1.26.1999

Back at Autumn's apartment in the East Bay. I always think of it as Berkeley, where she's at. There's no defining points between where towns begin and end here anymore. It's all a sprawling mess. From the edge of Oakland heading North you hit Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, and to me it's all the same junk.

I'm gonna keep this short tonight because I'm damn tired and I'm depressed about work. At work I've been fighting the good fight against those evil little VCOs but I'm not making much progress. Each pair of new VCOs I build have a 50% fail rate when I test them. They also seem to frequently fail in the instruments even after they've passed the pre-testing and tuning stages. Lately many of them have been coming back from the field for repair, which is further straining our ability to turn them around in a reasonable amount of time. Tonight for example, I got hit with two for repair from a service center plus I had to get a new one built and tested from scratch to go into a dead instrument. It takes me most of an eight hour shift to get a couple sets of them at least up to the pre-testing stage. I ended getting only one out, the other one in the test set failed.