Exploding Six Pack

Big Dog and I were talking the other day about J1. It's been a long while since I heard anything about that fool. When J1 left Team Loser to go work in the R&D lab for The Drunk, I was happy. It meant I wouldn't have to see or hear his stupidity anymore. Big Dog told me J1 just royally screwed up again back in the E-Lab. I'm not at all surprised.

Recently J1 has been working in the Environmental Lab doing temperature testing on a new instrument. We do temperature testing on prototype and initial production boxes to help flush out unforseen problems and set performance specifications. By subjecting raw units to repeated extremes of cold and heat, we can simulate the aging process. Make them suddenly six months to a year old and see what kinds of failures pop up, if any. Maybe there's a trend to a particular failure mode and after investigating it the engineering department may find a serious design flaw. Obviously it's desired to find these kinds of problems before we release a new product line for purchase. The other important goal is setting the specification and performance limits. Temperature testing allows us to find the absolute extreme edge the instrument can operate at. It's a critical part of launching a new product. If we provide a customer with tighter specifications or better performance than a competitor's equivalent box, we can more than likely command the market.

Depending on the kinds of testing we're doing in the chambers, boxes can take many hours if not days to complete. At each temperature the environmental chamber is set to, it has to flood the inside with super chilled air or super heated air. If we want testing to be completed at 0C the chamber will have to ramp down and then soak for a minimum of an hour at 0C before any testing can begin. J1 sometimes likes to take advantage of the cold cycle in the chambers by storing his food or drinks in there along with powered up instruments. He treats chambers as if they were his personal luxury refrigerators. It's stupid, we've got plenty of refrigerators on every floor of each building for grub but that's not good enough for J1.

The other night J1 decided to stash a six pack of Coca Cola in one of the chambers while it was soaking at 0C, and he apparently forgot about them. At the end of his shift he went home empty-headed as usual without thinking twice about his sodas. Hours later the chamber completed required testing and automatically ramped up to 55C beginning a new temperature soak for an hour. It probably didn't take long after reaching 55C that J1's cans of soda exploded, spraying liquid all over the inside of the chamber dousing four live instruments. Coke seeping inside the unit's cases shorted out multiple circuitboards which ruined them.

We sell our products in a variety of option mixes. The more options a customer buys, the more capable the unit is. Of course more options also means a considerably higher retail cost. I don't know what the specific option mixes on these four boxes were but let's say they were mid-range capable. That would place them in the $20,000 bracket. The grand total of destruction caused by J1's incompetence for this incident is therefore estimated to be $80,000 give or take ten grand.

Lab managers had no choice but to investigate how this happened and find out who was responsible, but nobody finked on J1. Unable to find who the culprit was, they quickly gave up and just took the loss. People who knew that J1 was at fault should have spoke up about it. I mean, I know people don't want to be seen as the bad guy or get involved in stuff like this but come on. J1 is a total asshat that nobody likes anyway and this was a perfect opportunity to finally get him out of here. Since nobody stepped up to the plate and ratted him out he's going to be able to fuck up more shit. It's not a question of if J1 wrecks shit, it's simply a matter of when.

Co-Manufacturing

Big news just came down from the top. Everyone here is still in shock about it, but we had heard rumors for months that this was going to happen. Corporate has made the decision to begin production work of our instruments in Malaysia. We've had a manufacturing presence in Malaysia since the 1970s but until now most of the work they have done there has been component-level only. Like producing seven segment LEDs and chips. The test and measurement equipment we produce is complex compared to manufacturing simple electronic components.

The reaction has been very negative. Many employees are suspicious of the business move and are guessing that this could be the beginning of the end for our United States workforce. We'll see. None of this will take place overnight, in order to set up instrument production lines in Malaysia it's going to take a tremendous amount of logistical support, time, and money. It very well could take years to accomplish.

Upper management is calling the proposed plan "Co-manufacturing." To me, the Co-manufacturing concept seems like a politically correct way of saying "Offshoring." The way they claim it will work is three of our manufacturing divisions, one in Penang, Malaysia, one in Scotland, and our site here in California will all produce the exact same instruments. The breakdown of total production will be 40% from Penang, 40% from California, and 20% from Scotland. Everyone has been apprehensive about this so far. The same question keeps coming up, "What about our jobs?" Supervisors have responded by saying that 40% is plenty of work to do so our jobs are safe. I'm not so sure about that.

We have to get ready. In a few months there will be large groups of Malaysian employees here training with us on the product lines, learning what we do. We're also going to have to ramp up monthly production significantly. It is unclear what may be going on but I think something strange is happening with our future order picture. There's talk of a huge increase in demand for our boxes and we may need to do a bunch of hiring to meet the need. Things are probably going to become even more stressful and weird...

MERT Voyeur

I've worked in a number of our divisions over the years. The majority of our factory campuses are rather large. Some problems have resulted due to the sprawling size and rat-maze layout of these sites. A major issue that crept up was how to assist an employee that suddenly becomes seriously ill on the job. If a person drops to the floor unconscious for whatever reason, and requires immediate medical attention how do you help them? Paramedics probably won't be able to get on-site and then be able to navigate their way through the buildings on our campus in enough time to reach someone in need. This is why MERT was created.

MERT stands for Medical Emergency Response Team. It's a group of volunteer employees who receive special training about stabilizing an injured or sick employee until Paramedics arrive on the scene. MERT guys and gals do more than administer first aid, so the training they've gone through can really make a difference when it might count the most.

We're all trained on what to do when someone in our immediate area falls ill. All employees have been instructed to call a special emergency number that is a direct line to security. When they pick up the phone in the security center all we have to do is say there's a medical emergency in X building and give them the nearest column marking where the sick person is located. So you'd say something like, "We have a medical emergency in building 3 near column 22J." That's all we have to do. Security takes it from there and does a couple of things at once. They call the appropriate emergency services on the outside and get them rolling. Inside, security makes an announcement over the P.A. system calling for all MERT members and gives them the building and column number info. It's sort of an unspoken rule that anyone not involved with MERT is supposed to stay out of the way. Even if the guy sitting right next to you is the person that just had a seizure, you're supposed to leave the area or go work someplace else on the line. Once MERT is launched there isn't anything else we can do.

As soon as a call goes out for MERT, those folks drop whatever they're doing wherever they're at, grab some gear and converge on the spot where somone is in trouble. These kind of incidents happen infrequently but often enough you just end up knowing who's on the MERT roster after a while. During the last couple of months when a MERT announcement has been made over the P.A., Genia gets up from her workbench and heads out to go help. Nobody questioned her involvement and we all assumed she was part of MERT too.

That isn't the case.

Last week MERT was called to assist someone in another building that complained of severe chest pains and was having trouble breathing. That sounded like a heart attack brewing so the employee's coworkers did the right thing and called for help. As usual, when the announcement came over the loudspeakers Genia got up and fled our production line. When she arrived at the scene the rest of MERT was already there working on the person. Something happened, I'm not sure what specifically because I heard about this incident second hand. Anyway the MERT people suddenly realized that they didn't know who Genia was and asked her why she was there. What was she doing? Afterward they thought about it and remembered she's been there for the past year or more every time an emergency call has gone out. She never did anything but stand there and watch what was happening. They also made the discovery that Genia has never been on their team.

Smelling something fishy, MERT approached management and asked them to look into the situation. Genia was hauled out of the production area the other day and questioned. Turns out she told them she just likes to go and watch. She likes to watch people who are ill, or injured and in pain. I don't know what management is going to do with her, but all I can say is this is one of the more demented and creepy things I've heard about around here in a long time.

Guns Kill People

Lately Little Carol and I have been working together shipping boxes out of Area 51. I bounce back and forth like a ping pong ball from the front end of the line in assembly to the back end of the line in Button Up depending on what our daily throughput is like. I enjoy it. Keeps things from getting too boring and stagnant. Both Little Carol and Okie Carol have been great to work with because they're both crazy old broads. I like crazy old broads. I prefer working alongside them over working with dingbat housewives.

From the conversations I've had with Little Carol, it's obvious her political views are firmly rooted in the extreme right-wing camp. At times she's a borderline conservative wingnut but I can forgive that. The two of us have colorful discussions most evenings as I am more of a centrist Democrat, however I have some fairly Republican-leaning views. For example I'm a supporter of gun rights and I am a huge supporter of the defense industry. So that gives Little Carol and I some common ground. Turns out she's an even bigger supporter of gun rights than I am. She's a long time NRA member that becomes quite animated and angry when people foolishly talk gun control around her. I get a kick out of seeing such a frail little old lady raise her voice and shake her finger in people's faces. Nobody expects that kind of a response coming from such a nice old woman. It's sweet.

The other night Little Carol and I were walking side by side talking gun stuff as we passed by Area 51's test racks. TC overheard us and he interrupted our conversation by blurting out, "Guns kill people." Before I could say anything Little Carol marched over to where TC was sitting in front of a test rack and started chewing him out. She said, "Everybody should be taught how to properly shoot guns and everybody should have one! My daddy taught me how to shoot a rifle when I was a little girl and I've been shooting my whole life!" TC sat there with a calm, cool expression on his face. He didn't smile or get angry. I think he blinked once or twice. Then he said, "Yes. But you DO know that guns kill people, right?"

Holy shit. Little Carol's frail, bony, arthritis ravaged finger was up in TC's grill and she was shouting at him. I agreed with everything she was saying. I mean, I own four rifles. Two are AK47 variants, one is a tricked-out SKS, and the other is a World War II Soviet bolt action rifle I fixed up. TC kept at her. He took a beating and replied, "Sure. Of course. You have to admit though that guns kill people." Little Carol got so frustrated she was red in the face and decided TC was too stupid to talk with any further. She walked away towards Button Up leaving me behind. I told TC that I agreed with Little Carol's point of view. He kinda pissed me off too. TC said, "Don't tell Carol, but I'm a gun owner. I was just having a little fun with her."

Sneaky.

