V Is For Vindictive

Since the majority of us are now Potatohead's unsupportive enemies things around here have become pretty rough. Gary has been spearheading our resistance to Potatohead's stupid ideas and schemes whenever he brings them up in our regular line meetings. Yelling and fingerpointing are common now during our little get-togethers. We expect it to happen and I think everyone is becoming used to it. At least the women aren't on the verge of tears as much or at all when the brawling takes place. Musclehead has been teetering on the edge of sucker punching Potatohead for days. The arguments those two get into are vicious, and entirely entertaining for me to watch. I've been laying low and avoiding my idiot boss as much as I can. I only brawl him when he provokes me into it, I'm not following him around the department looking for a fight. Sometimes I think Musclehead is.

I have an overwhelming feeling that Potatohead is looking for any and every possible way of making our lives miserable. The thing that troubles me the most is what I will be able to expect from him when my next performance review comes up. How badly will he fuck me up? Or, what will he do to screw me out of my next merit wage increase? This is getting dicey for me to stick around here. Real dicey.

One of the dayshift assemblers is a nice lady by the name of Julie. She is a rather slow worker whose daily volume of throughput is minimal. But, she does consistently good work. Ideally we want people who produce quality rather than quantity. Julie is in the slow quality boat, which is fine with me. She does have a problem though. Julie is extremely overweight. She's so overweight that I have a tough time looking at her when I am talking to her about whatever. Really. In order for her to be able to work in the area Bill and Dave's company had to obtain a special kind of desk chair made for people in her situation. It's custom built to handle a harsh occupant weight and be infintely ergo adjustable. It's also required to be ESD compliant. Final cost: nearly $1,000 for the sci-fi wide load seat.

Potatohead seems to personally dislike Julie and it's an easy couple of guesses for me to figure out why. He's unsatisfied with her performance speed-wise so he's branded her as some sort of deadbeat employee. And he is angry that he has to buy her more chairs. See, Julie has wrecked a few of her thousand dollar chairs in recent months. Sometimes when she sits down the chair is under such strain from her weight that one or more sets of casters will literally explode off of the chair's legs and skitter across the assembly area flooring like a bullet from a gun. It happens so fast that her balance is thrown into chaos and it's just pure luck she hasn't been dumped face first into the linoleum tiles on the floor. The chair is ruined as the collars inside each leg that held escaped casters are mangled beyond use. So Potatohead is livid when he has to spend the money to buy her a new chair.