Useless

It's getting so a guy can't work in power supply test without tripping over boxes full of dead PC boards. Between the power supply test rack and a Herman Miller shelf unit filled with brand new boards, I have multiple boxes of junked boards placed on a shiny chrome rolling metro cart crammed to the brim. No more room on that cart means starting new boxes of dead boards and leaving them on the floor. I'm not cool with that. The power supply consists of three main circuitboards. As we discover defective ones they are dumped into a box sorted by board part number and placed in a ESD bag with test data showing what failed. Whoever is supposed to be taking care of repairing these suckers isn't doing their job. Why not expedite sending them out for repair? I decided to look into why so many were left lying around.

Treehead is one of our Material Coordinators in the production area. The one thing I bug her about all the time is part orders. If we're low on an item, or we're completely out of stock, I need to know when to expect a replenishment so I can plan to work around it. Seems like we're constantly running out of one part or another which screws up the flow of work coming from assembly into test. Treehead is also a go-to person for solving mysteries, like the mess of dead power supply boards. Treehead was sitting in her cubicle so I told her about the problem back in my area and asked what to do about it. She said in order to fix those boards we would have to write up some extra paperwork and then hand them off to a technician named Useless. Useless would ship them out to South Korea for rework and repair. I asked, "Why South Korea?" Treehead said nobody in the United States repairs them anymore. That's typical of this place. Instead of having employees close by our division who can fix these circuitboards quickly, we have to send them half way around the world for simple repairs. Who knows when we might get them back.

I spent a few hours going over every board reviewing failed test data. With each one I filled out a non-conform slip. Basically it's a carbon copy sheet with a bunch of fill in the blank stuff like part numbers and information about my production line. After making sure everything was packed up proper and had the appropriate forms completed, I placed all boxes containing defective boards on Useless' desk. I don't know Useless, never spoke to him. Sometimes I see him wandering in the hallways, but most of the time he just hides out at his desk in the back of our test area. He doesn't seem to do much.

I left for the night satisfied that early tomorrow morning all of those crap circuitboards would be on their way to South Korea.

Next afternoon when I walked into assembly and began to settle in for swing shift, I saw every single box I had packed up was tossed back onto the chrome metro cart or dumped in front of it on the floor. Not a damn thing was done with them. What the hell? I walked back to Useless' desk and caught him as he was about to leave for the day. I asked him if there was a problem with those boards or their paperwork and I wanted to know why he put the shit back without doing anything. He said, "There's no problem. I'm not sending them back." I mentioned that Treehead pointed me in his direction, that he was responsible for facilitating repair of these PC boards. Useless shrugged, and walked away. I couldn't believe it.

Useless is apparently just another example of a spoiled employee. We have too many of them here. They show up and try to do as little work as possible while collecting fat paychecks. I despise people like him and I wish they would all end up getting fired. They're garbage.

Reno Roadtrip

Weekends came and went, the transmission in Autumn's car worsened. Each time we drove somewhere in the East Bay I could hear more gear noise coming up through the floorboards. It made me nervous. I was stressed out and messed up for weeks trying to decide whether or not to tell Autumn about my little accident with the clutch pedal. Like a yellow-bellied coward I kept silent until it was too late. I don't know why I did that.

Autumn was looking forward to a short roadtrip so she booked us for a couple of nights into a Reno resort casino, the Atlantis. She bankrolled the whole thing which was generous. I didn't dare say no. We couldn't take the Cougar since it was all tore up from age, the damage from a deer I ran over, and years of neglect. I didn't think it was reliable enough to make the journey to Reno and back so that left us with one choice. Take Autumn's Honda. Before we left her apartment I hoped like hell the gear box would not self-destruct during the trip.

Things were cool for a while. Travelling East on I-80 we passed through Sacramento without trouble and we began to climb into rolling hills. Suddenly, a loud sustained buzzing noise rose from underneath the car and then we were stopped dead on the freeway. A heavy trail of oil streaked pavement lay behind us. Autumn was able to coast into the shoulder away from slow lane traffic, but there we were. Stranded on the outskirts of a small hick town with a dead car.

It was my fault. I felt like a giant sack of crap.

Luck is a funny thing. I heard an old song once with a lyric that went something like, "If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all." Most of the time I feel like that line directly applies to my life. Other times things work out in ways I never would have expected. It's all blind luck. While Autumn and I were trying to figure out what to do, one of us noticed a nearby building on a hillside overlooking the interstate. A bright yellow sign with large black lettering indicated that building was a transmission repair shop. After a short discussion about what to do next, Autumn started the engine and nursed the car to a freeway exit and got us into the transmission shop's parking lot. Unfortunately it was late in the afternoon which meant closing time. Before the transmission shop guys left for the day they promised to inspect her Honda first thing in the morning.

Under stress Autumn handles things much better than I ever would. She figured out we could get a rental car for a couple of days from a nearby podunk airport and continue our roadtrip to Reno a day late. We spent the night in a shoddy hotel eating take out Chinese food from a dive across the street. We ate in our room with paper plates and plastic utensils that we begged for. The hotel's manager gave them to us. Later in the evening we took a cab to the town's only movie theater and saw Gladiator. It was the last showing of the night and the theater's double doors were locked behind us as we stepped outside into dark, cold mountain air. Taxi service had just been introduced a few weeks before. Autumn and I stood outside shivering for hours waiting until a cab came to pick us up. There was only one cab available at night and the previous fare had needed a ride fifty miles outside of town. We were screwed.

For the rest of the trip I felt like an asshole. I couldn't relax. My mind was preoccupied with Autumn's broken car and my inability to 'fess up to the truth. I think I acted extra weird around Autumn and she couldn't figure out why.

No matter how strange things were during the next two days in Reno, it didn't stop me from being selfish. We had a steak dinner at the Silver Legacy and during our meal I spotted a cigarette girl selling light-up yo-yos. I had to have one. I bolted up from the table and practically ran outside to buy it. The next day I pestered Autumn into driving me across Reno to a machine gun store so I could drool over Thompson submachine guns, AK-47s, AR-15s, and Barrett M82A1 .50 cal sniper rifles. While I was in the store I purchased a stack of 30 round magazines for my AKs. All eastern block of course. A woman behind the machine gun store's glass pistol cases warned me that her kids sometimes mixed up eastern block AK mags with inferior Chinese made ones and she told me to be extra careful which magazines I picked out. That was nice of her to inform me.

Everything had an off-center Twilight Zone sort of feel to it until we came home a few days later. My sister reluctantly drove out of Oakland to come pick us up in hickville and take us back to Autumn's apartment. I guess I owe her one for that.