BSOF

Six months ago Bill and Dave's corporate managers announced a new company-wide program called Behavioral Safety and Observational Feedback (BSOF). We were bombarded with emails heralding BSOF as a method of eliminating employee injuries and accidents on the job. Yeah, right. When upper managers I've never heard of keep sending me emails telling me how "exciting" a new company program is, I pretty much write that program off as boring ass ho-hum junk that will be quickly forgotten by the majority of our workforce.

It seems any time our corporate management team hears about a hot business trend or the latest fad in manufacturing, they latch onto it like a stampede of lemmings sprinting off of a cliff. None of these people are industry leaders anymore, blazing trails for other companies' management teams to follow like Bill and Dave used to do. Instead, our top managers are content to stay complacent and simply sway whichever way the industry wind blows. They frequently foist upon us concepts and initiatives that have little if anything to do with the kind of work we do here and they expect to implement these things as one-size-fits-all solutions to our unique company problems. Rarely if ever does it work out that way. In fact most of the time management's kooky schemes end up withering on the vine soon after being launched. This results in nothing more than massive amounts of employee time being pissed away as well as large sums of cash wasted.

BSOF makes an underlying assumption that employees are idiots. According to the BSOF philosophy, employees will attempt to seriously injure, maim, or kill themselves daily unless you have BSOF in place to save them from themselves. Described as a "proactive approach to increasing safety in the workplace" BSOF is really nothing more than a campaign of spying and fear. As TC says, "It's all about finking on your coworkers."

Here's how the BSOF deal works in a nutshell. Employees pick out a fellow coworker to watch while the individual is performing a job task. While standing around staring at the person making them nervous, you have to fill out a checklist of what that employee might be doing wrong i.e. might be doing unsafely. After filling out the checklist you have to provide feedback to the person you've been quietly terrorizing. First, you set them up for the fall by complimenting he or she on what was done correctly, and how great the employee looks today. As soon as the unsuspecting coworker has been buttered up, you body slam the poor slob. You list every insignificant thing done during the job task that was dumb and may have resulted in the employee's injury or death. If he or she didn't do anything wrong during the spying session, or you just don't like the person you can use patented MSU(tm) technology to "Make Shit Up" and get them in trouble. The final step of the BSOF process is to turn the checklist in to your supervisor like the good little BSOF nazi that you are.

Since the company-wide rollout of the BSOF program months ago few if any employees have bought into the concept. It's a hard sell to make here because none of us use heavy machinery or are around dangerous equipment. It's not like we're in construction running each other over with earth scrapers every day. We sit at workbenches tinkering with standard size rackmountable electronic instruments. That's it. I suppose BSOF might be useful in some industries, but here it's just silly. The most dangerous thing we use is a soldering iron. Nobody's gonna get killed here by one of those. If one of my fellow coworkers did somehow manage to perform death by soldering iron I would assume the nitwit worked really hard at it and most likely deserved to die anyway.

Once a month supervisors beg and plead for everyone in the department to please fill out our BSOF checklists and turn them in. Nobody makes the time for this crap because we're swamped with more important things to do. Usually we wait until the last day of the month and scribble some stuff on the BSOF sheet, sign it, and hand it in. It's all faked. I suspect the real drive behind the whole project is somehow tied into the company's insurance premiums. If corporate can prove to our insurer that we've trained X amount of employees in BSOF practices that are ongoing maybe they cut us a break on the insurance cost. There has to be some weird accounting or finance angle on this because it doesn't make much sense. Anyway, we've pretty much sidestepped BSOF as of now. There's no interest or support for it. I can't wait to see what stupid idea our corporate masters grab hold of next...

Gravity Attack

Sources' assembly area is very busy on swing shift. There's a full crew of people working on a half dozen different instrument product lines. The majority of these boxes are new models. They're compact and lightweight compared to the one hundred pound vintage monster Signal Generators we're pumping out of Area 51. I'm guessing that most if not all of the work they do here is really fast and simple. Usually I'm fairly busy so I don't have much time to bug folks about their work asking questions but I have done a little peeking over people's shoulders as they crank out unit after unit. From what I've seen so far the latest boxes to emerge from our R&D labs are cookie-cutter snap-tight models with little to no wiring or hardware required.

On the main aisleway running through the middle of our floor there's an area where employees from the warehouse drop off supplies and parts for Sources' assembly army. The warehouse guys get to drive small orange electric trucks with a yellow blinking light on the roof which makes them look like Cal-Trans golf carts on steroids. Behind each truck they usually haul four or five trailers loaded with black boxes. The black boxes contain parts that were ordered by assemblers during the previous shifts. Every other hour or so, another orange truck with a caravan of trailers will unload a bunch more stuff for us. When parts arrive either myself or Okie Carol will pick through the boxes looking for Area 51's supplies and put them away in our part bins. Then we dump the empty black boxes back out in the hallway for removal. It's a simple, straightforward part distribution system that's almost foolproof. That is, it's foolproof until you add a fool like Super Shopper into the mix.

Nobody in the Sources assembly area wants to put away parts when they arrive from the warehouse. Mountains of black boxes pile up in the hall. Dingbats like Super Shopper complain that they've run out of parts in their bins so they can't do any more work even though the supplies they need are just a few feet away. Because none of their assemblers volunteer for parts duty, someone came up with a daily rotating schedule. Each day of the week a certain person is assigned to put all of their parts supplies away for everyone else. However, if a new person is hired onto the line, the rest of the group will dump on the new person and make them put all their crap away every day for a while. Their excuse is it's helping the new person to become familiar with the assembly area but I think they're just being lazy by treating new employees like servants.

One of the new people they just got is a nice lady from Micro. She's probably in her early 60s and she dyes her hair bright fire engine red. To me she looks a little silly with a vibrant hair color like that, but whatever. Slipping into old age must be difficult for some people to handle. Her name is Shelley and she's got some of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. They're a bright sky blue color. Almost white-blue actually, and her eyes are so gorgeous that at first I thought they had to be fake, like maybe she was wearing a kind of colored contact lenses. Shelley said she didn't wear contacts and that her eye color was the real deal.

We got to talking about what she did before ending up here in Sources. Shelley told me she's been working in the Microcircuit department for years but using microscopes has taken a toll on her eyesight and she can't see very well anymore. She can't work in Micro because of it so they moved her out here to work on instrument lines instead. Man, I can understand what she's talking about. I worked with microscopes for just over two years at TDS and I noticed my eyesight was much worse after that. I had to get a stronger prescription for my glasses. Part of the problem is scopes use extremely bright light sources and most of that light is reflected off of metalized surfaces up the eyepieces right into your skull. It can strain your eyes in no time and over a period of years working like that can definitely degrade your eyesight.

Shelley is being used every evening by the rest of the assembly team as a parts gopher. She spends much of swing shift grabbing assembly supplies and carting them into the area to be put away. The other night she was doing okay with parts duty until she grabbed a long, flat box filled with hardware. I think she misjudged how heavy the box was because when she lifted it off the rollaway table it slipped out of her hands. The box flipped upsidedown throwing the lid off. Thousands of tiny screws, nuts, and bolts rained down onto the concrete floor and scattered all over the place. I heard the commotion and walked over to find Shelley standing in the middle of a hardware catastrophe. "Oh dear." She said. I felt bad for her. Since her eyesight isn't so hot it was going to take her quite a while to round up all those loose parts. Being scattered across a dull gray floor, tiny silver screws would be perfectly camouflaged. Shelley would probably never find most of them.

I stopped what I was doing and volunteered to help clean the mess up. I joked with Shelley and told her she had just suffered from a gravity attack. "You never know when gravity will just jump up out of nowhere and snatch stuff out of your mitts." I smiled and she tried to laugh it off. She was visibly embarrassed. I fetched a broom and dust pan. Both of us cleaned up the rogue hardware fairly quickly. The worst part was spending the time to sort out the different parts from each other. It took a while, but we got it done and I went back to slaving in Area 51.

During the next couple of evenings at work, Shelley managed to dump at least one full box of hardware per night. After the third accident it wasn't amusing anymore and I got tired of coming to her rescue. Her fourth mishap was the worst. She spilled an entire box of 10,000 screws. I heard her softly say "Oops" as a waterfall of metric hardware belched out onto the floor. That pissed me off. I decided I wasn't going to assist in the cleanup and that Shelley needed to learn a lesson.

I waited for a half hour until she had picked up every last screw from the concrete. I pretended to walk by searching for a pair of pliers or something and I said to her, "Oh look Shelley. You missed a couple of screws down there under that workbench. See 'em?" I pointed at a vague spot on the floor. She crouched down on her hands and knees looking for a couple of loose screws that weren't there. I walked away. Ten minutes later I came back and she was still trying to find the nonexistant last screws. Snickering to myself I said, "Damn Shelley. You can't see those screws? They're right in front of you!" Again, I walked out of the assembly area. I have no idea how long she crawled around on the floor searching for them before finally giving up.

I know, I'm a bastard.

Familiar Faces, Usual Suspects

Super Shopper and her notoriously annoying bleached blonde dingbat housewife of a sidekick are here in Sources causing trouble. I wasn't sure where these two nitwits ended up after we kicked them out of the Precision Group. Super Shopper and her pal don't know they were delibrately removed from that line. I'm sure management put some kind of positive spin on the situation so neither woman would know any better when they informed them they were being moved. I'll never forget the first night we worked in the Precision assembly area without them. God, it was so nice. You could have heard a pin drop. That kind of silence was glorious after having painfully listened to Super Shopper's obnoxious voice, babbling about retail sales every night for a couple of years.

Things never change. No matter which production line Super Shopper ends up working on, she spends most of swing shift making personal phone calls to her idiot daughters. I'd estimate the average length of each call is around 45 minutes. She never makes up the wasted time. Super Shopper is so loud yapping away mindlessly into the phone that anyone within thirty feet of where she is standing can clearly hear all the juicy details. I can tell from listening to her side of the conversations that each one of her daughters are experts at causing high drama of one sort or other.

Super Shopper is a professional at inciting personal conflicts with other employees. One of the Sources assembly teams working on a new Signal Generator product has a Romanian woman named Genia that brawls with Super Shopper on a daily basis. Every time I turn around the two of them are in a heated argument over nothing or one of them is sitting at a supervisor's desk complaining about the other woman. They try to sabotage each other by using managers as weapons. It's dumb. Neither one of these broads has a clue that every petty incident they waste a manager's time with is being counted against them on their employee records.

