Lightwave Interview Part Three

Dingbat Blondie said good bye and good luck to me, then she waived me off in the general direction of where Tom's cubicle was supposedly located. Her directions were so totally confusing and jacked up that I started walking off towards a wall she pointed at. Wandering around looking for Tom I got a better self-guided tour of the Lightwave division than I ever would have received with the help of that airhead blonde dimwit. I was certain of that. I travelled through a human rat maze of test racks filled with few familiar pieces of gear. Lightwave employees were everywhere across the shop floor wearing the same light blue labcoats. It reminded me of what an army of Smurfs would look like if they were people-sized instead of only being three inches tall.

I hated Smurfs. Castle Smurfenstein really was the shit, wasn't it?

Stumbling across Tom's office I got his attention and waited for a few minutes outside his cube until he finished interviewing a woman I barely recognized from one of our instrument lines at the other site. As soon as she left, Tom asked me if I would like to tour his product line first and then get down to the interview or vice versa. I was restless from sitting around and still somewhat agitated with the way my afternoon was turning out so I decided to stretch my legs a bit and go for the tour. Tom escorted me through his area. He did a thorough and thoughtful job introducing me to some of his assemblers and technicians, showed off their whole instrument line process from start to finish, and he answered every one of my questions. That was more like it. The Lightwave products he was responsible for were actually quite interesting. At least from an engineering standpoint. They were like nothing I had seen before. For a moment I thought it would be fun to work on a project like this. It would be fun, until I saw who Tom had working for him in his semi-clean room area.

The last part of his Lightwave box production line we hadn't walked through yet was a closed room that had been set up to be a hybrid clean room slash micro assembly area. It wasn't a true clean room with an overpressure air system and employees covered up head to toe in paper suits breathing through dust masks. And it didn't seem like a real microcircuit area either. They had some nice custom scopes mounted at some of the workstations, but it appeared to me that a large portion of their assemblies could be done without the use of heavy magnification. Before we entered this room I peeked through one of the windows and I saw Felix. As soon as I saw that guy sitting in there, I knew there was no way I'd allow myself to be working with this group no matter how interesting or cool their boxes were.

Felix wasn't really a bad guy. I never had any personal problems with him and actually I enjoyed talking to him when he was still with us working in the Precision Group's assembly area. He was a nice enough old fellow. But, he had his problems. Felix wasn't content with doing the job he was hired in for. He was just another factory peasant like myself, hired in to build PC board modules, front panel displays, and power supplies, among other things. Felix was one of those people who gravitated to any and every extra job role he could find in an attempt to tie up the majority of his 40 hour work week doing anything but build instruments. I've seen that sort of thing before. Other employees have tried the same tricks with limited success. When Felix did get stuck working on boxes, he'd mangle shit up like you wouldn't believe. I saw that guy smoke more live power supplies than even Stupid Guy did. Felix also managed to consistently wreck his board mods. So, I liked Felix well enough as a person, but I really hated his fouled up workmanship. When he left us I didn't know he took a job up here in Lightwave but I was somewhat glad to be rid of him just the same.

Tom pushed open the double doors leading into their closed production room and he began explaining what they were working on. I listened to him as we walked past various workstations equipped with fume hoods and specialized microscopes. Felix hadn't spotted me yet. By the time Tom and I made it to where Felix was sitting, Tom introduced me as another potential new hire for their group. Felix stopped what he was working on and backed away from his microscope. As soon as he turned his head towards me and recognized me, he interrupted what Tom was talking about and yelled at me. "Hey Factory Peasant! Great to see you!" Felix reached out to take my hand and he thrashed it about like I was a rag doll. I smiled and asked Felix how the hell he had been, and to tell me a little about what he was working with.

Both of us forgot Tom was standing there as Felix pushed back from his bench and got out of his chair. He invited me to sit down and look through the scope at his work. I said, "Sure thing" and seated myself. I pulled in close to his microscope and adjusted the eyepieces until his work in progress came into focus. It had been a few years since I last did any micro stuff, and to be honest I really didn't miss it.

Felix was putting together an unusual precision-machined aluminum bulkhead that had a few tiny pods adhered with some sort of glue. Each pod had a number of miniature wires sticking out of them. He explained that they would be connetced to small motors and when activated would flex a couple of key areas on the bulkhead. Felix pointed one or two of them out to me so I could find them in the view of his microscope. It was clever design. The flexible points had been machined in such a way that they were like a tab that could be gently pushed or pulled by a motor with a worm gear or something similar and the base of the tab would provide resistance for smooth movement without the use of a mechanical spring. The idea was simple, as the piece of metal moved, some optics that are attatched would move with the piece changing the focus of a laser beam being pumped through it. That was the basic gist I got from Felix's description anyway.

Because Felix had been notorious for wrecking so much work back in the Precision Group, I decided to have a little fun with him in front of his boss. Still sitting at the microscope I turned to face Felix. He was standing off to my left. Tom was out of my view standing behind my right shoulder. I looked at Felix and said, "This is cool stuff here, Felix. But I have one question I gotta ask you about it. How many of these have you ruined so far?" Felix laughed and blurted out, "Heh! Well you know Factory Peasant that's not too far from the truth!" As Felix got my joke and laughed about it, I heard Tom make a noise that sounded like he had choked. I didn't look to see if Tom was okay, and I smiled to myself.

Back at Tom's cubicle we began the interview. I was disappointed when he produced the exact same form with the exact same scripted questions that Dingbat Blondie had already asked me. What was up with that? Were these people so insanely lazy and uninterested that each manager couldn't come up with their own questions to ask of us? Whatever. I just went with it and answered the same battery of questions in an identical manner as I had with the first supervisor.

After we finished that mess, I noticed Tom had populated his cubicle with dozens of pictures of people dressed up in Star Wars costumes. It seemed odd and somewhat retarded this guy had so many of them pinned around his cube and I had to ask what it was all about. Tom said, "I like to have fun at work. One of the things I try to do is to encourage team spirit and keep things really fun in the area. Frequently we're under extremely tight schedules and we're also under an intense amount of pressure to make shipments. So I schedule Star Wars day and everyone has to come to work in costume..." Tom kept yammering away about his team building efforts through the medium of Star Wars. There was no fucking way I was going to come to work dressed up in that shit and be a space nerd. No way in hell. Ever. At that point, I wrote Tom and his instrument line off.

Tom did mention one interesting thing about himself. He used to work at the same optical coating lab company I worked at for a short time years ago. I still had a few buddies I kept in touch with over there so I figured I'd call them up later in the week and run Tom's name by them and see what, if anything they had to say about the space nerd.

Next up, the panel interview.