Culture Clash

Lately we've been told repeatedly by our management staff that we are eight times more expensive to employ than Malaysian workers doing the same jobs. Over the past few months the expense of Bill and Dave's American workforce has been a recurring theme for managers to whine about. It's been brought up so many damn times by managers that I'm sick of hearing about it. Really. In order to stay competitive we must shift production to Malaysia as quickly as possible, they say. If an assembler here costs the company $3,000 a month to employ, an assembler in Malaysia only costs $200 a month. That's the economics driving our corporate business decisions these days.

The first two groups of Malay employees arrived here weeks ago. Engineers and assemblers only so far. Oddly there weren't any technicians sent along for training on the instrument production lines. At least not yet anyway. Our job in assembly is to teach the Malay how to build RF and Microwave signal generators. It's been somewhat of an uphill battle because they are completely inexperienced working on instruments. Until now everything they have been manufacturing has been at the component or sub-assembly level only. Many of them don't understand English very well.

There are a few peculiar culture barriers to overcome when dealing with the Malay. For example, Malay are very concerned about being thought of as stupid. They believe that asking a question is showing ignorance so they seldom if ever ask any questions during training sessions. Ironically, by not asking any questions they don't learn much on the job until they've made a bunch of silly mistakes. I have been trying to do my best to go slow and make sure they are comfortable performing jobs before I let them loose to work on their own. I ask them over and over again if they understand a procedure or a group of steps, and the answer they always give back is a quick "yes." Seems to me they're just telling me what they think I want to hear. We work together, I will usually demonstrate a task by doing it first while a trainee observes me. Then I'll have the person try it on their own while I watch. I'm there to help in any way I can without making them nervous or by being a pest. It's frustrating for me though because I have no way of gauging if they are really ready to work alone, I just have to pick a time when I assume they've got it and let them try. Instruments have ended up mangled and smoking as a result. We start over from scratch again. And again. It's tedious.

Another problem working with Malay comes from their caste system approach to dealing with managers. Managers are not only their de-facto leadership, they are total authority for making any and all decisions no matter how trivial. Malay won't move to do anything without approval coming from their supervisor first. It's almost as if they are acting like nothing more than mindless drones. If an unforeseen problem suddenly arises and there aren't any managers available to ask for direction to solve the problem, Malay will stop what they are doing until a manager can be located. There will always be situations or times when employees have to be resourceful on their own. I hope we can teach them to be a little more self-reliant on the job before they go home in a few months.

All of the Malay assemblers are female, which is interesting because it makes me wonder if they view production assembly jobs as being nothing more than women's work. To me, these ladies seem extremely innocent and childlike. The majority of them are Muslim, you can tell if they are or not because the Muslim ones are required to wear a headscarf. On Fridays they come in to work wearing brightly colored long dresses that look like Indian saris, draping over their shoulders and flowing in air slightly behind them as they walk. Beautiful to catch a glimpse of when they're passing by in the hallways. A handful of the women are of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, Indian and Chinese mainly. They're more talkative than the Muslims and generally they seem to have adjusted to life here much faster than their Muslim counterparts.

The only time I have been able to get any of the Muslim women to open up a little bit is when I have asked them about their families. Eyes light up and they enthusiastically tell me about all their aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, children, parents and grandparents in painful detail. The average Malay family seems massive in comparison to American families. Muslim Malay men can have up to four wives, as long as they can afford to financially support them all. Can you imagine what it would be like having four wives? Four separate sets of kids? I can't. Damn.

I've been quietly watching the Malay engineers do nothing but play ping-pong since they got here. Every afternoon when I come into the building to start my shift I pass by a set of ping-pong tables. The Malay engineers are out there having heated tournaments. On my lunch break hours later I'll catch them still outside playing. Must be nice getting paid to hang out and play ping-pong. So far I haven't spotted any of them actually on the shop floor studying our instruments. They should be with us learning how these products function and the electronic theories behind their operation. Maybe our engineering department has them training in some other part of the factory but from the amount of time I see the Malay burning every day on ping-pong, I kinda doubt it. My first impression of these guys isn't good. In my opinion they seem flaky.

Differences in how we approach working on the job and solving problems aren't the only things to accomodate for or get sorted out. Some of our culture clash is over simple things, like using the restroom. Malay have been thrashing the men's restroom on a daily basis since they arrived. They won't sit on toilet seats to take a dump because toilets are a foreign, dirty concept to them. I guess in Malaysia they have bathrooms with little more than a hole in the ground that you put a leg on either side of to poo and pee into. Since we don't have hole in the ground action for them here, they climb up onto the toilet seat while squatting over the bowl to do their business. We've noticed water smeared dirty shoe-prints all over our bathroom toilet seats since those guys showed up. It's angered a bunch of people, including the janitors.

Lunch With Mr. Fussy

Mr. Fussy insisted we take his car into town for lunch. I nestled myself comfortably in the passenger seat and buckled up before Mr. Fussy opened the driver side door. As he got in and started up his car I saw his hands were shaking a little worse than normal. He navigated through the North parking lot past a security gate and made a left hand turn to take us downtown. I figured now was as good a time as any to bug him with questions about old rumors.

"If you don't mind my asking, how come your hands tremble all the time?"
Mr. Fussy shot me a look and said in a deadpan tone of voice, "I have AIDS. Some of the medicines I take to treat HIV cause bad side effects. One of the drugs thickens my blood. I have to take another pill to thin the blood back to a normal level but a side effect of that drug makes my hands shiver."
I was surprised at his matter of fact reaction to my question.

We drove a few blocks without any conversation. The silence was awkward so I asked him, "How long ago were you diagnosed with the virus?"
"Most of my friends are dead. They took AZT."
I vaguely remembered back in the late 1980s the first anti-AIDS drug was called AZT. I was in high school then. Evening news on television had run a few stories about AZT when it was introduced amid some controversy. That was all I knew about it.
"Did you take AZT?" I asked.
"No."
"How come?"
"Because everyone that took it, died."
"That's kind of a risky decision you made, don't you think?"
Mr. Fussy yelled at the top of his lungs at me. "Everyone I knew died slow painful deaths because of that shit! If I was going to die I was going to die because of the virus, not AZT!"
"Okay, okay. I didn't know. Sorry." I had backed myself up against the passenger side door, startled by Mr. Fussy's angry outburst.

The rest of our trip to the Mexican restaurant was subdued. Neither one of us said anything.

After being seated at a table and placing our orders for drinks and food, I changed the subject to our days in the PC board department. Mr. Fussy had been accused of rifling through a manager's cubicle and stealing confidential paperwork which he then revealed to the PC board department's workforce. I asked him if the rumors I'd heard were true.

