Becoming A Test Rack Monkey

Due to the massive buildup in orders I've been pulled in all sorts of directions over the past six months. In addition to my normal job working at Adjust One testing and pre-tuning boxes, I've had to jump back to testing A6 boards, build instruments, and test power supplies. That's just here on the line. Supervisors have also tasked me with building thirty or so brand new GWS workbenches (which was a total clusterfuck), strip the hard drives from over one hundred Unix workstations and reload them with pre-imaged replacements, and assist other production areas. It's too much to keep track of at times. Trying to stay on top of everything and get stuff finished when I said I'd deliver has been a stressful chore. Even with help it hasn't been easy. TC has been giving me some backup pulling and swapping out those Unix hard drives. Management allowed me to pick out four or five of the department's new assemblers to assist in building workbenches. Without them I probably would have had an aneurysm by now.

They've hit me with a new task. A technician who was given the responsibility to build dozens of new test racks has been removed from the project. For months he's been dragging his feet putting the shit together and that has caused a negative chain reaction. Other areas (including our own production line) who were patiently waiting for the equipment have ended up far behind schedule which has jeopardized some rather large customer orders. It's also slowed up some of our support for Malaysia. Anyway, the bosses finally came down on that technician pretty hard. He's no longer in our department. I was told this week I am his replacement. It's a full time gig. I have no idea how long it's going to take me to do this job, but I won't be working in Area 51 anymore. At least for some time. To be honest I'm nervous about this assignment because I've never built any test racks. I don't even know where to begin.

I'm not a technician, I have no experience or background doing this kind of work. Really all I am around here is a glorified instrument assembler, a mere cog in the great RF Sources machine.

In a mostly vacant section of shop floor way in the back of Building 2 I found a staging area containing one long single file row of incomplete test racks. Many of them were the big bruisers, the eight foot tall racks. There were huge sections of empty space in each cabinet. Only a few of them appeared to have most of their equipment loaded in and bolted down. Cables and wiring had been hastily left dangling everywhere inside. They were far from functional. Nobody left me any tools or hardware supplies. I scoured through that deadbeat technician's cubicle hoping to locate some kind of assembly documents or written outline of what instruments were supposed to go into certain flavors of test rack but I came up empty handed. Typical. I should have expected that to be the case. This was going to be a rowdy uphill battle filled with plenty of headaches.