Mysterious Grease

Lately I've noticed every observation window on each of the environmental chambers has been completely fouled up by some kind of weird greasy gray colored filmy funk. It's become so thick on the glass that it's very difficult if not impossible to see anything inside a chamber, even with the chamber's internal lights turned on which happen to be quite bright. I grabbed a straight edged razor blade and dragged it across the glass of one chamber's window. A lump of greasy slime collected along the razor's edge. Nasty.

Throughout my shift at night I'm constantly peeking through those chamber windows to check on instruments and verify cable hookups. Or I am making sure sensor connections have been made properly. With that unknown greasy crap covering the plate glass on all our chambers It's been annoying trying to see anything. One night about three weeks ago I grabbed a spray bottle of Lab Clean and a full box of those blue colored paper Shop Towels. Like a madman I drenched all the observation windows with Lab Clean and scrubbed the shit out of them until they were spotless. Much better. Turning any chamber light on after that I could see clearly inside for a change.

Not more than two or three days later the mysterious greasy substance was back with a vengeance. Walking through both the E-Lab and our chamber area I discovered every single window had been contaminated again. What the fuck? I have been puzzled as to where the source of this filth is coming from. Approximately every three days or so I break out the Lab Clean and go to town on all the glass again. Then the grease reappears like black magic. Nobody that I've talked to about this seems to know anything about it or even noticed the grease until I pointed it out. I'm going into Gumshoe mode trying to solve the strange mystery now, but I really have no clue what's causing it to show up.

A Software Engineer Named Tiny

Talk about wasting time on the job. Tiny has got to be the king of pissing away hours every day doing absolutely nothing in the area while he's on the clock. He's also a master of charging the company for mass hours of overtime each week that he didn't work. It's amazing nobody has caught on to his scheme yet, Tiny has been able to easily get away with ripping the company off for a very long time. Somehow I get the feeling he knows what he is doing is wrong but he's deliberately trying to stall Mini-Rel projects from the R&D labs anyway just so he can cash in. I don't know how to handle this. The Mini-Rel test area could be turned around and back on schedule in a few days if Tiny wasn't here. I'm convinced of that.

Tiny is a kiss ass supreme, I mean he should get a medal for being one of the smoothest liars I have ever run across when it comes to snowjobbing supervisors. I will give him credit for that. He has management's ear so if I try to approach the boss about this situation it will probably backfire on me. At the same time though Tiny's antics are so disgusting I'm having a difficult time watching him get away with this crap. For now, I guess I'll just fuck with him a whole bunch and see if maybe he snaps out of it.

Two days ago Tiny announced to me we needed more shelving for storage. I disagreed and told him he should start sharing whatever drugs he's on with me because he is so completely high. We've already got tons of storage space for work in progress and supplies like instrument covers. In fact there are so many shelf units going unused right now that a nice layer of dust has formed on them. Regardless of my protests Tiny went scouring around Building 2 hallways with heavy tools to unbolt a few ten foot tall shelf units and then drag them back to our department. I half-heartedly helped him get the first of his extra shelves while reminding him that I could have been spending my time more wisely in the E-lab or working the chambers. It was a feeble attempt to make him feel guilty. The second afternoon of extra shelf mayhem I gave up on him and just let him do his thing. He was going to do it anyway.

Today I came in to work and found him sitting in front of a Combo Mod station at one of the chambers that had seized up. As usual everything was exactly where I had left it the night before, Tiny didn't do a damn thing to help move instruments forward in the test process. At the Combo Mod rack Tiny was busy tapping away on the station's keyboard altering lines of software code. He had a look of seriousness on his brow while he edited code. Out of curiosity I asked him how long he had spent being a code monkey trying to fix the station. At least three or four hours, was his response. I practically blew my stack. See, Tiny is only an electronic technician here and not even a very good one at that. He knows little to nothing about software code. I was instantly worried his code tinkering might have made the downed station even worse.

I have a policy that if I cannot fix a problem on my own in a reasonable amount of time then it obviously requires more skilled help from an appropriate resource. Say for example if I had been the person to discover that Combo Mod station had jacked itself up I would methodically go over about an hour's worth of troubleshooting. By then I would have it narrowed down to a software issue or a hardware issue. At that point it's time to pick up the phone and call engineering to have the experts come out and deal with it. Ultimately this saves everybody a whole heap of trouble. Tiny just can't get with it. I guess he thinks he's some sort of software engineer all of a sudden. Idiot. Maybe by next Tuesday he'll finally call someone who actually knows how to fix this shit.

Little Stoners

Dangerous D the romantic player had himself another hot date this past weekend. This time the girl was from Sonoma. I guess she was a score off his internet chat room action. Late in the afternoon D hobbled through the front door with girl in tow. When I saw her I had to fight the urge to bust up laughing right in front of the two nitwits. She was midget sized just like Dangerous D, plain as hell wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Her hair wasn't done up and she hadn't bothered to put on any makeup. What really caught my eye and made me want to laugh was, she is a Mouthbreather. A Mouthbreather is a person that happens to be so stupid that they don't know how to breathe in air through their nose. So they leave their jaw hanging wide open and breathe that way which makes them look like they have down syndrome, or they just stepped out of a prehistoric cave into daylight for the first time.