"That isn't entirely what happened. You know how some manager's cubicles have a waist-high partial desktop facing the hallway?"
"Yeah."
"A supervisor or someone in the department's management chain had a copy of their business plan for the coming fiscal year. They left it out in the open at our division manager's cubicle hallway desktop ledge. That night on swing shift I walked by in the hallway and saw a big stack of papers just sitting there in front of his cube. I stopped to see what it was and read it. That's when I discovered they were planning to cut all our job positions and outsource the work. I took the paperwork and showed it to some other employees. Next day the news was everywhere in the department."
"So you didn't sneak into the guy's office like a thief in the night and steal this stuff?"
"No."
"Then what happened?"
"They talked to everyone. A few people that I thought were my friends turned on me. They told managers I stole the paperwork. But they couldn't prove it. Instead of firing me they took my Expediter job away from me and put me back in production building boards. I was so stressed out that I ended up in the hospital and didn't come back to work for months."

Our food arrived at the table. I ordered a chicken super burrito with extra cheese and sour cream. Mr. Fussy got enchiladas or something that might have resembled enchiladas. Before he began to dig in, he produced a small plastic container and dumped about fifty pills on the table. Various shapes, colors, and sizes of pills scattered about near his plate. He took a bite of food and then fed a pill or two into his mouth. Washing the pills down with a soda he took another forkful of food followed by another pill. I didn't say anything. I quietly observed and ate. By the time he had consumed about half of the shotgun pill pile I said, "What's all that about?" I shook my knife in the direction of his medication cocktail. Mr. Fussy told me he had to take that swarm of pills every day to fight his AIDS infection.

He said, "It's keeping me alive."

Mr. Fussy

Eating alone at restaurants sucks. I eat lunch by myself frequently and I always feel out of place doing it. It's like I'm a social outcast that everyone glares at while laughing when they spot me sitting at a table in solitary uneasiness. Sometimes I bring along a book for company but the whole time there sitting and waiting for my food I end up sneaking peeks over the brim of my book to see if anyone is staring at me regardless. Most of the time I forget to bring a book with me. I have no problem dragging a fellow swing shift employee along for lunch off-site even if I don't really know the person all that well. My only criteria for lunch company is that it isn't a coworker I despise. I despise a fair amount of them, however there are plenty to choose from for grubbin' out with that I don't already hate.

Lately my pals at work haven't been able to go out for lunch due to projects they're behind schedule on. Too busy. Or I'm hungry when they aren't. So it hasn't worked out. Instead I've been picking from the second string batch of coworkers. Mr. Fussy is in that group. I know who he is and I have seen him in various departments and hallways of the factory for nearly eight years. Until recently I have never worked together with him.

I remember Halloween, 1993 well. I smoked cigarettes back then. Building 1 Upper had a designated smoking area that was an open air balcony with awesome views of nearby rolling hills. That Halloween afternoon at work I walked to the balcony for a quick nicotine fix. Stubbing out the smoldering filter, I pushed the building's double doors open stepping back inside to see a crowd of costume-clad employees clogging up the hallway. They were approaching rapidly and something in that crowd seemed very wrong.

My eyesight was starting to go bad on me back then. The wolf pack of employees were a slightly blurry mess. It took me a few seconds and then I caught it. A jet black frilly minidress with white apron moved closer towards me on legs captured in fishnet and feet trapped in shiny black stilletto heels. This was somehow out of place. Vision became less fuzzy as the costume mob approached. French Maid's feet were bony and sharp, too much so for a woman. And the leg muscles were out of place as well. They seemed to bulge from under those black fishnets in all the wrong places. I stopped where I was and stood still, watching. When everything was close enough for me to see clearly I looked at the French Maid's face to discover a neatly trimmed moustache on her upper lip. Ugh. My eyes burned. That was the first time I saw Mr. Fussy at work. He was an ugly French Maid.

Over the years since then I heard two consistent rumors about Mr. Fussy. One, that he had contracted AIDS, and two, that he had snooped around in a manager's cubicle. While snooping he found documents relating to our division's business plan to outsource all the printed circuit board work to a Chinese company. Mr. Fussy apparently leaked that information to the entire department causing a huge brawl between employees and management. Bill and Dave's mid-level managers seemed to have been caught in a lie that they couldn't easily explaint their way out of. And if that rumor about Mr. Fussy was true, somehow he managed to avoid being fired for his transgression. I had wondered about that for a long time.

Tonight Mr. Fussy and I went over to a Mexican restaurant for lunch. I decided to be a nosey bastard and ask him some questions about those old, lingering rumors.

Factory Mosque

I was walking back to Building 2 from the Stores warehouse with a box of urgently needed parts. The most direct route through our site complex takes me along a wide hallway at the back end of Building 1. As I passed Shipping, a small group of employees were dashing in and out of a conference room. They had removed all of the conference room's furniture. Tables, chairs, a TV, and an overhead projector were dogpiled just outside the room entrance. Curiosity got the best of me so I stopped and asked one of the busy workers what they were up to. A guy carrying equipment into the hallway said they were clearing this conference room out to make a temporary Mosque for Islamic Malaysians who would be arriving at our factory soon.

I'd been hearing grumbling from some employees about a Mosque being set up on site, but I thought it was all bullshit. Since I don't ever go to meetings around here anymore I guess I missed the announcement a few weeks ago. Management wants to make accomodations for Muslim Malay in every way possible so they offered to give them a private room on site they can use to pray in. I don't know much about the Islamic faith but I've heard they have to pray multiple times a day or something like that. Seems a little much to me, but whatever.

The interesting thing about all this is the amount of anger coming from many of our Christian employees. They're the major source of grumbling concerning this. We don't allow for churches anywhere in our manufacturing sites or office complexes, so why are we suddenly allowing a Mosque? It's a good point. But from what little I know about Muslims they have to pray in a room facing Mecca throuought the day every day. Christians only show up someplace to worship once a week and generally when they're not at work. Big difference there. Personally I think it's a little weird having a Mosque sprout up at work all of a sudden but really I don't care one way or the other. I have more important things to concern myself with.

As usual thanks to Christian wingnuts I'm getting another reminder of how hypocritical they are. Instead of being understanding and accepting of Malaysian religious needs, I sense a rising amount of intolerance and hatred coming from their beady-eyed crew of Bible-thumpers over this Mosque stuff. Reminds me of all the years I had to suffer through their mentally ill teachings as a kid growing up in private Christian schools. What a miserable time of my life those years were. I won't ever forget it. I learned quickly to watch Christians and pay attention to their actions, rather than their words. Words mean little when dealing with these people. They're always talking about what they will do, what they think they do, and what you should do. But their actions seldom if ever match up to all the talk.