Mr. Fussy is here in Sources. I hadn't crossed paths with him in many years, since I left the PC board assembly center. He's an old gay man that sounds and acts like a teetotaling grandmother. He wears eyeglasses with a pewter antique chain that clasps together at the back of his neck into a little metal bowtie. Simply fabulous. It doesn't take much to agitate Mr. Fussy and when he does get mad, he'll scold employees like they are unruly children that just ran all over his freshly cleaned carpet with muddy shoes. I've noticed one different thing about him from when we worked in the same department years ago. His hands are always shaking. Strange.

After I left Bill and Dave's to go work for an Optical Coating Lab I'd heard a rumor that Mr. Fussy had been snooping through one of the supervisor's desks and found a bombshell of a document which he then distributed through the company. At that time our managers started to subcontract our circuitboard manufacturing to a Chinese company. Most of us suspected that the end goal was to outsource all of our work causing everyone at Bill and Dave's to lose their jobs. That's one of the main reasons why I quit. I didn't want to be anywhere near this place and find myself caught up in the unemployment line. This outsourcing concern was expressed by employees to management during meetings many times and the supervisors always came back at us saying no one was going to be out of a job and not to worry about vague rumors of outsourcing.

Well, the paperwork Mr. Fussy discovered happened to be the division's business plan for the next couple of years and it clearly showed the bulk of employees in the PC department were in fact going to lose their jobs due to shifting as much of the PC board manufacturing to outside vendors. As word spread through the company, management was essentially caught in a lie with their pants down around their ankles. They aggressively investigated how this information was leaked and eventually traced the leak back to Mr. Fussy. He became a pariah after that, shunned by his coworkers and persecuted by management. Amazingly they didn't fire him. Instead they chose to take his job away from him, and demote him back to assembling circuitboards. The most humiliating part of it was they set up his workbench in plain view of the department manager's cubicle so he could babysit Mr. Fussy. He was so completely stressed out by the situation that he ended up in the hospital and had to take a medical leave of absence for a few months.

The first evening after we moved Area 51 into Sources I heard a familiar voice heckling me from behind a section of test racks in the forward flow area. In broken English somebody yelled at me, "You seeeeeeee! You cannot seeeeeee! You eat the shitfish! Yeah. Yeah, yeah." It was Dung, the wacky technician from my old line. He spent a good amount of his time teaching me how to say dirty stuff to women in Vietnamese when we had been working together back then. It was great to see him, I had lost track of where he was working in the company and I hadn't talked to him in a long time. For him it was like we had just hung out together yesterday. He pointed out some of the female employees in the test area that he thought were hot and gestured with his hands in the air as if he was following the curves of their bodies while he laughed. He's already started brushing up the dirty Vietnamese phrases he taught me and he's even thrown down some new stuff for me to learn. You know, it really is good to have a demented Vietnamese language tutor.

Goldbrick

Until recently I haven't worked with or talked to many of Area 51's day shift crew. Since we made the move to Sources I've seen more of our day shift guys stay later into the afternoon which allows for some overlap between them and us on the night crew. One of the day technicians on our line is a fat little Chinese guy that likes to sleep on the job. He's in his late 20s I think, and dumb as hell. Honestly I don't know how this guy landed himself a tech position here because I doubt he could troubleshoot his way out of a wet paper bag. He generally comes in to work wearing his pants so high that he could easily walk through a six inch deep puddle and not get either pant leg soaked. Basically, the guy is a super-nerd. The only thing he's missing to complete his geek outfit is a shirt pocket pen protector. I call him Goldbrick.

When Goldbrick gets situated at his work station every day he usually pulls a busted box up close to his test rack. He's got his test rack facing towards him at the end of his bench. With a broken unit hooked up to the rack and pulled in right next to where he's sitting, he will position himself in his chair slightly slumped over the top of the box. If you happened to walk past him it would at first glance appear that Goldbrick is intently staring downwards into the guts of the box as if he was thinking hard trying to solve whatever is wrong with the instrument. In reality, Goldbrick is slumped over fast asleep. None of the Sources managers have caught him in dreamland yet. A couple of the more obnoxious supervisors like to go on patrol through the area at least once or twice a shift and have walked right next to Goldbrick while he's passed out and didn't notice. It's kind of funny.

TC frequently enjoys fucking with Goldbrick. He will patiently wait until the oaf is deep in slumberland and then creep up right next to the guy. Making sure not to disturb him, TC moves in right next to his ear and then shouts his name as loud as he can practically blowing out his eardrum. I've never seen anybody freak out and snap into consciousness as fast as Goldbrick does when TC nails him like that. Goldbrick will jump out of his seat while throwing his body upright and yell out "I was no sleeping! I was no sleep!" Fucking hilarious.

Even though Goldbrick is one goofy looking guy, he's got himself a very attractive girlfriend. He showed me her picture once and I almost choked when I saw it. She's a beautiful woman. Looking at the photo and looking at Goldbrick I can't understand why a girl like that would be mixed up with a goofball like him. The girl's parents can't figure it out either and have forbidden her from having anything to do with him. She is still dating him secretly though. Her father has told Goldbrick that if he catches him with his daughter he's going to kill him. Can't say I blame the man, if I were in his shoes I'd do the same thing.

One of the only ways Goldbrick and his girlfriend can see each other is if she comes here to the site. What he does is bring her to the factory parking lot and he leaves her outside in his car for his entire eight hour shift. She sits out there all day long in the car bored out of her mind. He won't step outside to check on her to see if she needs to use the bathroom or invite her into the building. On his lunch break he doesn't bother to bring her anything, he goes to the cafeteria like he always does. I asked him if he at least leaves one of the car windows rolled down a bit so she can get some fresh air. He didn't understand that I was making fun of him for treating his woman worse than a dog.

2 Lower

We're in our new location. Sources department occupies most of Building 2 Lower on site and they have given us some of their floorspace. Area 51's assembly and test groups have been set up in an L shape with the test racks across a walkway from assembly. Our techs have used a dark alcove way in the back as a sort of isolated little command center. Assembly consists of three workbenches all planted single file, one ahead of the other, and the power supply test rack right behind the first assembly bench. Surrounding our assembly group are dozens of assembly workbenches for other Signal Generator product lines. Inevitably we're going to be exposed to Sources personnel sitting out here on the shop floor. I'm not looking forward to it.

For some stupid reason I can't figure out, the plan for our move ended up placing our MI/EI Button Up area way down on the other side of the building. If Little Carol needs me for something like helping her lift a heavy unit or if she has a question for one of us, she has to walk all the way through the department just to get to us. It's weak. In a way this has fractured our line, it doesn't feel like we have our own real instrument line or identity anymore. Maybe that was the idea.

A group calling themselves Nerdville are just down the hall from us. I don't know what they do, but their department banner hanging over an office cubicle maze has the word "Nerdville" on it in big white letters. Cool. Right across the hallway is our engineering staff. There are a number of other groups and departments scattered around Building 2. The Spectrum Analyzer department is on the second main aisleway from us, out back there is the Physics Lab, Chemical Stores, Machine Shop, and the Environmental Lab. So far I've quickly checked out all of them just to get a better idea of where everything is at. Someone in the Environmental Lab has a rather dark sense of humor. The office for the lab is directly across from their temperature chamber area. In one of the office windows there is a PC board with a great big hole going through it and it's mounted for display on an aluminum pedestal. Just below the board's gaping hole there's a yellow post-it note that says "9mm @ 25 Yards." Makes me laugh every time I walk by and see it. Guess that PC board received justice from the barrel of a gun.

Building 2 is depressing to work in. Overhead lighting is dim, at least compared to our previous spot in 1 Upper. I like to have bright light while I'm working otherwise it strains my eyes too much and I get headaches. It's also much colder in here at night than Building 1 which is uncomfortable. I've been wearing my Army field jacket to help me stay warm. The entire shop floor is a dark gray concrete. Maintenance waxes the concrete with an ESD conductive material. Instead of laying flooring tiles that are ESD conductive like everywhere else in the buildings nobody in management bothered to spend a little cash to properly outfit 2 Lower for instrument production. Because we work with electronics that are extremely sensitive to static electricity everything must remain grounded at all times. The flooring we work over has to be conductive electrically so we don't zap any instruments or PC boards. We measure the floor for electrical resistance periodically and if it's too "hot" action has to be taken immediately. If an outside ISO 9000 auditing company comes in and finds we're in violation of this, they could shut our whole department down until we fix it. So it's kind of a big deal.

Synthesized Sweeping Signal Generators

My test and measurement instrument experiences here at Bill and Dave's have been limited to working mainly with RF/Microwave Signal Generators. With my move to Area 51 I'm still firmly mired in the world of Signal Generators, but the product line I'm working on now caters to CW synthesized sweeping applications. The boxes I was building and testing previously operated at much lower frequencies, I think the top end output was a little over 1Ghz, and were legendary for having extremely low phase noise. That made them very desireable to a specific customer base. This product is useful for signal simulations and for system testing up to 40-50Ghz. For example, testing and tuning systems on fighter aircraft is one job these boxes are adept at.

Okie Carol started me off learning the instrument chassis assembly. She's done an excellent job showing me the ropes around here. Thanks to some interesting mechanical engineering, an operator can slap together a complete chassis in practically no time at all. The whole thing consists of a single large motherboard, two prefabbed dark grey pot metal side rails, an aluminum bucket (for the power supply boards), a few bulkheads, rear panel assembly, and a front frame. To build one all you have to do is grab your parts and place them into a fixture. Then you lock the fixture down and hand load a bunch of Torx-20 screws down both side rails. I leave all the screws completely loose with only two turns just to keep them temporarily in place. Then you flip the fixture upsidedown and drop in the motherboard. This also takes a pile of T-20 screws. Again I hand load all the hardware with only a couple of turns on the screws. It's important to start the hardware by hand so nothing ends up cross-threaded when you torque it all down with an electric driver.