Once again D set up their evening of entertainment around cowboy cold Coors Light beers and a crummy videotape. They did however mix things up a bit by frequently sneaking into the back yard like a couple of junior high school criminals to smoke a few bowl loads of weed. I kinda suspected that the only reason Ms. Mouthbreather was here in the first place was to get smoked out for free. That she did, and plenty. Shortly after dark I walked into the livingroom to discover both dorks had passed out cold with their movie still running. At either end of my couch was a little stoner completely unconscious, sitting upright. They were held in place only by cushions and an arm rest.

Both of them remained there passed out like that all night. I laughed at them every time I walked through to get to the kitchen. Next morning Dangerous D had to drive the Mouthbreather back to Sonoma because she didn't have her own vehicle. I think she is a close match for D and they should get married as soon as possible. They're perfect for each other.

D's vegetable dehydrator is now a hazardous biological waste generator. He hasn't used it for any food items in weeks. I'm happy about that because the house no longer smells like freshly cooked rot. The inside of his machine is filled with brightly colored mold colonies. Contamination that severe is truly a sight to behold. I try to avoid getting anywhere near that dehydrator when I'm in the kitchen. Just looking at it might give me the AIDS. The only way to properly clean an abomination like that now would be to burn it. I'm curious to see if he's going to put a new round of vegetables in there as is and then patiently wait to see if he dies from a ruthless form of food poisoning. I can only hope.

Lightwave's 30% Bonus

A while ago when I was covertly trying to escape from Potatohead I drove to another site in the area and interviewed for some open job positions in the Lightwave division. Lightwave manufactures test and measurement gear for fiber optic applications. That seemed pretty interesting to me at the time. However, after I spent the better part of a day looking around observing their operations and talking with supervisors I realized they were a bad crowd of employees. In their group they collected many people I'd had negative experiences with previously in other departments of the company. Incompetent managers will inbreed, they hire more bad managers to work alongside them and hire plenty of substandard people to work for them. My gut feeling told me that was the case there. Lightwave also struck me as a product division with a real attitude problem, one of pure arrogance and greed. I left their division late that afternoon unimpressed and completely turned off by them.

Perhaps everyone in Lightwave felt a sense of entitlement, like they could get away with being a bunch of condescending, obnoxious bastards because they were raking in an estimated $100 million a month in equipment sales. Technicians working on product lines in Lightwave were spoiled brats. They were each given personal laptop computers, and their own refrigerators to place under every workbench. Some employees who saw the gross excesses in Lightwave were apathetic to it and thought to themselves, "Good for them. At least some of our folks are getting over on management." Others became fiercely jealous. Why should Lightwave's staff get better treatment than the rest of our workforce when we are working just as hard if not harder? They had a good point there. My opinion was quite simply that Lightwave reeked of corruption from top to bottom. I wanted to stay the hell away from them.

Profit Sharing is one of the few remaining employee benefits we have. Twice a year if the company is financially stable and sales have been strong everybody here receives a bonus. The funny thing about it is when that bonus has turned out to be fairly substantial, corporate sort of freaks out about it. Reacting swiftly they alter the formula by which the profit sharing is calculated. So the next time a bonus might be headed our way a payout will be severely degraded compared to what it could have been previously. Corporate has tweaked the math to generate a lower profit sharing result numerous times in recent years.

Then the asshats in Lightwave go and give themselves a 30% payout bonus on our latest round of profit sharing. Nobody anywhere else in the entire company was given a profit sharing check larger than a single digit percentage. Somehow upper level managers in Lightwave manipulated their situation to dish out some serious loot to their own people. I'm disgusted with them, but I have to laugh. Now that Lightwave pulled this stunt the watchful eye of the corporate board has shifted focus towards their division. I expect a serious beat down is on the way and those idiots are going to be held accountable.

All I can say is I'm glad I didn't pursue a job in Lightwave.

Customer Simulation

Due to the recent tech boom and rapid rise of dot com companies orders for all kinds of our electronic test and measurement instruments have gone through the roof. This past year we've hired in thousands of new production workers, including many technicians and engineers to meet this demand. Simultaneously, our overseas operations have also grown exponentially. While this has been great news for our stock shareholders and for our employees it hasn't turned out to be very positive for our customers. Orders dramatically increased, and so did the time it took for a customer to receive their shipments. It has become entirely out of control. Instead of getting their goods in a matter of a few weeks it now takes an average of a few months minimum. Also as orders have flooded in, the overall quality and reliability of our test gear has significantly decreased. A number of factors have contributed to this situation.

1) When you hire massive amounts of new people it takes a considerable amount of effort from the existing staff to properly instruct and train rookie employees, not to mention it consumes most of the veterans' available time. Generally we haven't been given enough time to train new hires properly which means mistakes in workmanship spike up.