East Bay Update

Jeff has been unhappily loafing around Autumn's apartment recouperating from surgery. His ankle was so badly mangled thanks to his little late night blind man muddy ditch adventure. Doctors had to cut open his leg and bolt in a metal plate. I do feel kinda bad for the guy, he was already having somewhat of a rough time out here. Jeff seems homesick and he doesn't have much of a social life. Now that he's hobbling around on crutches with a plaster cast halfway up his leg he's even more isolated from the world. Lately he's been a hermit, surfing the web and hiding out in his bedroom for most of the day.

Driving around the east bay this weekend with Autumn, I could hear the gears in her Honda's transmission making a bunch more racket than usual. Made me very nervous. There's a constant buzzing sound when she shifts into gear. As far as I can tell Autumn hasn't even noticed the increased noise. I still haven't mustered up the courage to tell her I probably wrecked the transmission. Honesty is the best policy, I know this. I am always trying to be up front about stuff but for some reason I just can't come out and say something. My foot slipping off the clutch pedal was a pure accident. Nevertheless it's like I'm muted by a fear that she will rage on me and end up hating my guts if I come clean about it. Fuck. I better figure out how to deal with this situation soon before things really get out of control.

J2 And The Unabomber

Talk about poetic justice.

Both J2 and Unabomber have been kicked out of my old department. I assume their managed moves were due to increasing personality clashes with employees and at least in J2's case, finally being identified as a lazy sack of crap. They ended up working shoulder to shoulder in the Metrology Lab. The Metrology Lab is a small enclosed room on the other side of Building 1. All they do is re-calibrate torque wrenches, electric drivers, miscellaneous hand tools, and maybe a few power sensors. From what I hear, every day J2 and Unabomber are practically at each other's throats arguing. Their boss has already had enough of the petty bullshit. He's threatened to fire them. So sweet. I can't wait to see which chump gets a one way security escorted trip through the lobby first.

Place your bets.

Spare Change

In Sources' test area there is a group of technicians who have been tasked with the upkeep and maintenance of all our equipment. It's a tough job. They're responsible for everything on the shop floor from automated test systems to individual stand alone racks. We've got hundreds of instruments to keep track of in test systems alone. Any time a unit goes kaput for whatever reason, those guys have to swap it out with a functional calibrated replacement as soon as possible. That's only one of their daily headaches. Each instrument is calibrated and good for one year of operation from the date it was in the cal lab before it's due for recalibration. Usually a few weeks before the cal drop dead date they pull the box, replace it with a good spare and send the stale box out to the lab. Units are constantly due for recalibration.

Big Dog is the guy in charge of equipment maintenance. He's got a deadpan sense of humor packed into his stocky frame. Great guy, really. His laugh is deep and he has a good time making wisecracks at those who have earned them. I like the man because he's funny as hell. Big Dog has a handful of technicians working with him to make sure all our test gear is in good working order and that every test rack is fixed up promptly when bad shit happens. Bad shit happens to instruments alot around here. Big Dog's little group of techs are buried to their eyes in work and somewhat stressed out as a result. Since we've been hiring people like crazy Big Dog was able to add one more tech to his team. His new employee is named Rich.

Rich is a nice enough fellow. But he's got a few nagging problems that are hard to overlook. Rich talks too much for anyone's liking. He won't shut up no matter how hard you try to make him quiet down. You'll hear over and over again about how he's gone to school to become an engineer and he will describe in great detail why he feels the work he is doing for us is below his lofty capabilities. I have a rough time looking at him while he speaks because he always seems to have a white glob of goo hanging onto his lips. As his mouth opens the glob turns into a stringy mass of gunk. Then there's his smell. Rich is odoriferous and not in a good way. Oh yes, and he's got a chronic butt-crack problem. He won't wear a belt to hold up his pants. Frequently you can find Rich in the forward flow test area stooping over in front of a broken piece of equipment. Passing by you will receive an unwanted eye-full of ass crack, guaranteed.

The women working around Rich don't dig his stink or having to view his daily rear end peep show. A few of them went to Rich's boss and complained about him. Shit always rolls down hill. Rich's supervisor is a tall, skinny redneck with a massive hook nosed beak on his face that reminds me of Ichabod Crane. Ichabod didn't want to deal with telling one of his employees to use soap with water and a use a belt with pants. So Icahabod did as many mangers do, he deferred the problem back to a subordinate employee thereby ducking his responsibility as a supervisor. Big Dog was ordered to corner Rich and have a heart to heart talk concerning his personal hygiene issues. Reluctantly, Big Dog did as he was instructed. This wasn't something he felt was his job to be doing but he had no choice. He sat down with Rich privately and told him in a blunt but tactful way that Rich needed to shape up.

Weeks passed. Rich continued stinking and he continued showing off his rowdy butt-crack to everyone in the department. Another round of complaints from female employees resulted. Big Dog wisely decided on a stronger method of communicating with Rich. He collected a large handful of change, and waited for an opportunity to strike. He didn't have to wait long. Big Dog found Rich one afternoon in the test area squatting over a busted piece of gear with his ass hanging out in the wind. He grabbed his fistful of coins, held them over Rich's sagging pants, and let go. A shower of spare change dumped into Rich's ass-crack which startled him. Abruptly he stood up to face Big Dog. There was anger in his eyes. Big Dog smiled and calmly said to Rich, "You can keep that."

Rich finally got the message.

Germ Freak

People sure are messed up.

Another one of the new guys in assembly is turning out to be somewhat of a personality problem and general headcase. He is extremely germophobic. In his little world anything and everything he comes into physical contact with is filthy. He's also afraid of people getting too close to him so he demands employees keep their distance. I think if one of us happened to accidentally brush past him he'd probably shriek like a little girl and run out of the building. He'd have his clothing decontaminated at a biohazard waste laboratory afterward.

The Germ Freak likes to listen to AM talk radio programs while he is working which is fine. We're allowed to have walkmans and stuff like that on the shop floor. Normal headphones aren't good enough for him to use though because he is concerned someone else might put them on. That would be dirty. So he prefers one of those old style beige colored single ear-phone speakers that you have to jam inside your ear like a plug. He's deathly afraid of anybody coming into contact with his precious earphone. When he leaves the area for lunch or to use the bathroom he covers his AM radio and earphone with a protective teepee of Kleenex tissues. As soon as he gets back, I've watched him frantically wipe the end of his earphone with fresh tissues and spittle. That's his choice of premium disinfectant, his own saliva. Germ Freak spits on anything he deems unclean. It's a nasty habit.

