seeping into his room while he's sleeping, most of us drive vintage wheels containing meaty V8 dual pipe power so we have to warm them up for a few minutes. In the process of warming up the engines, he kinda gets gassed. Poor fella.

Upon my glorious return here, I immediately repainted my entire room black. Just like I did the first time I was here. It really feels like home again. I love it especially at night with the lights out because the black ceiling and walls seem to open up as if they weren't there and I'm sleeping inside a massive cave. The pictures I hung on the walls seem to float motionless in space and the crystal knob on my bedroom door appears to hover in pure nothingness. In a way, it's peaceful. It's good to be here again.

Around 3am every night the Donut Slut (a greasy donut shop a few houses down from our place) kicks the production into high gear and the entire neighborhood reeks of tasty icings and fresh, hot donuts. The Donut Slut has one very small window with metal bars crossing through the frame just like you would see in a jail cell. I call it the donut speakeasy. Sometimes, after a night of binge drinking, one or more of us will walk over to the Donut Slut from our pad and politely tap on their speakeasy window frame. A shutter on the inside of the window will open to reveal the friendly bearded donut technician type guy. Handfuls of spare change are passed through the iron bars from our side, brown paper bags are shoved back at us with two or three yummy donuts inside and a small container of milk. It's a beneficial secret arrangement we've thoroughly enjoyed for the past few years.

No Hypnosis, Goddammit

The last few counseling sessions with Couch Potato have been largely unproductive. First of all, Couch Potato wanted to hypnotize me, which I am not comfortable with. I explained to her when I started therapy with her a few months ago that hypnosis was out of the question and to not bother with wasting any time analyzing my childhood. I was there for one reason only, to sort out the failed relationship with Jennifer. I thought I had been clear on these points, evidently I was not clear enough. Couch Potato suggested we do some hypnosis therapy last week and I was adamantly against it. This surprised her. I didn’t go into detail as to the why, but the real reasons needed to remain a mystery to her.

When I was younger I committed some crimes. No one was harmed in the process of carrying out my deplorable acts against society, but the crimes were serious enough that I don’t speak of them to anyone. I have a fear that under hypnosis some of these things might come out and I won’t have any control over spilling the beans. I am also concerned about divulging secrets on the classified work I did for various smart weapons programs. I have no idea if Couch Potato would expend energy on subjects like that but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take. Another more personal reason I refuse to participate in this kind of therapy is simple. I have seen things, experienced things, done things I can never tell a soul about. To a degree I think every person has some things in their life or past they just can’t ever tell anybody or explain. I’m paranoid I’ll babble all kinds of junk to this woman and seriously regret it afterward.

I accidentally discovered that my father happens to be a patient of the Couch Potato. This has caused me to feel awkward during our sessions. I didn’t mention anything to her about it for a while, but I finally brought up the fact that Dad was also in therapy with her and she came clean about it. After I started my sessions with Couch Potato she didn't put together the odd coincidence that two of her new patients had the same last name, and they might happen to be related. When she asked me about my Dad however, I complained so much about the fucker with great detail she easily put the puzzle together. I think she figured it out a few weeks before I did. Couch Potato assured me nothing I confide in her will ever get back to Dad, or vice versa, but it’s still uncomfortable. From her perspective I could see this must be a real treat. Imagine being a professional psychologist and you have both the father and the son to study. I’m sure her notes in my case file have been very interesting lately.

During my last visit, Couch Potato wanted to try something new. She suggested we do an exercise, if you want to call it that, where I closed my eyes and pretended to be back at my parent’s house where I grew up. She instructed me to imagine I was standing outside the house. I grudgingly played along with this scheme although I have to admit it seemed really silly. So there I was, standing on the front lawn of my parent’s house in the shade of a tree. Couch Potato then said that I should look at one of the windows of the house. In the second story living room window, she said I would see a child staring outside at me standing on the front lawn. The child was supposed to be me, and she asked me, “What do you want to say to that child? What do you want to tell him about yourself? Is there anything that the child is trying to say to you?” I completely lost my composure at that point and busted up laughing right in Couch Potato's face. This was so stupid. I kept on laughing and said to the Couch Potato that this was all too dumb to continue.

I think I irritated the shit out of her.

Learning From A Wingnut

Orders seem to have vanished for our instruments at the moment so it's going to be a very light production month in our area. It's a slow time of year for business, I guess. When there is nothing to do on my line I become restless and bored. Even worse, it makes an eight hour shift seem like an unbearable eternity. I hate that. To stay busy I volunteered to work in the Precision Group's assembly area. It's pretty damn bad If I take such a drastic measure like that just to pass time at work because I never wanted to work over there. It's too fucked up. With the exception of Mister Mo and Wingnut Dan, there's nobody cool on that product line. Knowing what I was getting myself into I approached Wingnut Dan first and asked him if he could train me up building their PC board mods. I didn't want to work with Meth, Super Shopper, or the Screw Murderer because they're all a bunch of retards. Dan was cool with the idea of my helping out so he checked on the amount of work they had to do for the night and sat me down at one of their workbenches. He started me off with some of the easiest board mods they've got and showed me where all the parts were located. After I settled in we got down to brass tacks and Dan did an excellent job showing me the ropes.

Board mods on my product line are a pain in the ass to build. The mechanical and electrical engineering of the design is doomsday sturdy but also bulky and awkwardly heavy. It's a prime example of 1970's vintage electronics. I once heard a story about a guy in the US Navy that was climbing up a radar mast on a destroyer. He had one of our boxes in a special shoulder bag and almost near the top of the mast the 100+ pound unit slipped out of the carrying bag. It fell about 80 feet and slammed into the metal deck of the ship. Luckily no one was killed by the falling instrument. The interesting thing is, when they plugged it in and powered it up thinking it would catch on fire, the unit still worked. It's that burly.