2) New employees with no previous experience in electronics (or in any production work for that matter) were placed into critical job positions on instrument lines. This was a direct mandate from upper level managers based upon their concept that "Anybody can do these jobs." Clearly that isn't the case and never has been here.

3) Our strategy in the marketplace has hinged upon having so called new products available for purchase before our competitors are able to launch a comparable instrument. To make that a reality management has put a tremendous amount of pressure on our R&D teams to design and release new product platforms with totally unrealistic project completion goals.

In order to please their bosses the R&D guys have cut just about every corner imaginable to shave months off product development schedules. This has allowed critical design flaws to appear in our latest and greatest instruments after customers have operated them for just a few weeks in some cases. Customer dissatisfaction with this company is currently at an all-time high. Our warranty service centers are buried in repair work. Let's not forget that warranty service costs money. That's money thrown away because we have to eat the cost on fixing those failures.

Quality inspectors here used to be employees who were expert instrument assemblers on each product line. After years of working your way up from job to job on a specific product you would finally move to MI/EI or what is more commonly known as "Button Up." Button Up is the last stop on an instrument line before finished boxes are sent to Shipping. Operators in Button Up were some of our most experienced people. They could identify any irregularity or defect easily and send the unit back for rework or repair. Since most of those jobs over the past year or so have been populated with green, inexperienced employees all kinds of retarded shit has made it out the door.

Any fucking moron with a modicum of common sense in their skull would know you don't take someone off the street that has never worked with precision electronics before and turn them loose screening finished instruments for defects. They don't know what to look for. Even with a robust training effort there is no real familiarity or experience with the products. So, blatantly stupid workmanship defects continue to make it into customer's hands. Customers have opened up malfunctioning instruments to discover hardware rolling around loose inside shorting out circuitry, damaged cables and wiring, broken components, missing parts, and even food scraps.

As I mentioned before, Japanese customers are the toughest to please compared to the rest of our worldwide customer base. Those guys nitpick and complain about everything no matter how petty, insignificant, or abstract their grievances seem to us. For example if there is a single speck of dust trapped in an instrument's front panel display glass a Japanese customer will reject their order and try to send it back. If the calibration date doesn't match the date we actually printed the certificate paperwork, they bitch about it. Doesn't matter if their instrument has a serious electrical failure or a minor cosmetic defect like a nick in the outer cover paint. It's all unacceptable workmanship in their view.

I have to admit though, many of their complaints are valid.

The latest goofball plan someone has come up with here is to create a new department and staff it with employees that will pretend to be Japanese customers. Each box that ships off a product line will go to a new inspection area called Customer Simulation, or Customer Sim. Once the people in Customer Sim have an instrument they will go over everything in fine detail looking for discrepancies in paperwork, missing items, cosmetic damage, electrical failures, and other random problems. If they find anything suspect that box must go back to the product line for rework. If everything is okay it will move on to Shipping. Ironically, if expert assemblers had been left in place at Button Up to inspect products and screen for defects Customer Sim would likely not be necessary.

Seems to me this is another example of bad managers forcing themselves to waste more money because they consistently make foolish business decisions.

The Best Commute In The Bay Area

Swing shift really is where it's at for me. Every day I wake up when I just can't sleep any more. I don't have to set an alarm clock or worry about being late for work. Basically, I set my own schedule so there's no stress. The company has very accommodating start time "windows" for each shift. Swing shift generally can show up anytime between two and five in the afternoon, but I can start work as early as noon if I want to. I rarely do that though. Until recently I preferred to arrive at work closer to five. Now that I'm working with Tiny putting in eight to twelve hours every day I'm trying to get there no later than two in the afternoon. The later I get there means I might be leaving the factory at three in the morning. That kinda sucks.

While everyone else in the Bay Area has to get up early and do the rat race commute stuck in evil traffic, or hop on a mangy BART train, or ride along in a stinky bus, I cruise to work on country back roads. In the early afternoon I'm usually the only person out on the road. By that time of day everyone else is already trapped slaving away over a hot desk at their otherwise meaningless jobs. I live on the edge of town so it's convenient to run around the corner for a cup of coffee and then have a relaxing drive to work. For me, this is the best part of the day.




Passing through vineyards the road begins to climb upwards through a series of tree tunnels. That's one of my favorite stretches, it's like riding a roller coaster. The Cougar eats up pavement like it was nothing. I never bothered to put a stereo in the car because I enjoy listening to it's dual exhaust. The crummy AM radio in the dash died many years ago. I hardly ever used it anyway. Under the hood there's a 302 V8 with plenty of power. It sounds damn good when I'm heading up this hillside.

Driving over the hilltop I enter another scenic tree tunnel. This one is made by a long row of Eucalyptus trees. I like the way they smell, Autumn doesn't. Autumn hates Eucalyptus trees which is interesting when you consider her hippy tendencies. Hippy girls are supposed to love ALL trees regardless if they happen to be smelly or not. Autumn hates on them anyway.