Sometimes when he's gone out for lunch I like to relocate his radio just a few inches from where he placed it on his workbench. I don't do anything else to it. He's noticed. Usually he flips out and demands to know who touched his belongings. Nobody has a clue except for myself of course so I sit back and enjoy watching the fireworks as he gets more and more frustrated. I wouldn't do it if I didn't get such a rise out of the obsessive idiot.

Before working here at Bill and Dave's company, Germ Freak was a security guard in a shopping mall. He told me he was married, which I scoffed at. I find it hard to believe that any woman could put up with such a strange guy. While working security at the mall, Germ Freak said he began taking notes on various shops that had pretty girls running the sales floors and cash registers. He drew a map of the mall and put X marks on shops that had girls he thought were attractive and wrote down an approximation of their work schedules. Then he methodically began chatting each one of them up over a period of months until he got a date. Most of the women rejected him, but one girl took him up on his advances and now she is his wife. That's how he met her. Germ Freak's story sounded super creepy to me. When he finished telling me all about his girl-hunting escapades at the mall I said, "You are a stalker. Nice." From his reaction it was obvious he was greatly offended by my comment and Germ Freak hasn't talked to me much since. Heh.

Tom Thumb

Over in the MI/EI area there's a particularly weird new hire with no thumbs and shaved legs. Maybe he's only got three fingers on each hand, I couldn't tell for sure. I like to call him Tom Thumb on account of his disfigured hands. He's got a mullet-style haircut that looks bad on his grayish mane. Tom's daily uniform consists of a light colored t-shirt and ultra short ripped up jeans. I mean, his shredded blue jean shorts might as well be go-go dancer hot pants. Some of the guys have nicknamed him "Daisy Duke" or they refer to his hot pants as Daisy Dukes. For a guy, wearing stuff like that every damn day is kinda icky. Makes people think he is a mangy oddball.

Getting Tom to talk about himself is easy. He's a jabber jaw. I learned that he's a collector of vintage psychedelic rock n' roll posters from the 1960s which he buys and sells online. He claims it's a good side business that makes him a fair amount of cash. That's cool. As I suspected he's never worked with electronics before, he's just another body hired in off the street with no previous manufacturing experience. Now we've got him in a critical part of our operation screening calibrated boxes for defects just before they ship out to customers. It's a big mistake placing new recruits like Tom in MI/EI because there's some things you can't teach people. They have to learn by doing, it takes years of experience to achieve.

Guys like Tom will be unable to identify and catch problems in units. Little things like damaged wiring or a loose piece of hardware. They'll ship boxes out the door only to have them fail in the field a few months later. Then we've got to bite the warranty costs and deal with yet another pissed off customer. It would have been much more intelligent to move veteran instrument assemblers to MI/EI and then backfill their vacant jobs in assembly with these new hires. That would have made too much sense though, so we can't do that.

Caught

J1 is here. Unlucky us.

We developed a new, modular Signal Generator based on VXI technology. VXI if you've never heard of it before, stands for Virtual eXtension Instrumentation or Virtual eXtension Interface and it was the next big thing coming in the world of high technology. Or some people thought so anyway. I remember reading about the concept of VXI in an early 1990s issue of Evaluation Engineering. VXI instruments usually have to be controlled from software as there is no front panel with a keyboard or display built in. Essentially these kind of boxes are nothing more than a standard mainframe packed with a bunch of instrument-on-a-card PC boards. They're flexible as each circuitboard in the box is a plug and play device. If a board dies, you pull it and slap in a fresh one. There's no hassles and you're back up and running in minutes. Provided you have an on hand supply of good spare boards that is.

Our VXI Sig Gen has one of the fastest signal switching speeds compared to anything else out on the market. I mean, it's like a supercharged race car blowing doors off the competition and leaving them in the dust. Funny thing is, it's not selling well. In fact it's turned out to be a real dog. This box is too capable and there doesn't appear to be any industry application that requires such high end performance out of a modular package. In that respect our marketing team royally screwed up. Coming along with high performance is a very steep price tag. So far only two customers buy this box, the military and some other product division inside our company. That's it.

With a less than desireable product launch and weak sales, management decided to roll the VXI Sig Gen product line into the department I work in. That's how we ended up with J1. He was in the R&D lab with The Drunk launching this thing so I didn't have to deal with him anymore. It was nice. Now that he's back and assigned to swing shift I have to work around him again. What a drag.

People are noticing he disappears every evening between 7 and 8 o'clock. Nobody can find him anywhere in the site after that. A few employees have gone out of their way to search for him on occassion. I know what's going on but I haven't said anything about it to his coworkers yet. J1 is evaporating into thin air just like he used to do on the graveyard shift and cheating on his time. Getting paid for a full eight hours every day while only working three or four hours is something J1 absolutely loves to do. He's bold to be pulling this kind of crap on swing shift though. Sooner or later a supervisor is going to catch him and hopefully fire his ass. I nailed him trying to sneak out last night, and I enjoyed beating him down for being a lazy dirtbag.

I was cruising through a deserted hallway in Building 2. J1 came around a corner, looked up and saw me. As I approached him I noticed he wasn't wearing work clothes. Instead he had on shorts and a tank top. He stopped in front of me and with a nervous tone in his voice he said, "Oh man. I'm so out of shape. I just finished working out in the gym upstairs, heh heh."
I asked J1, "So. What are you doing now?"
He replied, "I'm going to clean up and change."
"No, you're not. I know what you're up to. You are going to sneak out the back double doors into the parking lot behind the building, get in your car, and go home for the night just like you've been doing for the past couple of weeks and just like you used to do on graveyard when you were working with Musclehead."
J1 was caught and he knew it. He tried to babble excuses at me and I cut him off.
"Do you know what you're going to do?" J1 was silent.
Lecturing him while pointing my finger into his face I said, "You are going to change your clothes, and you are going to come back into the area. You are going to fucking work for once. That is what you are going to do. Got it?" He scurried away down the hall towards the locker room.

Hours later in the shift I passed by J1's desk. He was present and accounted for, the first time in weeks.

Eighty Pounds Of Carrots

The cafeteria is to be avoided at all costs. No matter what. I have to keep reminding myself of this because when I break my own rule about eating lunch in the cafeteria, I suffer heavily for it. Last night I gave myself another lesson in lunchtime woe. I should have known better. Most of the time I head off site for lunch, but there are nights when I am buried in work and far behind schedule. I make an exception for the cafeteria. I'll admit that on rare occassions I'm too lazy to drive around town to eat someplace so I'll walk across the factory campus for lunch instead. Afterwards I always regret it.