After everything is torqued down and solid, I unlock the fixture and pop the instrument sub-frame out with a big, ugly rubber mallot. Rear panels are already built up for us by a sub-assembly group which saves a ton of time. Depending on the option mix a customer has ordered you simply grab the corresponding rear panel assembly and load it into the frame. The rear panels don't consist of much besides multiple BNC connectors and a mess of cables. Those get hooked up later at Final Assembly. Once that is done a front frame piece is installed and then you can add a set of mounting arms. The arms allow for the box to be loaded onto a rolling cart so we can push the units all over the shop floor and spin them end over end and lock them into any position for ease of access.

Building a complete chassis maybe takes me twenty to thirty minutes from start to finish. In comparison on my old line building a whole chassis would take hours. The older series boxes from the 1970s took a tremendous amount of hardware to put together and everything was in separate pieces. Before you could even start a chassis on that line you would already have had to build a reference casting and a power supply because they made up the bulk of the rear panel. These newer generation instruments are so simple and fast to slam together, which makes my life here at work much easier. In an eight hour shift I can stay super busy only building chassis if I want to and I can probably knock out fifteen of them. I like staying busy. Makes the shift go by in what seems like ten minutes.

Next step in the process is power supply test. The power supply consists of three PC boards. Two of them have to be pressed into the motherboard and then a jumper connection is installed linking the two boards together. At the power supply test station they have a goofy overhead boom that looks like a construction crane. It holds a weird fixture made out of clear acrylic. Inside it has one extender PC board. I have to place this fixture over the chassis I just built and then lower it into the instrument motherboard where it makes a connection. Basically the whole fixture becomes a safety shield when it's in a unit under test. If a power supply board shorts to ground or if a capacitor explodes, anybody operating the setup will be safe from injury. It's kind of a hassle to use though because it's awkward and bulky. A third power supply board is placed in the fixture on it's extender board and then you close the lid. You're ready to test the damn thing. From there the process is software controlled by the test rack. I can either take a little break while it runs or I can jump back to build another chassis. Sometimes when I'm in kick-ass mode I like to jump back and forth all night long from building to testing. Keeps things from getting boring.

Not much can go wrong at power supply test. It either works and passes, or something screws up and you fail it. Troubleshooting a problem is easy. The third power supply PC board has a bunch of error LEDs for the various line voltages so if one comes up red I know there are probably a couple of pins on the motherboard that are making contact and shorting out. It's usually the +5v or +8v supply that goes out when that's the case. I fix it by carefully scanning over the board to locate the culprit pins and straighten them out with needlenose pliers. Occassionally though I do end up with a bad circuitboard which will kill the power, shit happens. I take notes and get a printout of failed data and dump those defective boards into a box and forget about 'em. They're not my problem at that point.

If it passes power supply test the box then goes over to Final Assembly. That's the job around here I like the most. Compared to my old line the final assembly here is easy as hell. The whole box really comes together and it's all about dropping in a dozen circuitboards, adding the front panel display, and dropping the RF deck. Then you cable it all up and shove the unit over to the technicians. It's a breeze. The front panel keyboard and display are built by our sub-assembly group so all we have to do is bolt it to the front frame and we're done. We build the RF decks here on the line, but when I get them at Final someone else has put it all together. So again all I have to do is drop it down the side of the unit and bolt it in place. Quick work.

For some reason I really dig the front panel displays on these boxes. I've always liked display technology, I don't know why. Guess I'm an uber-nerd for that. I have some favorites. Nixie tubes from the 1950s are super cool. In the 1970s the first 7-segment LEDs were a rich ruby red color and I've always liked those alot. These units use a pretty light blue-green VFD screen that looks especially cool in low light. The Japanese manufacture our VFDs for us. Besides a few instrument lines here that use VFDs the only other place I've seen that kind of display technology is in some stereo equipment.

RF Decks are the one place I am going to stay away from. I've tried it a few times and I can positively say that job sucks. It sucks real bad. The RF Deck is a collection of microcircuits that are linked together by rigid metal cables. It's a pain in the ass to build because you have to use a rotating fixture and the instructions didn't take into account the fixture position an assembler would have to place everything to put it together. So I'm sitting there looking at the instructions and everything is upsidedown or backwards from the way it's laid out on the workbench. It's like I suddenly became dyslexic and the shit gives me a splitting headache in no time. It's a mess. Thankfully, Okie Carol is so good at building RF Decks that she's stuck putting them together every night.

Sources

Area 51 has gone really well for me over the past few months. I've been happy working with the swing shift team on this line. Everybody here is helpful, fun to work with, and there haven't been any petty episodes or personality conflicts. This is the way things should have been here all along. Okie Carol has completely trained me up on Area 51's power supplies, instrument chassis, and final assembly. Final assembly is where the whole box comes together. I'll get into that step in the process and describe everything else I've learned here later on. The one job I'm hoping to avoid getting stuck with is building RF decks. That shit gives me a headache.

Things have been so smooth that it seemed just too good to be true. I had a bad feeling an unforseen problem would creep out of nowhere and sabotage everything and sure enough it has happened. Management has made the decision to move our line to another location in the factory and effectively integrate us into a larger department. That department is Sources. The reason why upper management wants us to move is because Sources has an automated test process and they're hoping to shoe-horn our instruments into it to save loads of money. Most likely it's some bottom line dollar bullshit invented by a beady-eyed bean counter in finance that caused this to happen. Jerks. Currently our test process is mostly manual meaning testers and technicians wheel boxes around on the shop floor and hook up each unit individually for calibration and tuning. The automated process is controlled by a few robots that run the boxes around from station to station 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Nobody in Area 51 is happy about the move because we will lose our autonomy, our group will probably be polluted with deadbeats, and the technicians are fairly certain our older Signal Generators won't be very compatible with the Sources department automated testing process. The techs have been trying to fight against the decision but it looks like they've lost the battle even though they have some solid arguments for us not to go. It seems management's ears are closed to common sense, as usual.

Personally I'm not too thrilled about working in Sources either. I'm most concerned with how many screwups are roaming around loose in that department and worried about getting some of them dumped on us in Area 51. That's gonna bite fiercely. We will also be subjected to a different style of supervision there. With Squirmy we only report in to one manager who is hardly ever around. In Sources we will have a team of a half dozen supervisors mucking up the works while trying to babysit us. I can't wait to see what kind of stupid shit they end up trying to foist upon us once we're settled in. On the plus side, for me Sources will be a haven, a safe zone if you will. Sources is the one department I can count on to never see Potatohead ever again. Sources was where he got himself kicked out of and from what I've been told Potatohead will never be allowed to work there again in the future. The rest of that department's management team has effectively blackballed him.

We move to Sources this coming week. Packing up and relocating from building to building is a real drag. It's one of my least favorite things to do at work. It's a total hassle to pack everything up tech bench by bench, every single test rack, account for and organize all the tooling and such, then put it all back together again. Inevitably shit seems to evaporate into thin air which means even if we're only moving down the hall we're going to end up having a few bad headaches getting things set up and back to normal. We'll also be down for at least 24 hours as soon as we move. There's a rule here that anytime test racks are powered down there's a mandatory 24 hour warm up period after turning them back on before we can start any production testing.

Blind Man Walking Part Three

Jeff said, "This is really, really stupid. You swear you won't tell anybody about it?"
"I swear I won't tell anybody. Ever. Okay?"
"You know there's a school for the blind here in the neighborhood, right?"
"Yeah."
"Some of the blind students hang out at the same bars I go to. They're regulars. I've gotten to know a few of them pretty well. Tonight I was thinking about how difficult it must be for them to go through life and do things, you know, being blind. I was one of the last people at the bar with them and on the way home I decided to put myself in their shoes. When I left the bar I closed my eyes and kept them shut while I tried to walk through the neighborhood and find my way home. I wanted to experience what it's like being blind."

Holy shit. Jeff was right, this was hands down one of the all time dumbest things I ever heard. I had a hell of a time keeping a straight face while Jeff continued telling me his story.

"Then what happened?" I asked.
"I made it into the parking lot by the Mel-O-Dee. I took a step forward, did a flip, and fell into a creek." He said as he tumbled over, he smashed his ankle hard against something and then landed in the water. He lost his glasses during the fall.

I knew exactly where Jeff was talking about. Directly across the mall parking lot from a row of shops including the Mel-O-Dee, the pavement abruptly ends and drops down to a mangy little stagnant creek. On the opposite side there's a row of houses with their backyard fences butting up right against the steep dirt. The creek flows from nearby BART tracks past the mall's parking lot, continuing under San Pablo to come out behind The Gun Room. In a couple of spots the mall parking lot is ten to fifteen feet above the creekbed. Maybe higher. What's nasty about it is in some places the pavement edge is made up of concrete globs mixed with gravel. Those globs bulge out from under the parking lot creating sort of a large overhang before dropping off to the scummy creek below. As Jeff flipped over and fell, his left leg slammed into the concrete.

Jeff told me he attempted to crawl up and out of the muddy creekside for 45 minutes with no luck. He couldn't get good enough of a hold on anything to pull himself out, and he couldn't simply walk down the creek to an easier place to haul himself out because the pain in his left leg was so bad. Without his glasses he had a difficult time seeing anything which compounded his plight. Each try he made to escape landed him back in the mud. That at least explained the pile of soaked, mud coated clothes lying in the middle of Autumn's living room floor. Then I asked him, "Did you yell for help or anything? I mean, wasn't anybody around?" Jeff said he didn't want to explain to strangers how he ended up in the bottom of a muddy ditch after two in the morning, and he was afraid the cops would somehow be involved if he did shout for help. So he kept quiet.

"How did you finally get out of there?"
Jeff said, "I got tired and frustrated. I stood up, climbed out on my hurt leg, and hopped the rest of the way back home."

Oh man. Putting his full weight on a broken leg must have caused Jeff some terrible pain not to mention aggrivating his injury. When he made it into the apartment he was covered head to toe in filth. He stripped his clothes off in the living room and left them where they fell. I asked about his noisy shower adventure. With only one good leg to stand on Jeff said he did almost fall head first a couple of times while he was in the tub trying to clean up. That's what caused so much racket. He left the shower's sliding glass door partially open for some reason. Now I knew why there was water all over the bathroom floor when I went to take a leak.