Each PC board mod consists of an aluminum casting and a small motherboard that has to be placed on one end of the aluminum extrusion. The worst part of mounting the motherboard is trying to line up about thirty screw holes while placing a paper thin metal RFI gasket between the motherboard and the extrusion holes. The gasket likes to shift location with the slightest movement and I find I have to tinker with it a bunch before it cooperates. Once you get these parts together and secured, you slide about a half dozen PC boards into the casting and press them firmly into sockets on the motherboard. Each board looks like a tiny metal desk drawer because of the mounting faceplate. In the center of them they have a knob that reminds me of something you'd find on a bedroom dresser drawer or an old metal Army office desk. After they're in place you torque them down with more screws and then cable it all up.

The Precision Group instrument board mods are totally different from our stuff. Their instrument family was unleashed from the R&D labs in the 1980's. Instead of each mod holding up to six PC boards stacked up inside an aluminum box, their mods use a metal frame about an inch wide by let's say, a foot long. This design approach only holds one PC board per frame, or can hold up to three tiny boards. That's it. They are much easier and faster to build though, and they don't weigh hardly anything. After securing a board inside the frame you just put a cover on the top and bottom of it and torque the whole thing down. The contrast between the R&D lab design of the 1970's and the 1980's is remarkably different. What I find to be ironic is, the Precision boxes were supposed to replace the old dogs I work on, but they never met the Phase Noise performance specs of the older generation so customers still buy the vintage boxes. They pay a pretty penny for them, too.

Wingnut Dan and I got to talking about our Spokane experiences while he watched me build my first few PC board modules. He was there on the product transfer at the same time I was, but we never met the whole time we were there. His time spent in Spokane was much more pleasant than mine apparently. Shortly after he arrived in the city, he went to the DMV and told them he lost his California driver's license, which was all bullshit. He explained to them that he recently moved into town (which was the only truthful part of his sob story) and gave them his local address of residence. The Washington DMV issued him a new ID card on the spot and the first place he drove to as he left the DMV was a gun store. He's a gun fiend. Washington's gun laws are much more relaxed than California's and Dan knew it. In the months during his stay he figures he must have spent more than ten grand on everything you can think of. He bought assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, you name it he picked it up. Listening to him talk about all the gun shows and pawn shops he hit I became kind of jealous. There was a bunch of firearms I saw in pawn shops I would have loved to buy, but the thought never occured to me to get a Washington ID and buy shit there all legal. I wish I had thought to do the same thing while I was there. Oh well.

The best part of the story he said, was when we were all heading home to California. Bill and Dave's made the offer to ship our stuff back home for us free of charge. We simply had to bring our belongings into the factory and put it on a pallet, they would take care of the rest. Wingnut Dan bought a large metal trunk with a spot on the front for a big, nasty padlock. He loaded the trunk with all his weapons and secured it. Then he placed it on a pallet and dropped it off in the shipping and receiving department. Bill and Dave's company happily transported machine guns across multiple state lines without ever knowing it. As soon as he arrived home he drove on over to the site, picked up his trunk, and drove off into the sunset armed to the teeth. I have to give credit to Dan for that one. Damn clever.

Site IT Defeated

This afternoon was amusing. A slob from the IT department sat for many hours in front of our computers trying to find Frau Regenbogen's hidden copies of Quake 2 with no success. I tried talking with the jerk to see what he was up to and I made a feeble attempt to get some idea of how close he might be to discovering copies of the concealed game. The IT guy had a conceited attitude which instantly rubbed me the wrong way just like Computer Termite did. I thought to myself, what's with these people? Just because they work on PCs for a living doesn't mean they are automatically better than everyone else around them or that they are some kind of geniuses. Most of them are the biggest, dorkiest, greasiest nerds I have ever crossed paths with. I seriously doubt any of them could do something as challenging as replace a flat tire on a vehicle or possess enough hand-eye coordination to feed a cat. God damn IT nerds. May they burn eternally in lakes of hell fire.

Mr. Hotshot IT guy became frustrated and irritable the longer he stayed on our line sniffing for videogames. Frau Regenbogen and I watched with glee when he got up from his chair pissed off. He came out of the search empty handed and I smelled failure. Bringing Squirmy over to the PCs he spoke with an aggivated tone in his voice. He asked Squirmy, "Are you sure we're looking for something on these computers? I haven't found anything on these machines". Squirmy seemed perplexed. He had better things to do with his time like schedule his next game of golf at the local course so he wasn't willing to get heavily involved in the search. Squirmy's number one Dingbat Snitch always gave up accurate information to him, she was his best intelligence agent so what went wrong? He didn't seem to have a clue. Neither IT guy or Squirmy could decide how to proceed, so Ace IT guy raised the white flag of surrender and split the scene. I was laughing so hard on the inside. We won this skirmish with Squirmy and site IT. As for the Dingbat I hope Squirmy will view her with less credibility from now on and maybe even beat her down a bit. That will seriously piss her off and anything that pisses her off makes me insanely giddy.

I'm impressed with Frau Regenbogen. He said he could bury Quake 2 so deep in our systems that the Devil would be screwin' around with it on his leased Packard Bell. Sure enough, he followed through and made the software switcheroo happen. Very cool. I expect from now on we will absolutely have to make sure none of the women are here in the area before we brawl the Network hombres. I swear those old broads are nothing but trouble to work with, they seem to enjoy going out of their way just to fuck with us. I'm constantly trying to find a way to return the favor.