By the time I arrive in the parking lot at work my coffee is mostly gone and I'm ready for a long, problematic shift on the job. As soon as I walk in the door I can expect to be picking up exactly where I left off the night before. Tiny will have accomplished little to nothing all day except for chasing broads and surfing the web. Oh joy.

Temperature Cycling

Mini-Rel testing consists of three parts. The first stage is called Temperature Cycling. It's sort of a break-in period to screen out serious failures in new product designs and simulate the aging process. Four instruments are loaded into each environmental chamber and a temperature profile is programmed into the chamber's controller. Once it's started, the chamber will ramp up and down for days between freezing temperatures and frying hot. Boxes inside the chamber remain powered up most of the time. By rapidly heating up and then cooling down prototype instruments we can begin to look for trends in any failures. This might help engineers flush out flaws in circuitry or microelectronic components that otherwise could have gone undetected. Another interesting aspect of this testing is simulated age. In just a week or more of temperature cycling, a brand new instrument will have aged six months. If longer durations in the chamber are selected we can simulate up to a year of age. This also can help catch failures that may only come up after the first year of customer use. The desire is to catch as many problems as we can now so customer warranty issues will be relatively low.

As far as I can tell there's only one real disadvantage to running these tests. We have a limited number of chambers to use. Since temperature cycling takes such a long time to complete it damn near cripples our daily throughput in the area.

After temperature cycling is complete the boxes move on in the process to actual electrical testing under adverse conditions inside the chambers. Stage two involves a considerable amount of performance tests to determine absolute limitations of the hardware. Engineers pay particular attention to massive amounts of test data generated. Reviewing failures they decide which ones are real and which failures are merely the maximum threshold our design can handle while performing reasonably well under extreme temperature conditions. Engineers will draw the line on performance specifications that will be published for our customers. This is a critical part of the overall process because if we can produce an instrument with just slightly better performance specs than a competitor's box we will more than likely get the sales. The third stage of Mini-Rel testing is somewhat more brutal on the boxes. We're going to be doing a series of vibration and drop-tests on these instruments. From the sound of things it's going to be potentially destructive, which I am personally looking forward to.

This afternoon when I arrived at work I quickly discovered once again Tiny hadn't lifted a finger to do anything in the area. All of the tests I started last night before I left to go home had finished and the chambers were ready to be unloaded. He didn't do a fucking thing all day. Tiny gets here in the morning. I show up around one or two which means we're well into dayshift by then and that bastard should have kept everything moving along in the test process. Instead, I caught him dawdling in front of his PC looking at women's personal ads on some website. I gave him hectic amounts of shit for that. When I questioned what he had done for the day all I got from him were vague excuses. I think I'm starting to see the real reason why Mini-Rel is months behind schedule.

Sharing A Cubicle

Since I'm going to be working full time environmental stress testing new products I needed to move closer to the E-lab. Tiny already had himself a massive cubicle office to work from so he's been told to make room for me. Most managers here don't even have an office with that much floor space. I was hoping to get my own cubicle though because Tiny is a total slob. He's kind of an Oscar The Grouch. Like Oscar, Tiny lives in a garbage can. At least that's what his desk looks like. See, Tiny is a scrounge. I am too but I prefer to scrounge up useful stuff like functional equipment. Tiny is one of those guys that will dumpster dive around the buildings and bring in pure crap. For example right now on his desk he has dozens of broken hard drives. Some of them he has disassembled to get magnets out of them which he has absolutely no use for. He has bundles of shredded wire and hundreds of feet of damaged LAN cables. He's collected random circuit boards all of which appear to be wrecked. Tiny likes to hit the cafeteria and get his lunch meals in clear plastic "to go" containers. There are a few of those containers mixed in with his trash pile of parts. Half eaten meals are left inside, lying here and there around his computer. Some of his old lunches appear to have been sitting around so long that they are outgassing mold and fluid. Oh and then towering over all that is a pyramid of empty coke cans.

Today I spent a minimal amount of time setting up my PC and my Unix workstation on the opposite side of Tiny's cube. I say minimal because I don't have much time to be screwing around with this. We're currently buried in work and Tiny didn't do anything this morning. Everything in the chambers is exactly where I left it last night at 2am. Ugh.

I deliberately placed my gear in such a way that no matter what I'm doing in our cubicle my back will always be facing towards his Sanford and Son style electronics junkyard. The best part of my rig here is that Unix station. With it I can monitor half a dozen test stations remotely instead of having to get up every half hour to go on patrol between the chamber area and the E-lab out back. If a unit under test barfs and fails or if a test rack gets screwed up I'll know about it right away instead of discovering it whenever I happen to walk through the area. Should save me some time.

Chamber Bitch

Bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball between the Environmental Lab and our Chamber Area here on the line is all I get to look forward to from now on. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be little more than a Chamber Bitch, starting and stopping tests, loading and unloading instruments from chamber to chamber. Oh and I get to put up with Tiny's bullshit too. Lucky me.