We were rapidly approaching the hospital. I couldn't hold back anymore. I was on the verge of laughing out loud numerous times while Jeff was talking but I managed to keep my composure. When he finished I looked at him and said, "Well, you learned a valuable lesson tonight. Being blind kinda sucks, doesn't it?" I slapped him on the shoulder and I laughed my ass off. Jeff stared shamefully into his lap. "I told you it was stupid." He said.

We pulled into Alta Bates hospital complex and I drove right up to the emergency room entrance. Leaving the engine running I got out, grabbed the crutches from the back seat and helped Jeff stand up on them. As he worked his way inside the building I took the Cougar to the hospital parking garage and found a spot to leave the car. By the time I rejoined Jeff he was sitting in a chair in front of a desk with a glass window filling out medical forms. A few minutes later hospital staff brought him a wheelchair and they strapped an ice pack to his ankle. Then the two of us waited. And waited. I zoned out watching a crummy TV that was high up in a far corner of the room. The channel was stuck on CNN. There weren't any magazines lying around to read.

Eventually an old Filipino man in blue hospital scrubs came into the waiting room and hauled Jeff away. Bored out of my mind I continued to zone out while infrequently scanning across the faces of a few unhappy people sitting here and there in the emergency room lobby doing the same thing I was. Waiting. I wasn't paying attention to how long Jeff was gone. When Jeff finally did emerge through double doors leading into the lobby, the guy pushing his wheelchair looked angry and Jeff was holding an oversized brown folder containing x-rays of his lower left leg.

Alta Bates' emergency room staff told Jeff he broke his ankle in three places.

Blind Man Walking Part Two

Jeff didn't know I was staying at Autumn's for the weekend. He never really knows when I may be there or not unless Autumn happens to mention it to him days in advance. I stood perfectly still in the entryway between the bedroom doors and the bathroom for a moment while I thought about what to do. I played it safe and said to Jeff in a stern tone of voice, "Autumn's asleep. It's me Jeff. What's going on?" Jeff had to be so completely drunk and belligerent, anything could happen. I backed a few feet away from his bedroom door and listened. He didn't say anything for a few seconds and I couldn't hear him moving in there. Then he said, "Come in here and turn on the light. I want you to look at something." Oh great. Visions of bad shit about to take place flashed through my mind. I didn't trust him. Was he going to hit me with a pipe wrench as I walked through his door? Maybe Jeff was bombed out of this world on liquor and thought it would be a good idea to show me his cock. This wasn't cool.

Carefully turning the knob to his bedroom door I used my arm's long reach to stay as far away as possible. Gently pushing the door open a crack I ran my hand along the wall just inside the door frame feeling for the lightswitch. I fished around where I thought the switch should have been searching randomly for it with my fingers. Just as I was about to become slightly annoyed with myself I found it and flicked it on. Peeking around his partially open door I saw Jeff on his back in bed, with his left leg thrust out towards the middle of his room. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light and said, "Come here and take a look at my leg. I think I broke it." I didn't have my glasses on so I walked right up to him and stooped close to see. Jeff's ankle was swollen the size of a large boiler pipe. The skin was turning black, the heel and bottom of his foot were a shade of purple. His leg was definitely broken and it was a very bad broken at that.

"Jeff, your leg is in a bad way."
"I just took some Advil and I was going to ask Autumn for a ride to the hospital in the morning."
"We're going to the hospital now. You can't stay like that. Advil won't do anything for the pain you'll be feeling in a little while, you won't be able to sleep. Not for a minute. Autumn has some crutches somewhere around here. You get dressed while I go find the crutches and get directions to the closest hospital." I was a man on a mission now.
Jeff looked at me and said, "Are you sure?" He had a sincere but helpess tone to his voice like he held out hope that maybe he wasn't in that much trouble and he could ride this injury out. It would be gone in the morning like a bad dream. "I've got to take you to get help right away. This can't wait for morning. Get dressed, I'll be ready to go in a few minutes."

I scurried back into Autumn's room and turned on the light. Autumn was out cold. As delicately as I could I woke her up and asked for her crutches. It's always confusing being jarred from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. Imagine the extra weirdness Autumn had to deal with as she saw me hunched over her babbling about used crutches stashed somewhere and where are they and Jeff's hurt I have to go. She directed me to find them in the back of her bedroom closet.

I got dressed, found the cripple sticks, and rushed into the kitchen for a phonebook. Sitting down at the kitchen table with the phone in my hand I looked up the non-emergency number for the local police and rang them. The cops were helpful. I described the situation and asked for the closest hospital emergency room and directions to get there from where we were located. The police repeatedly offered to send out an ambulance to pick up Jeff and I practically had to yell at them to get them to stop offering. So, I wrote down directions to Alta Bates hospital on Ashby. That wasn't far from Autumn's place at all. No sweat.

Jeff had managed to put on some shorts and a T-shirt. I handed him Autumn's crutches, opened the front door to the apartment and shut off the lights behind us. We had a little bit of a journey to get to my car thanks to three flights of stairs. Let me tell you it isn't easy to get a drunk with a broken leg on crutches down three flights of stairs. It took some time and Jeff had a couple of close encounters with the hand railings, but we made it out to the sidewalk. Everything was smooth sailing from here on out, I thought. Fortunately the Cougar was parked close by. I got lucky earlier that night and scored a parking spot damn near right across the street from Autumn's apartment. After cramming both crutches into the back seat Jeff managed to hobble-shimmy himself into the passenger seat. I shut the door after him and hopped in.

Firing the engine up I threw the car in gear and we drove through the outskirts of that shitty little shopping mall with the abandoned Emporium Capwell building that towers over the neighborhood. We past by the Mel-O-Dee and came out to San Pablo, which is one of the main thoroughfares in the area linking Oakland with Richmond. I was pretty sure I could follow San Pablo all the way out to Ashby and then easily locate Alta Bates from there. I turned on San Pablo. There wasn't a soul out on the street at that hour of night. The Cougar was the only car on the road. Both Jeff and I had the windows rolled down and the dual exhaust from my car resonated beautifully off of each building as we passed. All the neighborhood landmarks seem so different at night when no one is around. It's like everyone suddendly died and familiar places like Caspar's Hot Dog joint and The Mallard become strangely foreign and entirely depressing.

One thing crept into my thoughts as we drove deeper into Berkeley. Funny, I realized I hadn't wondered about it before now, but there it was. I looked over towards Jeff who was sitting there with an impatient expression on his face. He was in pain.

I asked him, "So Jeff, if you don't mind me buggin' you about this, uh, you don't have to tell me about it if you don't want to and all, but, how'd you end up with a broken leg tonight?"
Jeff took a deep breath and sheepishly looked me in the eye. "It's really stupid." He said and kind of half-nodded at me.
Again I told him, "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."
"Promise you won't ever tell anyone about it?" He was serious.
Oh, this was going to be good. On the inside I cringed with evil delight. This was going to be good, indeed. I looked at Jeff and smiled. "I promise I won't tell anyone what happened."

Blind Man Walking Part One

Autumn's new room mate Jeff has been here for the past few months. He's from New Jersey studying Psychiatry at a school in San Francisco. He's an okay guy, I guess. Jeff isn't too tall. Average height I'd say, he's balding with jet black short curly hair. Jeff is a 1970s man. He's one of those people that lived through the Seventies and liked them so much that he still personally identifies with that era. Poor bastard.

Jeff seemed to me to be having trouble fitting in out here in California. Making friends with people was an uphill battle for him and he acted homesick and lonely most of the time. His social interactions with people consisted of Autumn, his classes at school, volunteer work, online chat rooms, and the local dive bars. In particular of the few local dive bars he had been playing pool at and getting drunk frequently in were the Hotsy Totsy and the Mel-O-Dee. The Mel-O-Dee I could handle every once in a while. It's a leftover dump from the early Seventies, located in a worn out strip mall near Autumn's apartment. The interior decor of the Mel-O-Dee is straight out of a bad film, velvety red walls and black vinyl trim with etched glass mirrors behind the simulated wood grain bar. Completely tacky. The crowd is mostly elderly. One of Autumn's neighbors in a nearby apartment building goes to the Mel-O-Dee once a day for drinks dragging his oxygen tank behind him. He's a good example of their regular geriatric clientele.

I expect as soon as the 20-something "cool kid" crowd discovers the Mel-O-Dee, they'll end up taking the place over and run out all the old time regulars. Same thing happened to a little dive bar I used to go to near where I live, called The 440 Club. The 440 is wasted now thanks to those trendy "cool kids". I won't set foot in it anymore. When I first started going to The 440 Club the only people there were white-haired. Some nights senior bowling teams were there drinking after a match. I was the only young person in the whole joint. Rosie would bitch me out as I sat at the bar drinking Murph Islands. Some nights a blue collar worker like a taxi cab driver or a mechanic from an auto shop would get off work and come into The 440 and buy the entire bar a round of drinks just because they had a great day. That stuff was fun. It all came to a screeching halt after dirtbag hipster kids discovered the place and took over. I stopped going when the elderly crowd disappeared and the nightly Junior College fist fights appeared.

The other bar Jeff goes to as I mentioned, is the Hotsy Totsy. It's down the street and around the corner from Autumn's place. It's pink, run down, and the neon sign over the front door is generally flickering out or entirely busted. I hate that hole. Jeff seems to like it way too much.

Autumn's neighborhood is strange. There's a dying strip mall practically in her front yard, BART tracks within view of her livingroom windows, a Wild West gun shop, a kick ass ACE hardware store, a bowling alley, and a school for the blind. It took me a while to figure out why there were so many blind people in Autumn's neighborhood all the time. Apparently there's a well known school for the blind here, so blind students come from all over the nation to attend it. I had no idea a school for the blind was anywhere near here.