Swing shift lunch breaks are only 30 minutes. If we leave work and go out to eat, we can take more time as long as we're honest about having an extended lunch hour and make up the time at work. Walking through the site complex to the cafeteria takes a while from where we're located. The bosses have given us an extra ten minutes during lunch to walk there and back. Cafeteria food is like eating fresh poison, crafted with little to no care and served up lukewarm daily. Usually on my walk back to Building 2 my guts decide to mutiny and I have to make a mad dash for the nearest bathroom. Not only is the food fresh poison, it's also fast-acting poison.

Yesterday's lunchtime woe was called "Beef Lasagna." At first glance the food on my plate resembled lasagna and even smelled like it. When I sat down at a table in the dining area and cut into my food, I realized I had been tricked. A thick layer of shredded orange stuff was concealed by oozing cheese, tomato sauce, and fat sheets of undercooked pasta. Ground bits of cow appeared to be scarce. I frowned. It was those fucking carrots again. A few months ago I noticed the cooks were sneaking carrots into almost every dish they possibly could. I half expected to see shredded slivers of carrots in stuff like ice cream soon. Punks.

As I sat glaring down at the food on my plate with a scowl plastered on my face, Paulee came over to my table and grabbed a spot across from me. His choice of fresh poison was the meatball dish. I watched him as he took a forkful of meatball and chomped on it. Paulee threw his utensil at his tray with an angry look in his eye.

"What's wrong?" I asked.
Paulee said, "Meatballs are supposed to be BEEF. Red MEAT. That's the meat part of a meatball. This shit is turkey!"
"Yeah. They've been doing that more often. Hamburgers are the only thing on their menu with cow in it anymore, I think."
Paulee was real angry. Mumbling out loud he said, "Motherfuckers."
Shoving my plate towards him I said, "Check that junk out. A monsterous layer of shredded carrots hidden in lasagna. It's not the vegeterian dish tonight because it's supposed to have meat in it. You ever seen anything so stupid before? I haven't. Tastes like crap, too."
"We need to do something about this."
I thought about it and asked Paulee, "What do you want to do? Complaining isn't going to change anything around here. They don't give a shit."
"Let's go yell at them and get our money back. You with me?" Paulee was serious.
I shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure."

Both of us stood up with our lunch trays and marched out of the dining area past employees waiting to pay for their food in the cafeteria cash register lines. Paulee was in the lead, walking while searching for the manager. When he saw her, Paulee went right up to her and launched into an amusing tirade. It was amusing for me, that is. He was totally riled up about buying meatballs that were made out of turkey instead of cow. While raising his voice so everyone within a fifty foot radius could clearly hear him Paulee explained that in his view, red meat is actually meat and everything else is not meat. Therefore meatballs or meatloaf should not consist of ground turkey. The cafeteria manager was confused.

Before she could do or say anything I questioned her about excessive amounts of carrots in their cooking. "We use eighty pounds of carrots a day." She informed me.
"80 pounds a day? That's insane. I'll bet you are using it as filler in everything because it's cheap. You guys need to knock that off. It sucks. I'm not a big fan of carrots to begin with and I'm probably going to turn orange like an Oompah Loompah from an overdose of beta-carotene."
She said, "I'll speak to the chef about it tomorrow and see what we can do. I'm really sorry. Would both of you like your money back and a coupon for a free lunch?"
Paulee took her up on the offer. I accepted my six bucks back, but I skipped the free lunch deal. I wasn't going to eat there again anytime soon.

ETAP

I don't know who my immediate supervisor is anymore. Seems like every couple of months I'm assigned to somebody else and most of them I've never met before. They don't matter much and I've found it's easy to side-step them when bosses decide to get in the way. For the most part I ignore them and keep working. Every six months though, you have to sit down in cubicle-land for a one-on-one meeting with your boss and receive a performance review.

My supervisor this month is a 20-something year old accident-prone skinny bleached blonde lady I nicknamed Hee-Haw. Back in the late 60s there was a redneck TV show called "Hee Haw" and it featured a bunch of podunk white trash folks living in dirt floor shacks doing sketch comedy only podunk white trash folks would understand. That's assuming this particular breed of podunk white trash lived someplace with electricity and had a working television. Between unfunny skits or commercial breaks, a cartoon mule with big buck teeth and a whole lotta gums would open it's mouth wide and make an obnoxious "hee-haw" sound. At the time I saw episodes of that show I was a kid. Everything about Hee Haw bugged the shit out of me although I didn't know why I hated it so much. Too little to figure it out I suppose. Anyway my boss has a whole mouthful of gums and very little in the tooth department so she reminded me of the Hee Haw mule. Every time she smiles at me I want to hand her a feed bag full of oats and help her strap it on to her face so she can grub out in style.

During my performance review with Hee Haw, she asked me if I would like to become a technician. That's something I've given thought to lately. It would take two years of full time school at a local junior college, or four years going part time. I know my limitations, I'm very weak with math. Math is a big part of the tech program so I am intimidated by that. Also, I severely dislike school. The thought of being in school for years in order to become a tech makes me unhappy. Discussing my feelings about the technician program and school with Hee Haw made her come back on me more forcefully. She wants me to be a tech and she said she will put more pressure on me until I sign up.

There is another avenue of approach to becoming an electronic technician here at Bill and Dave's company. Years ago they set up a program called ETAP, which stands for Electronic Technician Apprentice Program. The way that works is, you enroll in the tech program at junior college and attend classes part time. At work you get to move into tech jobs and every six months they roll you into a different product area so you get all kinds of varied hands-on work experience.

Upon completing technical school the company hires you in as a mid-level tech which is pretty good money. It's not a bad deal, but there are some problems. Support for ETAP from management appears to be waning. I've talked with guys that are currently in ETAP or just finished up tech school. Instead of being hired in as techs working directly in a position they were trained for, supervisors are using them as glorified testers. ETAP graduates aren't getting into troubleshooting defective PC boards or figuring out busted instruments. Nobody in management is encouraging them to do so anymore. They're just shuffling boxes around from station to station running automated tests. Anybody can do that without schooling. And what if we start laying off people? New technicians will be low on the totem pole and probably lose their jobs before anybody else does. Right now I'm firmly established in the company with years of senority backing me up. If I move into the tech realm I'll be back down on the bottom rungs of the ladder again.

I thought about Hee Haw's proposal and I asked for a short term compromise. If she would be willing to let me get my feet wet doing more technical work somewhere in the production area, I could find out if I like it and decide if I can handle tech stuff. Maybe then I would be more willing to enroll in school and take the ETAP approach to becoming a technician. Hee Haw was cool with my suggestion, she agreed to set something up. For now I have to wait and see what happens. She finished up our meeting by giving me a positive performance evaluation. Right on.