In these photos I am getting ready to start a run of four units testing. These are prototype RF Signal Generators, some of the latest designed by our R&D teams. This test is fairly easy to set up because there is a minimal amount of connections to make between equipment outside the chamber and the boxes inside. Also, I can use the Yogi robot here so this will be all automated testing. Once it's hooked up and I close the chamber door it's sort of like fire and forget. Just start the software and come back every few hours to make sure nothing choked on the test code.

Environmental Lab

Here's a couple shots of the E-lab out back. It's very noisy and kinda dark. I'm going to be spending a lot of time in here over the next six months. Most of the testing on new prototype products will be performed in these chambers and all of the cable hookups and connections will be done by hand. We can't automate any of the testing here due to the age of these chambers. They don't support computer controlled equipment. The brown ones on the right are old Envirotronics chambers that have limited access ports through the front door and sides. The blue chambers are either made by Blue M or by Thermotron. The Thermotron chambers are some of the better ones to work with, but I'll get into that later.

High Power Calibration testing is what I will be running out here at night. In those Envirotronics chambers I will have four units to test, and just outside the chamber door there will be two test racks one on either side. The first thing to do is set the chamber temperature to 0C and let it ramp down. Once the inside of the chamber is zero degrees the instruments inside have to soak for a minimum of one hour. Then I can begin testing. The only pain in the ass with this is I can't simply reach inside the chambers through an access port to make cable connections or hook up power sensors. The chamber door has to be opened in order to hook shit up. Problem with that is, ice will form almost instantly over all surfaces inside the chamber. So I have to work quick like. Open the door as little as possible, connect stuff up like a madman, and then close it back up. If I leave the chamber open for too long enough moisture will freeze inside that later on when we ramp the temperature back up it could start to rain in there. That's no good for powered up electronics. Real bad mix.

Testing is going to take a long time. Each box has to be tested at five different temperature settings between 0C and 55C. High Power Calibration once it's running can take most of an eight hour shift per unit tested. So that's four boxes times five temperature tests plus soak time. One chamber load is going to take a couple of days to complete, and there are hundreds of new instruments coming through to test. I will be a very busy man...

Yogi

I go where I'm told to work and each new assignment seems like more of a raw deal for me than the last one. Tiny apparently can't keep up with the work load back here in Mini-Rel land so I'm here to help him catch up and get back on track. Problem is Tiny wants to pretend he's my boss. He's already throwing attitude on me, ordering me around like I'm his personal assistant. That shit is going to get old fast. Fortunately he isn't here in the area that often. Most of the time he's out of the department chasing female employees in engineering. No wonder projects back here in the environmental lab are so far behind schedule. The guy is seldom doing his job.

Repairing a few robots in the chamber area has been my first task. There are two separate areas that are set up for Mini-Rel testing, the environmental lab in the back of our building and the chamber area here on the production line. Some of the testing can be automated and the rest of it has to be done by hand. Regardless all of the tests we're going to be running will take many months to complete. So time is money. In order to automate some of the tests and speed things up the engineering department has constructed a half dozen cart-sized robots that they've nicknamed "Yogi." Basically Yogi is a system of movable plates loaded with connectors. Inside there are four plates, each one will be hooked up to a separate unit inside a test chamber. On either side of Yogi one test rack can be hooked up for a total of two stations. The idea is we hook up two racks, load 4 units to be tested inside a chamber, start some software and let 'er rip. We come back a few days later and all the tests should be complete. Trouble is these little Yogi units are worn out from high use and no maintenance.

Tiny handed me a mass of paperwork. Diagrams, schematics, and parts lists. He told me to replace all the connectors and cables on every plate in most of the Yogi robots since they're not making good electrical contact anymore. He also shoved plastic bags full of brand new cables towards me and rolled a brown tool kit over to where I was sitting. Then he split. He's probably going to be wasting the rest of his time chasing skirts this week. Loser.

Mini-Rel

For the past few months I've been working exclusively building entire test stations for our department as well as extra racks to be sent to our division in Malaysia. It has been very challenging, stressful work in part due to the fact that I have received little to no support from my immediate management staff. They wanted their test racks built and they wanted them yesterday, but they didn't do anything to help me expedite the job. In fact they were more of a hindrance than anything else. All I can say is I got the job done and I learned much along the way.

The Malaysians still aren't up to speed yet at producing the same instruments we do. I have a feeling as soon as they do though, our American workforce will be thrown out of here.

Now that I have dished out dozens of functional test stations my supervisor has re-assigned me once again. Looks like I won't be heading back to Area 51. My new job is working with a giant oaf of a technician in our environmental laboratory. Back there in the E-lab they take new prototype instruments and subject them to many different kinds of extreme conditions to flush out unforeseen design flaws and set performance specifications. They call this testing "Mini-Rel" which means mini-reliability testing. I guess once upon a time we did thorough reliability testing on our new products and now we cut corners there too, just like we seem to do everywhere else in our processes these days.