The other weekend I was staying with Autumn at her place. She was blissfully sleeping next to me when I suddenly woke up. I had to pee like a motherfucker. I always sleep on her side of the bed that's closest to the wall, so I have to scoot out of the covers without waking her up. Most of the time I fail to exit her bed stealthy enough without disturbing her. I was about to get up, hit the bathroom, and hop back in bed. I held still in bed as I heard a bunch of racket coming from the livingroom. Jeff had blundered through the front door to Autumn's apartment. It was late. As I nestled next to Autumn's warm body and threw the covers back over my chilled frame, I heard an awful lot of noise coming from out there. Something wasn't right.

The floor was pounding with each heavy step of Jeff's movement. From the sound of things it seemed like a struggle but I didn't hear any voices. I could tell by the increased light flooding underneath Autumn's bedroom door that Jeff turned on every lightbulb in the apartment. I squinted at the sharp white blade pouring from under the door into her pitch black room. This was fucked, I really needed to take a leak. It sounded like Jeff staggered into the bathroom and proceeded to take a long shower. Multiple times I heard solid thuds against the bathroom walls and the tub. Once or twice, I thought Jeff might have fallen in there hurting himself, it was that loud. I almost got up to check on him and then thought twice about it. I decided to play possum and hide in Autumn's bedroom until Jeff was passed out asleep. I still had to pee, the pain in my bladder was getting worse and I considered taking a leak in Autumn's kitchen sink. I had to go that bad.

Jeff managed to finish up in the bathroom, and stagger his way into his bedroom. I listened intently for any sign of movement trying to reassure myself that he was finally down for the count. I waited a few more minutes. There was nothing, not a sound in the apartment. Figuring it was safe to make my bathroom run, I dashed out of bed and opened Autumn's bedroom door. As my eyes adjusted to the blinding light I stopped in my tracks at what I saw. In the middle of Autumn's livingroom floor there was a pile of Jeff's soaked, mud encrusted clothes. A dark stain spread out in the carpet around his filthy clothes pile. I was perplexed. Shaking my head in disgust I walked into the bathroom. My left foot hit about a 1/4in. lake of water and I jumped back into the hallway. The bathroom it seemed, was flooded. What the fuck was going on?

A tired, moaning voice spoke from behind Jeff's closed bedroom door. "Autuuuuumn. Autumn, are you there?"

Oh shit.

Lightwave Space Nerd

So I got a little backstory on that space nerd of a supervisor, Tom. He's the nitwit I interviewed with in Lightwave that likes to have his employees dress up for "Star Wars Day" at work. Retard. I called up one of my buddies still working at the Optical Coating Lab. Senor Biskits is a good friend of mine and he's been working at the Optical Coating Lab for over ten years. I figured if anyone might know about Tom's past there and be able to give me the scoop it would be Senor Biskits. Sure enough, as soon as I mentioned Tom and gave Biskits a quick description of what he looked like, he knew who Tom was right away.

"Nobody was sad to see him go when he quit to go work for you guys at Bill and Dave's."
I asked, "So, was he a weirdo there or what?"
Senor Biskits thought about it for a couple of seconds and then said in his cartoon character like voice, "Remember how everything at the Optical Coating Lab is overboard on safety regulations?"
"Yeah."
"Well, Tom was one of those guys who tried to ease off some of the safety rules. You remember when you came in to work every day you had to wear safety glasses even at your locker and stuff which was nowhere near any equipment or anything. He wanted the company to get rid of rules like that so you only had to wear protective gear actually in the work area, not everywhere in the building at all times. He changed his mind though."
"How come?"
"One afternoon he was leaving work and he forgot he still had his safety glasses on. He was by his locker out of the production area and a metal fragment flew all the way across the warehouse and hit him in the face. If it hadn't been for his safety glasses he probably would have got it in his eye. After that, he became a Safety Nazi."
I asked, "Is there anything else you remember about him?"
Senor Biskits said, "No. Just everyone here was relieved to see him go."

I was hoping for more juicy dirt than that. Oh well. Anyway Lightwave is stuck with that guy. I'll probably never run into him again unless it's in the cafeteria.

Two Carols

My first day over here in Area 51, Squirmy introduced me to his swing shift team. Most of the people working on this line I had never met before with the exception of Wah, and Ron. Ron I knew and liked from back in my PC Board days. I worked with robots in Autoflexing while he worked on the other side of our area in Racking. Ron was a sharp guy, way too smart to be wasting his time mindlessly racking and de-racking PC boards 40 hours a week. I remember when he got a job as a technician because nobody up in the PC Board department saw him again after that. At least I didn't anyway.

That idiot, Slobbering Mouth Kid, was here in Area 51 for a while. I had to work with him on the Spokane Transfer project during the summer of 1996 and all he did was get up in employees' personal business. He failed to do any work. Oh, and he burned the side of his head with hot soldering irons frequently. He was such a rocket scientist. I used to walk by in the hallway and see him sitting at a workbench in Area 51 doing nothing but talk his coworker's ears off. That guy never changed. He quit Area 51 just ahead of Squirmy firing him and headed up to work in another division. Squirmy fired a big bald Slobbering Mouth look-alike months before. Guess that shook Slobbering Mouth Kid up, so he sailed on out of here to be a manager's kiss-ass at another site. I'm glad he's finally gone.

Swing shift is damn fun with this crew. Two technicians, TC and Sea Squid, are constantly giving each other a hard time. They're funny as hell and quick on their toes with cut downs and talk about random silly shit all night long. It's like having your own private comedy show. There's also a Crazy Red-Headed lady in their tech area, and Wah. Wah is a teeny Vietnamese lady I only know by name and not much more than that. She's one of the Vietnamese women that I used to terrorize every once in a while late at night by yelling in Vietnamese at her. I was hidden behind cubicle walls or under a nearby desk whenever I pulled a prank like that. She never caught me and I think she assumed the dirty talk was coming from an old lecherous Vietnamese guy on another line. I wonder if she ever hassled him about it. Heh. TC is the area's class clown, and he's a good one. He reminds me of the little cartoon mascot on a can of Pringle's potato chips. I think it's his hair and moustache that resemble Mr. Pringle so much.

Squirmy has left me in the care of two women, both named Carol. They are to be my trainers in this product's assembly and MI/EI areas. Okie Carol is my assembly trainer. I call her Okie Carol because she has a slight Southern drawl to her voice like a depression-era Oklahoma native. She's weather-beaten in a black and white vintage movie Grapes Of Wrath dust bowl sort of way. Her cheeks are sunk in somewhat which gives her face a slightly starved appearance. She's going gray and she's covered in wrinkles. Okie Carol is tall and skinny, and bossy. She's got some spirit in her that's for sure. If I'm not doing something the way she thinks I ought to be doing it, I get told about it pronto. I'm just going along with it and having a good time doing so.

Little Carol is the other of my two mentors here. She's got to be right around five feet tall, maybe a little less. She's also older, gray, and wrinkly. But, she's got fire in her. Her hands are ravaged by arthritis, bony at the knuckles and shriveled some. Nevertheless she has no problems dealing with 100+ pound test instruments because she uses her noggin to figure out ways to move these heavy boxes around using what little tooling we've got on the line. I saw her lift a box onto a table the other night only using a couple of fingers. Made me do a massive double-take when I saw such a frail old lady do that. I'll eventually be working with Little Carol shipping finished boxes off the line. It will probably take me months before I'll be done training on the front end of their line and then I can go back to bug her.

For now, I have a seemingly endless supply of A6 boards to test and tune. After I burn through their stockpile of untested boards Okie Carol is going to begin teaching me their instrument chassis assembly and power supply testing. Maybe next week at the earliest.

Anvil Blow

Autumn's room mate Jove graduated from the Culinary Institute recently, and moved temporarily back to his family's place in Arkansas. I liked Jove. At first I wasn't sure of him. Something seemed a little off center about him. Occassionally very late at night when Autumn and I should have been sound asleep, I would hear Jove talking to himself in his bedroom. He must have been talking to someone on the phone I thought but after it happened more than just a few times I realized he was telling himself to shut up. Rather forcibly and repeatedly he would tell himself to shut up. That creeped me out a tad bit. Jove seemed harmless enough. Autumn never had any problems with him during the time he rented from her so it was all good.

Jove called up Autumn the other day to say hello. She told me he was drunk. The funny thing about the conversation, she said, was when Jove told her what he had been up to since he got back home. He mentioned that he had been spending time blowing up anvils. When Autumn pressed him for details what that was about, he said you put an anvil out in an open field. Then you have to put explosives on it and put another anvil on top of that. Autumn asked, "Then what do you do?" Jove thought about it for a moment and said in a drunken slur of words, "Then... you... fucking run AWAY."

So I guess that's what people do for fun in Arkansas. Blow anvils sky high with dynamite. Neat.

Performance Review

Squirmy told me the other day my current employee review is due and it was going to be written by Potatohead. I wasn't too happy about that tidbit of news. Obviously that would be Potatohead's last hurrah, his final opportunity to screw with me and sabotage any hope of getting a merit raise this year. I asked Squirmy if he might be able to pull some strings and write up a review for me instead, but he said he couldn't do it. I bet he could, he just didn't want to. He squirmed his way right out of that one.

I sat down with Potatohead this afternoon and got it overwith. My departure from his line was anything but pleasant. As usual, he had some words for me and I had a few for him. It felt good though, he was powerless to do anything about it. Potatohead thrust a packet of paperwork into my hands and gave me a few minutes to read it over before saying anything. Fearing the worst I carefully scrutinzed his comments. Some of them were actually kind of funny. Like this one, "Work in a team environment without disruptive conflicts. Be a positive influence and demonstrate this with visible cooperation, tolerance, and provide technical leadership." What a joke. Practically every time Potatohead walked the shop floor he was just wandering around looking to start a fight with someone. His concept of "visible cooperation" means nothing more than being a total kiss ass to him. I can't tolerate incompetence like his, and every time I tried to assist others with technical knowledge Potatohead got all up in it and slapped me down for it. Whatever. He continued, "Become more active in line meetings presenting his ideas on ways to improve productivity, quality, and training." Yeah, well, I hate meetings. And any time I did open my mouth to suggest something that wasn't in line with what Potatohead wanted, I was wrong. So I stopped trying and kept my yap shut.