Slippery Foot

Something real bad happened to me tonight as I was leaving work. Heavy rain was falling for most of the evening. When I dashed outside to Autumn's car, I was soaked. Climbing inside her Honda I slammed the door and rushed to get it started and turn on the heater. After I fiddled around with the heater controls I put the car into gear and headed out of the parking lot. Hardly any cars were around so I weaved through empty rows of parking spaces picking up speed as I did so. Reaching the perimeter road I took a left and shifted through first and second gear.

Depressing the clutch pedal while simultaneously shoving the stick towards third, my foot slipped off the clutch like I had just stepped onto a sheet of ice. I wasn't ready to release the pedal yet and I had the shifter somewhere near third, but not all the way in place. There was a loud mettallic noise followed by grinding. Then a final bang startled me as a large piece of gear slammed into the transmission housing and sounded like a church bell. It was probably a tooth exploding off of a gear in the transmission. I was mortified and in shock.

Pulling off to the side of the pavement with the engine still running I turned on a dome light and tried to look down at the pedal to see if it had broken. The rubber pad was glistening shiny black with water. Must have been from the bottom of my shoe and that's what caused my foot to glide off the pedal. I couldn't think of anything to do for the car except see if it still shifted properly. Very carefully I put the car into first through fourth driving towards the factory front gate. Everything seemed fine, but I had a sinking feeling there was a bunch of metal fragments floating around in the gear oil. It would probably chew the transmission to bits in no time at all.

I don't know what to do about this, I'm so lame. Autumn's gonna kill me.

Hiring Frenzy

Bodies, bodies, and more bodies. In recent weeks we've had a flood of new hires show up and begin their training on the instrument production lines. The bulk of these new people are going to be assemblers, but we've also received technicians and some engineers. More are on the way.

I'm somewhat concerned about the new people in assembly. I've been making small talk with them trying to find out what work experience they've got and so far the majority of them have never been in a manufacturing environment. None of them have worked with high-end electronics, either. In most cases no previous experience doing this kind of work is okay, assembly jobs are for the most part considered entry-level positions with training provided on the line. However there are a couple of critical areas here that new people need to stay away from.

Management has made a rather ignorant blanket statement which really demonstrates how out of touch with reality they are. "Anybody can do these jobs" they say. That's not true. Take MI/EI (Button Up) for example. Mechanical Inspection/Electrical Inspection is the last stop on the shop floor before calibrated boxes ship out to customers. Those employees working in MI/EI are veteran assemblers that know their products backwards and forwards. All of them started out as assemblers years ago and then worked their way to a Button Up position. The idea is, their experienced eyes and hands are tuned in to rapidly discovering every possible flaw or problem in the units. Having your best assemblers with years of product knowledge under their belts isn't something you can simply teach to rookie people who come in off the street. You must have experience. Managers haven't figured this out though, and they've placed new people into Button Up jobs. I predict bad things are going to happen as a result.

I've already caught one new guy in Area 51's final assembly station over-torquing front panel screws on the boxes to the point of snapping the heads clean off. If that wasn't bad enough, he was trying to conceal the broken hardware by super gluing the screw heads back on. I blew my stack when I found out what he was doing. Hanging from overhead booms at his workstation are a number of pneumatic and electric torque drivers to use for properly installing hardware. It's not like he didn't have tools available, he knew better. That's what makes me real angry. Almost laughing about it, he mentioned to me that he's been busting screw heads off and gluing them back on over the past couple of weeks. I traced every box on the shop floor that the asshole touched and found some broken hardware. Fixing them was easy, I used a power drill to remove the broken hardware and then I re-threaded the frame holes with a tap. Worst part of all this is a few boxes already shipped out to customers, most likely with one or two superglued screws in them. I want this loser to be fired.

Seems like our guys must be hard up for love. We now have two or three females in the area who are in their mid 20s and the guys keep drooling over them. It's starting to affect their work. None of these girls are all that attractive, and I keep pointing that out to the guys. One of these women is particularly annoying. She's dumb as a fence post and she's been playing that to the hilt to get attention and have the guys do her work for her. Every day when she comes in to start her shift she's made sure to parade herself through the department. Her low-cut skin tight clothes raises eyebrows and causes the men to go bug-eyed and stupid over her. I would too, if she wasn't so damn ugly.

Super Shopper is up to no good. She's pulling her usual tricks on new hires. Super Shopper's boss has given her a handful of people to train. If she doesn't jive with the new employees, if she doesn't like a person for whatever petty reason, Super Shopper runs to management and sabotages the individual to get them thrown out. I've seen her do this before in the past when she was in other departments. It's sad, but that's what she is doing again just like a bad re-run of a syndicated TV show. Super Shopper bungled a couple of boxes badly last week and then didn't admit to making some mistakes. Instead, she blamed the poor workmanship on a trainee in an attempt to save herself from reprimand. The new hire was told by Super Shopper's boss to not come back. It's so fucking frustrating because I can clearly see shit like this happening but I'm powerless to stop it. Supervisors never listen to me around here.

Poems From Louie

Louie is one of those people everyone hates to be around. Most of the time he smells rotten, like fish guts or human excrement. Some days he comes in to work reeking of both. It's a horrible mix. He's a space invader, when he wants to talk to you he gets too close for comfort. And then there's the spitting. Louie can't manage to finish speaking a single sentence without spittle spray raining down from his lips onto a hapless victim. Real unpleasant. Whenever he stops at my workbench to bother me I want to reach for a plastic garbage bag and wear it as a protective shield against Louie's cloud of stink and filth. He's that bad.

As an electronic technician, Louie sucks. The man can't troubleshoot his way out of a cardboard box.

The majority of his time is spent bugging other people in the area. He's an expert time-waster. Photocopying shoddy poems from an old, worn out, stain encrusted hardcover book is a favorite method of Louie's to kill day shift hours instead of fixing busted instruments. Making 50 pages of the same stupid poem from his book he will wander around the shop floor pestering anyone he even remotely knows and hand them a copy. With a smile on his face revealing gaps between his upper teeth Louie will say something like, "Hello, friend. I was thinking of you today and I have this for you. Read it." Droplets of spit hit my forearms causing me to cringe, and his stench nearly burns the hairs from my nostrils every damn time this happens. As soon as Louie turns his back to walk away the poem he generously dished out is crumpled up into a little ball and tossed into the nearest trash can.

TC mentioned to me recently that one afternoon Louie came out of the restroom with a few ribbons of toilet paper hanging out of the back of his pants. Nobody bothered to point that out to Louie, so he cruised around the building all day long with toilet paper streamers drifting along behind him. I didn't see it, but if I had I probably would have fallen off of my chair laughing at the guy.