I will be working with a big ass goofball of a guy. He's got a bunch of nicknames. Some people call him "Baby Huey" because he reminds them of the giant dopey cartoon duck. Others call him "Tiny" as he is the exact opposite of being small. Really, this guy is a behemoth of a man. I don't mean entirely overweight, he's just huge, balding, and he's got a beer gut that would make Homer Simpson proud. Shoelaces likes to call this guy "Mr. Around The World In 80 Days." I'm not sure why. For now I'm just going to call him Tiny like most people do in the department.

This week I start my new assignment with Tiny in the environmental lab. I'm somewhat apprehensive about it right now because Tiny doesn't seem all that bright and he's in charge of running that area. I might be stepping into a serious mess here.

Stray Bullets

At three o'clock in the afternoon a fifteen year old boy was walking home from school. Little did he know directly across the street from him an attempted robbery was in progress.

As two men burst through the front doors of The Gun Room towards the street, a swarm of bullets followed. Opposite them, the kid walking home from school caught a couple of rounds. He was in the wrong place at the right time. Staggering up the sidewalk, he managed to make it through a parking lot to a Payless Shoe Store. He shoved the front door open and collapsed. No doubt from shock and blood loss. Employees inside the shoe store immediately attended to the boy and called for help. Luckily, he lived.

Only two local Bay Area newspapers presented an accurate account of what happened that day. What I found particularly interesting about this situation was how the story was manipulated by gun rights activists a few weeks later. From reading their accounts of the facts you'd never know an innocent bystander had been shot twice during the bungled robbery at The Gun Room. Were hardcore gun fiends deliberately omitting information just to further their own agenda or had they simply done a slob job reporting the story? I suppose we'll never know.

Shootout At The Gun Room

Things over in Autumn's East Bay neighborhood took a turn for the bizarre again recently. Three really intelligent guys from Richmond attempted to rob The Gun Room. Of all the retail businesses to knock over, a gun store has got to be one of the all-time dumbest places to try and steal from.

Here's what happened. The Gun Room's owner was working behind the counter talking with a customer. The owner saw someone standing at the front door to the shop and buzzed him in. You can't just walk into The Gun Room. When you get to the front door you have to stand there like an idiot, hit a doorbell and wait for the guys behind the counter to release the door. Anyway after a few minutes of conversation with this new customer guy, the store's owner thought something was strange about the man and he told that customer to leave. When this person reached the shop's door instead of going outside he held the door open for two more guys to come in. One of them was carrying a shotgun.

Naturally, The Gun Room's owner pulled a handgun. The customer he was talking with at the time was also armed with a pistol. Both men opened fire on their would-be attackers. One of the robbers got himself shot in the foot. The other two geniuses freaked out, dropped their shotgun in the store and ran like motherfuckers on out of there. When the police arrived they bagged a robber with one foot and the other two were caught not long afterward.

Not surprisingly, many online gun rights news sources picked up on this story and ran with it. They all hailed it as a prime example of armed law abiding citizens protecting themselves against crime. Even the NRA's magazine, "America's 1st Freedom" ran a little blurb on the incident. Funny thing about it was, none of these pro-gun news sources were telling the whole story...

Five Hundred Dollars

Lately at work I've noticed things between Shitfoot and Dangerous D have become quite tense. Neither one of them have really been kidding around with each other or spending any time on the shop floor bullshitting together like they used to. Being the nosey guy that I am, I decided to ask Shitfoot what the deal was. Shitfoot was buried in work building RF Decks. I walked over to his assembly station and bugged him about Dangerous D. When I mentioned I noticed things between the two of them seemed strained as of late, Shitfoot sort of hung his head low. He told me what was up.

A couple of months ago when I offered a room at my place to Dangerous D, he didn't have the $500 for his first month's rent. I sort of figured that out. Anyway, on the day Dangerous D moved in he had five hundred bucks in cash for me. I didn't ask where or how he got it. Shitfoot apparently gave the loot to him because he felt partially responsible for setting up the whole deal between D and myself. From the get-go it looked like things might not work out because D was broke. So Shitfoot loaned D his first month's rent on one condition. He had to pay Shitfoot back the entire amount on our next payday which was only a week after he moved in. Seems like a fair deal, right? Well, that payday came and went. Instead of repaying his loan to Shitfoot D went down to Best Buy and bought that $1,200 TV. That's really messed up.

Shitfoot is a little mad with that sawed off retard right now.

Hangin' Out With Dangerous D

TC and Shitfoot have become pretty good pals with Dangerous D. After he was hired in here both of those guys kind of took D under their protective wings so to speak. Why I have no idea. That's cool, I guess. Although I have to be honest and say I really don't like being around the little jerk so I don't understand how they could handle it. Maybe they feel sorry for him. I was talking with TC the other day about some of his adventures hanging around with Dangerous D. I got a few stories out of him... heh.