As I continued reading on in my evaluation, I almost fell out of my chair. Potatohead gave me an excellent performance rating. I couldn't believe it and I'm still laughing about it. Somehow I have a feeling that if I hadn't gone to upper management to discuss my personal sitaution with this guy, my evaluation would have come out much differently. I mean, there's no way Potatohead could be objective or honest enough to put aside his personal dislike for me and give me an unbiased review. Right?

Factory Peasant is a strong assembler who is able to perform all the assembly processes for the Classic instrument line. He has many years of experience, here at Bill and Dave's company, that he draws on to do his job. Factory Peasant has a logical thought process that he combines with his mechanical ability to build a quality instrument. He handled all the Manufacturing Special Tests (MSTs) for the area. This required him to work closely with the 95 technicians and engineers. Factory Peasant was always thorough and accurate in his work. During this last year the assembly team was asked to expand their role. They took on the pre-testing of boards and duplexer sub-assemblies. Factory Peasant was able to quickly learn these test procedures which helped free up the technicians.

Factory Peasant has a good commitment to quality and his work reflects his ability. He will take the time and make the extra effort to insure that his work is correct and built to standards. For example, he discovered that a process was not being followed by a peer which had the potential to cause quality problems. He identified the issue and retrained the individual. One of Factory Peasant's strengths is his work output. He has the ability to work above standard times and to quickly learn new assembly skills. During slow periods he has been asked to help other production lines with their build schedules. Factory Peasant learns tasks quickly and is sought after by the other teams. In fact, he is often requested by name when the other lines need help.

Factory Peasant is a very smart individual who makes good decisions during the course of his shift. On swing shift there isn't much support available from typical support groups for the line, i.e. engineering, component test, material coordinators, etc. This requires him to make many judgement calls as problems arise to keep production moving.

Well shit. That was pretty good. He did manage to get in a couple digs on me though in the next sections of my evaluation.

Factory Peasant generally works well with his peers. His strong opinion on what should be done has come across as judgemental to his peers and interfered with his relationship with his peers. I have received feedback and observed his attitude. Take the "interpersonal relationship" class here at Bill and Dave's. This will help you recognize that there are many types of people with varying degrees of ability. It is up to you to learn how to work with these people in a non-judgemental manner and to create a environment that is safe for everybody.

Unfortunately we have employees here that for whatever reasons don't follow written or verbal instructions well and end up wrecking stuff right and left. When you catch things like that happening, it's always best to stop everything and investigate down to the root cause of how the problem started. If you find that it's a simple case of operator error then you have to give feedback to the person in a careful, professional manner that doesn't make them feel belittled or singled out. In many cases no matter what you do these people won't deal with it, and try to get out of facing their workmanship issues by turning on the tears and/or running to management. That's what I've run into here more often than not. And when a supervisor gets involved it doesn't matter how delicately you approached the problem individual because you are now the issue. It's frustrating to say the least. I think I'll skip the relationship class. And what's with that "safe environment" crap? I don't walk through the front doors to the building every afternoon with sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. Sheesh.

Potatohead's final opinion of me came in my review's Performance Summary section, which he attempted to use in an effort to explain away his poor behavior on the line. Essentially he blamed our area for the predominantly low morale, rather than on himself for the way he treated people. Of course he also slipped in some veiled criticisms, but I let it go. There was nothing more he could do to me now. I took that power away from him by leaving his product line.

During the last couple of years this line has gone through many management changes. Some of the moves have been sudden which has lead to confusion within the team. A natural response is one of apathy and negativity. When I took over the line I tried to engage Factory Peasant several times in conversations and in business tasks that I felt would help him in his development. According to feedback I received from his previous manager Factory Peasant was well thought of and was looking for a 92 level position. I was turned down by Factory Peasant when I tried to offer him some additional tasks. His reasoning was that those tasks were not directly related to building instruments and were a waste of time.

Factory Peasant has recently been transferred to another line due to business needs. Just prior to the move I felt that Factory Peasant and I were making improvement in our working relationship. I would encourage him to take on his new job with a positive attitude and to get involved in as much of the business end as he is able to. Factory Peasant is an individual who has alot to offer Bill and Dave's company.

Overall, I didn't do too badly. This should be the last time I ever have to deal with Potatohead. I can forget about him, and get back to work. Things around here at long last will be enjoyable again. That's what really matters.

Area 51

I started working on a new instrument line this week. So far it's been great. The entire swing shift crew are good people that have a fun time while working hard. This is what I've needed for a long time.

My first task here in Area 51 is pretty simple. Usually when a person first shows up on an unfamiliar instrument line, you try to find jobs for the new person that ease them into the product. They've given me the job of tuning A6 boards which are really cool looking. The ground plane on both the component and circuit sides of these boards are gold plated. I haven't seen anything like this before. Most of the time PC boards are always the same dull green fiberglass. The A6 PC board in these boxes is a sampler that takes frequencies from the instrument's YiG Oscillator and mixes them down. For example if the YiG is kicking out a 5Ghz signal, the circuitboards can't handle it. So the A6 board down converts 5Ghz to say, the 300Mhz range and then feeds it out to certain boards and this allows them to all stay in a phase locked loop.

Anyway, there's a particular circuit on the A6 board that has a capacitance problem. To fix it a larger value capacitor has to be installed. I sit here in front of a testbed instrument with untuned A6 boards, take some measurements and make a rough tune. Then I have to open the board up. It has a special metal clamshell cover on both sides of the board to help shield it from radio frequency interference and electromagnetic interference. Once that's removed I clip out one capacitor on a circuit and solder in a slightly higher value part based off my initial tuning info. The sheilds are replaced and after a little more testing for desired tune range, I'm done. They've got boxes filled with dozens of untested A6 boards for me to work on so I'll be doing this for a while. It's kind of like being in the Army and getting stuck peeling potatoes, but I don't mind.

The Seventies Are Crap

I remember when my parents bought their brand new house in 1970 the inside of the house was an eyesore. Their livingroom carpet was a deep olive green that was awful to look at, but fun to crawl around on. Just off the front door to the house there was a closet. Inside that closet hanging on the wall there was a rake. The rake was for our livingroom carpet, and a while later I heard people refer to our carpet as "shag." Whatever it was called, I didn't like it. One of my first chores my parents assigned to me was to rake the carpet a couple times a week. No sooner would I finish raking it, one of my family members would walk through it leaving a trail of footprints behind them like they had just tromped through fresh snow.

My bedroom was an abomination of interior design and a true example of bad taste. The wallpaper was a pattern of various width stripes that resembled a UPC bar code, only the stripes on my walls were colored worm-gut yellow, booger green, and baby poop brown. A light off white, cream color lay underneath those hideous bar code stripes. The carpet was a sickeningly bright orange shag weave. My room had a sliding glass door that opened out to the backyard of my parent's house. That side of our house got the most sunlight throughout the day and the curtains that covered my sliding glass door were also bright orange. After noontime, sunlight flooded my bedroom until evening. If my curtains were closed, the entire room glowed an evil orange that gave me headaches. If my curtains were open, blinding sunlight engulfed my room and I got headaches. In the center of the ceiling there was a single light fixture that had slivers of plastic jutting from the circular frame. At night when the light was turned on, those plastic slivers glowed bright yellow. It reminded me of a certain saucer-shaped ship from the television show "Lost In Space." It was entirely tacky, entirely useless. I didn't like my bedroom and I tried to stay out of it as much as I could during the day.

As a child, I didn't understand what was happening back then. I couldn't put my finger on why everything in the world seemed to be pure ass. Clothing fashions were retarded, cars flimsy and disgusting, music awful, houses bad. There was nowhere to escape any of it. Years later, I finally figured out what was wrong the whole time I was growing up. I had the misfortune of being born and raised in a time period people refer to as The Seventies, the worst decade of the entire 20th century. I know now that my woe and suffering then was no fault of my own. Somehow I managed to survive this bleak period, however I'm not sure how demented I became as a result of living through it.

Years later, The Seventies came back like a bad skin rash. It began in the UK, hit the east coast of the United States, and from there spread like a cancerous disease across the nation to California. I had some advance warning it was coming. In the late 80s I read a magazine from England called i-D. i-D was filled with stylish graphic design, photography, music articles, and fashion. It seemed to be on the cutting edge of whatever was hip and cool at the time. I bought issue after issue for a long time until one day I picked up the latest copy and thumbed through it's pages to discover the horror of a retro-Seventies movement emerging from fucking nowhere. I stopped buying i-D magazine.

Trendy hipsters instantly began raiding the nearest thrift stores for any and every item of vintage 1970s disco-dork clothing. College age kids tromped down the streets looking like they were always headed for a costume party dressed up in hideous polyester shirts and bellbottom pants. When the available supplies of Seventies crap clothing dried up at the Salvation Army, department stores started to carry "new" clothing that looked to me like it belonged on a rack at a Goodwill store and charged top dollar for it. Interestingly, I noticed that throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area, kids in the East Bay were the most susceptible to Seventies crap than anywhere else. I still haven't figured out why. Perhaps they happen to be too young to remember that decade, or they are simply fiends for the worst trash known to mankind. Frequently I find myself wondering who is more stupid, the clueless drugged-out individuals who pioneered those substandard trends in fashion, design, art, and music back in the Seventies, or the fools who attempt to emulate it now.

The Seventies Plague has lasted years longer than I ever would have guessed. I wrongly anticipated that people would quickly realize how stupid the 1970s retro look is and abandon it. Recently I made a comment to someone that I couldn't wait for the Seventies to die back then during the decade itself, and I keep waiting for them to die... again. The sooner the better. No more retro 1970s bullshit, please.

Clark

Next door to Autumn's apartment building there is a run-down little house. The small, worn out place has a single car garage in the back that is practically collapsing in on itself. When it rains, water pools up in a low spot on the garage roof adding more weight to the frail structure. Sometimes I wonder if it will crumble to the ground at any moment when it's like that. A driveway leading up to the garage is nothing more than two dirt tracks well worn by tires. In the middle of the tracks there's knee-high weeds happily growing. The front and back yards aren't kept up, and the outside of this house is so completely weather beaten that I can't tell what color of paint was used on the walls. Was it once green or maybe it was blue decades ago? Hard to say.