Race Car Driver

Tonight at work I was sitting in front of the power supply test station completely absorbed in my job and peacefully minding my own business. Area 51 received a military order for a number of units with an installed option that drastically alters the electronic functionality of the boxes. Building and testing these "specials" as we call them, requires more involved effort on our part to get them through the power supply test station. I had a stack of them to knock out before I went off-site for lunch. Being hungry, I was impatiently waiting for each test to finish. Visions of a chicken super burrito from one of my favorite Mexican restaurants kept me from concentrating. That was when J1 came into the production area and startled me.

J1 was babbling something about his car. He was talking so quickly with a nervous tone in his voice that I could barely understand any of it. I asked him to please slow down and start all over from the beginning again. He said, "While I was coming back in to work from my lunch break I hit something I think it was a sidewalk curb I'm not sure and one of my tires is flat and I don't have a car jack and it's dark outside now so I can't see and..." Fuck. The guy was rambling. Tears were welling up in his eyes. Here was a grown man with a wife and two children to take care of, and he's standing before me on the verge of crying because he popped a tire? Disgusting. I'd puke if tear drops crawled out from the corner of his eyes. I swear I would.

I asked J1, "So what kinda car have you got?"
"It's a 1986 Honda sedan." He said.
"Okay then. You have a jack." J1 looked at me with a perplexed expression on his face. It was true though, J1 absolutely had a jack in the trunk of his car. Hondas in the mid-80s all have a tiny compartment in the trunk that has a little knob you twist and pull to reveal a bottle jack with a small bag of tools. It's easy to miss. Autumn's Honda is the same way and I couldn't locate it in her car until she pointed it out to me. So, J1 more than likely didn't notice it and assumed he was screwed. A flat tire is no big deal though. I mean it's not like throwing a rod in your engine block or blowing up a transmission. It's just a fucking tire. Still looking like he was about to blubber all over me and piss me off further which may have resulted in him being punched, I decided to show pity on J1 and go outside to help the jackass change his tire.

Lucky for me J1 happened to have parked his ride in the same lot I use. He wasn't far from where I left the Cougar. Walking over to the trunk of my car I opened it and removed my chrome 4-way tire iron and a flashlight. Those little crummy-ass tire irons they include with most jack kits really don't work all that great so I prefer the 4-way irons. You can get a bunch more leverage on them with two hands which makes brawling with a flat much easier. I'm real into easier.

J1 opened his trunk and was standing there doing what he does best- look stupid. I poked my nose into the passenger side and immediately found the jack compartment. Pulling the door off I could tell the jack was brand new. Never been used not even once. J1 was stunned. Before he could say anything annoying I handed him the jack kit and my 4-way tire iron and I said, "I'll hold the flashlight so you can see what you're doing, but you're going to do the work yourself. I ain't doin' it." That seemed fine with him.

The blown tire was his passenger front. I stood on the curb shining my flashlight downward while J1 started changing out the flat. Knowing that sooner or later J1 would not be able to resist the temptation to open his mouth and jabber away at me I simply braced for the worst. As soon as he successfully planted the bottle jack under the Honda's frame and raised it high enough to get his wheel in the air, J1 stories erupted. He's worse than Commander McBragg. "I know cars. I was a race car driver. Did I ever tell you that? I worked on cars all the time. I know cars." Yeah, J1 sure knows cars. Fumbling around with the tire iron he began twisting it to the right.

Ever heard the catch phrase "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey?" Apparently J1 hadn't. By twisting to the right he was tightening his lug nuts, not removing them from the wheel. Oh, and that was just his second blunder. The first idiot move he made was to jack the car up off the ground. The proper way is to break your lug nuts while the wheel is still on the pavement. With each pull on the tire iron J1 was forcing to the right, his wheel spun with him. The whole time he kept babbling at me, "I know cars BLAH BLAH BLAH." I didn't want to question him for details about his race car driver story because that would encourage him to keep the lie going. I said nothing and just watched him be the giant, greasy retard that he is. "Race car driving YAP YAP YAP I'm a mechanic YAP YAP YAPPITY YAP I know everything YAP YAP YAP..."

I couldn't handle it anymore and interrupted his tirade of bullshit. "Okay. Now are you ready to do this the correct way?" J1 looked upwards from where he was hunched over on the ground as I aimed the flashlight into his eyes, making him squint. With a smirk on my face I barked out orders. "Number one. Put the wheel back down on the ground." J1 fell silent and did as I commanded. "Number two. Break the lug nuts by twisting them to the left. LEFTY LOOSEY. You got that?" I watched as he completed this most complicated task. "Now jack the car up and remove your flat. Good. Put the spare tire on and start threading the lug nuts RIGHTY TIGHTY. Spin them down with the iron until they catch. You can lower the car. Okay, tighten each nut with the iron and alternate the pattern you tighten them. Don't do each one in clockwise order." J1 finished up and I said, "Okay race car driver. Now you know how to change a flat tire. Gimmie my tire iron." I was laughing at him as he handed it back to me. I dumped my tire iron and flashlight back in the Cougar, slammed the trunk lid shut and walked inside building 2 leaving J1 behind.

Learning About Malaysia

This afternoon our department had a training session about Malaysia. Since we're going to be hosting a large group of Malay employees here for who knows how long, our supervisors wanted to educate us concerning their people and culture. Until today I have to admit, I was completely ignorant about the country.

My department sat in a conference room and watched a video program about doing business in Malaysia. Videos like this are usually real sleepers but this one actually kept my interest. The reason why I decided to pay attention was due to the fact that many Malay businessmen were somewhat critical of their American counterparts. They didn't come off as being mean or anything like that. They were being honest and up front about their opinions, which I can respect. The common theme expressed in many of the interviews was that American businessmen won't shut up during deals and meetings. From the Malay description it's like US business executives are trying to impress people by talking constantly, and saying very little of worth while doing it. I thought about that for a while and it really sounds like many of our upper level managers. I think the Malay have us pegged pretty well on that one.

To the Malaysians, family is very high on their list of priorities. Almost everything else comes second.

The national flag of Malaysia is similar to the US flag. It has the same blue square with alternating red and white stripes but instead of having a group of stars in the blue field, the Malay flag has a yellow half-moon and a sun.

Malaysia is an Islamic country. I wasn't aware of that, either.

In Malaysian society there are three main ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian. The Chinese seem to have infiltrated many positions of power in the business arena which has caused a disproportionate amount of Malay and Indians left out of the picture. To partially level the playing field the Malaysian government has instituted laws giving some advantages to the Malay while blocking the Chinese. I guess it seems like Affirmative Action here in the States. I wonder how successful they've been with that so far.

That's what I got out of the training video. I don't know how much good that's going to do for me when Malay start to show up on our production line.