Dangerous D, Shitfoot and I planned to take a trip to Lake Tahoe to go skiing. We agreed to meet at my house the night before around 11PM. I think we got to sleep at 2AM after much drinking, and slept until 4AM. We left Rohnert Park and reached Interstate 80 about 7AM. At that time, Shitfoot reached in the ice chest and pulled out a Lagunitas beer. I know from experience that these are hellish beers that contain a lot of yeast that produce a lot of gas. He proceeded to drink a couple until Sacramento where he went back to sleep. Dangerous D and I started to notice odor coming from the rear of the car as we started up into the Sierras. I could see in the rear view mirror that Shitfoot was horizontal in the back seat. These were nasty farts. We all know the beer farts are so pungent that they stay in your pants. All it takes is a small movement of your butt to reconstitute them back into the air. I pushed the lockout for the electric windows so that Shitfoot couldn't mess with them and lowered the back windows. Shitfoot yelled out. It was about 25 degrees outside and he was freezing. Dangerous D and I had the heater on full blast up front so we didn’t notice the cold. Shitfoot was freezing in the back seat. I was going to make Shitfoot pay for this. We drove the rest of the way with the back windows open.

Dangerous D has never been skiing. I have to admit that DD wasn't afraid to take a challenge. When you rent your skis at a ski resort, they ask you what kind of a skier you are. When I went in line I said that I was an intermediate. Dangerous D was right behind me and said the same. I knew then that we were in trouble. We left the lodge and went to put on our skis. Dangerous D had a problem just standing up. I finally took off my skis and helped him over to the chair lift. The lift was a 4-person lift. I put on my skis and helped him in line. As it happened, there was Dangerous D, me, and 2 strangers to go on one chair. In the front of us 1 person was alone waiting for the chair. This old man must have been around 60. When the chair came around for the person in front of us, Dangerous D advanced when he should have waited. This old man looked back and Dangerous D is sitting in his spot in the chair. Dangerous D and his skis knocked him to the side. The operator immediately shut down the chair and rescued the man from the ditch next to the lift. When I got to the top of the lift, I waited for the man, and I apologized for my friend's actions. Dangerous D skied on, oblivious at the mayhem he had caused.

One day Shitfoot and I decided to turn Dangerous D on to a local pizza joint called Old Chicago in Petaluma. Since he was from Kansas we wanted to show him some local good eats. We piled into Shitfoot's car and headed to Petaluma. Since Dangerous D was new to the area Shitfoot and I agreed that we would pay the tab, and he would only pay for the tip. After the waitress sat us at the table we ordered some beer. Actually, we ordered several pitchers of beer and pizza. The waitress was very nice. When we were full from the beer and pizza, we decided to leave. Shitfoot and I paid the bill. Dangerous D stood up and said, "nO tipP, BaAD sServISe." I thought he was joking so I didn't say anything. We got up to leave and the waitress started taking our dishes. As Dangerous D left out the door I realized that he was serious. I felt bad so I chased the waitress down and dropped her a $10, apologizing for my friend. Dangerous D walked out ahead of us with our leftovers in a container. As we walked behind him we saw him talking to a homeless person. The homeless person asked, "Can I have some food?" Dangerous D, with food in hand, said no, and then turned his head and barfed on the sidewalk. Dangerous D looked at us and said, "WhERE aRe weE goINg GUys?"

Dangerous D got dropped at his doorway that night. Another lesson learned.

Dinner Date

I was on my way out of the house tonight to drink beers over at Dave's place.

When I walked downstairs into the living room Dangerous D was sitting on my couch with a big jackass sized grin on his face. He reminded me of a cat that had feathers stuck in it's mouth after raiding a bird cage. He seemed way too pleased with himself. I couldn't help but ask why he was in such a good mood. He told me a girl from San Rafael was coming over to meet him. He'd chatted her up online style earlier in the week through Yahoo Personals. Out of curiosity I questioned him about his ideas for how the evening was going to unfold.
"iTS Ay dInNeR dAtE. hehH."
"So where are you guys going out to?"
Dangerous D said, "we'Re GONna HanG OuTt heRe aNNd wAtCH aH moViE."

Oh, great. This was the master plan of my handicapped Casanova of a room mate? He already had downed one or two room temperature Coors Light beers and he was acting a little loopy. I smelled blind date disaster looming on the horizon.

"Look, D. If you've invited a girl over for a first date you don't hang around the house with beer in hand expecting to plunk her down on the couch in front of a crummy video. You're supposed to get spiffed up a bit, put on some foo-foo juice take her out to a film in the theater and then go someplace halfway decent for dinner. Right? Even if you don't know each other all that well from online chatting you both just saw a film so at least you've got dinner table conversation that's an icebreaker."

He didn't get it.

As if almost on cue, the doorbell rang. I swiveled around from where I was standing and answered it. Opening the door I saw a very attractive Latino girl in her early 20s. She was wearing a light colored skirt that wasn't a mini, but it wasn't knee-length either. It didn't quite reach past her thighs which always gets the double thumbs up of approval in my book. She had on a tight top and she wore a headband in her hair. Damn cute, actually.

I was left wondering in amazement how a nimrod like Dangerous D could even get the time of day from a lady like this. Iniviting her inside she brushed past me through the entryway and made a left into the living room. Dangerous D hobbled up from where he was seated and enthusiastically bellowed a retarded sounding "HeLLo!" at her. I knew what was going through her mind from the look on her face. It was one of those startled, abrupt shock expressions that said "Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?" I could tell she instantly knew this was a colossal fuckup, but she managed to power through it. The cute San Rafael girl handed Dangerous D a tupperware container with a half dozen home baked muffins inside. How thoughtful...