A couple live in this house. The woman I rarely see outside. Once in a while as Autumn and I are coming and going from her apartment building we bump into this woman as she's unloading groceries from her late model BMW. She always says hello to us and seems pleasant enough. Her man on the other hand, is afflicted. He doesn't come outside to see daylight too often either, but when he does a whole lot of weirdness comes along with him for the ride.

Most of the time I see him standing on the porch just outside the front door talking to someone like he's a long time friend. He smiles as he talks to this person in a neighborly sort of way, and he spends time talking with him for a half hour or more. Problem is, only one person is standing there. The other person is thin air. As I pass by to walk up Autumn's apartment building steps I catch a glimpse of what is inside this man's house through his partially open front doorway. The first room is jam packed up to the ceiling with stacks of newspapers and garbage bags filled with who knows what. Instantly I classified the mess as a fire hazard. You read about houses like that in the news every once in a while. The owners were pack rats filling their dwelling to the brim with garbage and in one hapless incident the whole place goes up in smoke like it was a pile of dry leaves soaked in gasoline.

I asked Autumn about this guy, she said "Oh, that's Clark. Everybody on this street knows him." Some days I catch Clark outside when he's in rare form. He will be out on his front porch talking to an invisible person while wearing yellow latex dishwashing gloves, a pair of broken plastic safety goggles which happen to be masking-taped to his head, and he will have a thick coating of shaving cream all over his face. Once or twice I could have sworn I saw a celery stalk behind each ear in addition to his goggles, but really I'm not sure what it was. My eyesight isn't so good these days.

Nation Burger

Sometimes during the week I miss Autumn pretty bad. Usually I don't get out of work until hours after she is long asleep. It is boring, loafing around her apartment trying to kill time until I'm sleepy enough to hop in bed with her so I've started killing time at night when I drive over to see her. I hang out at Nation Burger. It's on the corner of Central and San Pablo. It's cool because it's a twenty four hour burger joint that doesn't force patrons into a drive-thru only lane. You can show up there at two or three in the morning and go inside. In my part of the bay area, we don't have anything like that. So I dig it.

Typically, I pull into Nation Burger's parking lot after midnight. Walking up to the front door you pass a gauntlet of newspaper racks. I buy a paper at random. Doesn't matter which one, they're all full of fresh lies. The place is so busy most of the time when I get there that I have to stand in a line which frequently is long enough that it trails out through the building's double doors onto the sidewalk. The food is good enough that it's worth the wait. I think it's good enough anyway, Autumn doesn't really care for it.

At Nation Burger you can grub down in style. I like to get a behemoth of a cheeseburger and chilli fries finished off with a slice of pie. Their pie menu is robust. Sometimes I get a key lime pie, other times my fancy is a berry pie. I always avoid coconut pie. Hate that shit like it's poison. After making an order at the front counter it's tough to find an open table. Swarms of rapmaster thugs and UC college kids stake out most of the territory. Eventually I score a booth, then I proceed to kick back while intermittantly reading a shoddy newspaper mixed with a little people-watching. Kills the time effectively.

Around three in the morning, waves of taxi cabs begin to cruise through the parking lot to stop near Nation Burger's entrance. Homeless looking bum-types always emerge from the cab's doors to stagger out into night air and damp pavement. I've heard when local establishments have problems with a bum, they call a cab and pay the fare to drop them off at this place. It's sorta fucked up. Street people like that aren't much fun to have around, they always wreck the bathroom inside Nation Burger with puke or worse. But, it adds to the overall people-watching chaos. Every time I'm there eating dinner either a hip-hop funklord or a stinky homeless person will bug me for the Sports Section of my newspaper. I'm happy to give it away. To me, sports and everything associated with spectator sports are useless.

When I'm too tired or too bored to handle the Nation Burger crowd anymore, I drive to Autumn's apartment and crash out for the night.

8.3.1999

Autumn doesn't understand why I stay at Bill and Dave's company. All the stories I've told her about how frustrated I am with fellow employees and chronic mis-management from corporate HQ all the way down to the factory shop floor have left her confused as to why I haven't quit. There are a few reasons why I stay with it. I get to work with technologies and hardware every day that most people have never heard of let alone actually seen before. The instruments I work on are used for countries' space programs, modernizing and strengthening armed services around the world, advancing scientific research at universities and laboratories, and supporting wireless telecommunications. You wouldn't have a cell phone without the equipment we manufacture. I like the feeling I get knowing I'm directly contributing to these kinds of industries despite all the bullshit I have to put up with on a daily basis at work. Also, I've discovered that I'm pretty good at electronics. So that's why I haven't left even though Bill and Dave's company is entirely dysfunctional. I enjoy the work too much.

I spent the whole weekend leeching off of Autumn. I feel dirty. She's kind and generous to me and I feel like slime for accepting it with little to offer in return. I don't manage my money well. It's one of my worst problems. Despite feeling guilty I did have a good time with Autumn. We didn't go out to do anything special. We just stayed around her apartment and did domestic stuff. I feel closer to her. I can't describe why. I just do. That realization hit me so hard this weekend in particular, that she loves me so much. It's genuine, not surface like it was with Jennifer.

On Friday as soon as I got home from work I decided to dress up for Autumn in my favorite gray suit. Even though we weren't going out for an expensive dinner at some posh restaurant or going to see a show, I wanted to at least look good for her. A small surprise. I thought about what I look like when I come home from work on Friday nights and I was ashamed. I haven't been putting much effort into my appearance. She almost always goes through the trouble of getting dolled up for me. The small amount of time it took to wear a suit and run a comb through my hair ended up paying off in a big way later that night. I think Autumn was pleased.

Barley Bails Out

I talked with Barley the other day. He's one of the Precision Group technicians. I don't know him very well, but we got to yapping about all the problems we've been having on the line since Potatohead showed up. I had no idea, but this whole time Barley has been yet another one of Potatohead's victims. Like me, he's leaving the area just to get away from the asshole. I'm heading for Area 51 as soon as possible, Barley managed to score a promotion in another department. That's good for both of us but I feel bad for the few remaining people we're leaving behind to suffer and rot with that imbecile. Barley told me everything that happened to him...

When Garden Tool was our supervisor, I was the electronic technician responsible for tracking assembly errors. It had worked well and the tech/assembly teams had been doing a good job of working together to bring down the rate of preventable mistakes. Each assembler and tech had a number that was assigned to them so that the next person could identify the person who had made a mistake in the process and bring it to the attention of that particular worker so that they could correct what they may be doing wrong. Pretty simple. However there were a few assemblers that went to Potatohead to complain that they were being singled out and were having their feelings hurt.

Potatohead's solution? No more numbers assigned to anyone. There would be no more feedback and no way to track errors. Needless to say, our failure rate went through the roof. Even worse, I tried to address this issue with the assemblers. I sent out an email saying that there was a high amount of errors coming from assembly and that the assembly team needed to spend a few minutes to double check their work before sending it to the next area. The next morning I got called into Potatohead's cubicle. He told me that there were several assemblers (Super Shopper and The Squirrel) who were offended and hurt by my email and that I needed to make sure that I was more sensitive to other people's feelings and make sure I proof read my emails before sending them out.

Frustration had grown within our tech group. The kiss-asses had stretched Potatohead's given power a little too far with us. Things had been going really well previously when Garden Tool was our supervisor. We had a good working relationship with the assembly and material handling team. Meth was beaten down to his level and was kept under control. But with Potatohead in the lead, some people took their power too seriously.

We had an assembler who worked in the final button-up area. She had been pretty cool to work with until she got a power trip, thanks to Potatohead. She started bringing back instruments to our area and shoving them towards us while yelling at us to fix something. We had enough of this treatment and decided to call a meeting with Potatohead. Four or five of us technicians let Potatohead have it with both barrels. We had some pretty good documentation of the crap that was going on and called him out on it. Most of the frustration was voiced about this particular assembler and the way she thought she had power over us. In Potatohead's infinite wisdom, he decided to stop the meeting and go gather this other employee so we could hash things out with her. Bad idea. She came into the room with a defiant look on her face, I think she knew what was going on. Potatohead gave her a brief overview of what we had been talking about. He then opened the door for us to start unloading on her, and that we did. It did not take long for her to start defending herself with tears. It was pitiful. She sure didn’t have the tears flowing when she was yelling at us. But now she had to play the role of poor little victim. Guess which side of the aisle Potatohead landed on? He called an end to the meeting quickly and basically told us we were going to have to be better team players. Worthless.

I had already been offered and accepted a promotion to another line. I had enough of Potatohead's crap. He had tried to buy my loyalty with a nice pay raise. It didn't work for me. I couldn't handle the mess that the line had turned into. At the end of the shift I would make sure that my bench was cleaned up so the next technician who used it wouldn't have to face a big mess. The problem was, most of the new people and Potatohead's kiss-asses didn't necessarily follow the same rules. The pretest area had become a disaster area. There were stacks of junk, scrapped parts, schematics, newspapers, and tools piled up on the benches making it impossible to do your work.

One night I got sick of it. I threw a stack of newspapers off my bench and also told one of the temporary employee testers to clean up their area. Unknown to me, Meth was having a relationship outside of work with this girl. He took offense to me talking to her like that so he went and told Potatohead that I was throwing stuff around the area and was treating the employees bad. He made up a bunch of lies to get me in trouble. The next day I came in and Potatohead was waiting for me. He pulled me aside and asked me what happened last night. I said nothing really important. He said that he had heard I had a bad night. I said, "Well this place is a mess and there is no leadership around here." He said that I should be a leader to the techs and testers. I said "No, you took those powers away from me when you stopped my training to become the 95 level technician on the line and second of all it isn't my job, its yours." He turned very bright red and told me to pack up my stuff and go start my other job.

I was happy to get out of there, but also pissed off that it had come down to that after all of the work I had put in to being one of the expert techs on that product line.