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?