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.