I couldn't watch any more. This was going to turn into something entirely dumb and embarrassing. I felt like I had to be embarrassed for Dangerous D because he was too stupid and oblivious to be embarrassed for himself. Before things raced onward into sheer lameness I announced that I was heading over to Dave's and I thought to myself "Nice meeting you, you poor girl."

Shutting the front door behind me I knew she'd be okay, it simply wasn't going to be a good time for her.

Who Is Lloyd?

Barney sure didn't waste any time stirring up shit and getting himself into trouble over on the Spectrum Analyzer line. I heard he's in plenty of hot water right now for a couple of things. A coworker left their email account up on a machine and became distracted with another project. The person stepped away for a little while. When that employee came back they discovered Barney had hopped onto their PC and was reading every last one of their emails. It's a careless thing to do, leave your account up and open for just anybody to sneak a peek at so I don't have a whole bunch of sympathy for that person. Me, I'm kinda paranoid about stuff like that happening in here at work so I always close out the program and kill the browser just to be on the safe side. Anyway that employee complained to management about Barney's snooping. The other thing Barney did is sexually harass a female employee, I don't know the details. She is apparently going through Human Resources department with an official complaint. Now that is a big deal. Rummaging through a fellow employee's email account is petty but that plus a sexual harassment complaint really isn't going to do Barney any good.

Of course Barney never should have been hired here in the first place. None of this would be happening. And he should have been fired by now. But, that's not the way we do things around here at Bill and Dave's company. We let problem employees run loose, wild, and free because our company is so completely terrified of lawsuits. So the rest of us get to hang out with freaks like Barney and deal with their bullshit for years. It's swell.

I saw Barney in the hallway yesterday afternoon. We crossed each other's paths in Building 2. I was heading over to parts stores in Building 3 and Barney was walking towards me in the opposite direction. Nobody else was around so I figured I'd give him some shit. It had been a few weeks since I last saw him. As we approached each other I loudly yelled out, "Baaaaaarney how's it goin'?"
He flipped his lid.
Shouting at me with an angry expression on his face he said, "MY NAME NOT BARNEY! MY NAME IS LLOYD NOW!"

Holy shit.

I didn't know how to react to that outburst so I stood still and kept my yap shut while watching him walk away. He cast his gaze at his feet and scurried down the hallway towards the Spectrum Analyzer line practically hugging the wall as he did so. Bugnutty. Lloyd isn't his real name, neither is Barney. Nobody knows for sure who he really is. Actually, I bet someone in Payroll or maybe somebody in Human Resources knows what his real name is. Totally weird scene.

Next time I see Barney in the hallway I think I'll keep my mouth shut and just keep on truckin'.

The Player

Dangerous D's obese sized TV was delivered here the other day. It took two Best Buy employees plus myself to get the box inside the house and unpacked. Total fourty five minute hassle. After he hooked his DVD up to it and powered the set on, he started right in watching movies without checking any of the settings. Since it's a wide screen flat panel model, the extreme edges of the picture seem squished and out of proportion to the rest of the video. For example if a car is moving across the screen from left to right it will appear somewhat shorter and wider, then normal sized in the middle of the screen, and returning to stubby fat again. It's kind of like looking through a fish eyed lens. I mentioned it looked weird but D didn't pay any attention to what I was saying. So when he wasn't around I fiddled with the menu settings and sure enough there was another screen choice for the video. Fixed it up. I don't watch much TV but when I do go to use it I'm going to change the settings and then revert it back to the fucked up one when I'm done. Dangerous D probably won't notice. Maybe it looks normal to him as it is fishbowl style. His retard-vision plus multiple room temperature Coors Light beers might automatically compensate for the screwy screen warping.

This past weekend Autumn came up to stay. We made dinner Saturday night and sat down to watch a film on D's TV. Just as we got past the opening credits all hell broke loose upstairs. From the living room we could clearly hear stupid shit like cow bells, door knocking, and other assorted noises bursting out of the second floor room D and I use as an office. It was like we were listening to sound effects from a Tex Avery cartoon. Over the top of all that racket was Dangerous D choking on a hairball or loudly belching up some food. We stopped the movie and eavesdropped for a few minutes. Autumn started laughing and she asked me what all the noise was. I explained to her that Dangerous D was using an online chat program for dating singles on Yahoo. He had a ton of sound effects activated. When certain conditions were met in the program sound effects triggered. Like when someone sent him a private message a goofy noise blurted out. Shit was going crazy up there so Dangerous D must have been typing his little stunted fingers off.

Earlier in the week Dangerous D mentioned to me he was on Yahoo Personals. He thought I wanted to know everything about it. I didn't ask or care, but he offered the information anyway. Apparently he's got a personal ad up there on Yahoo and according to him the only way to score on the chicks is to chat 'em up. D tells the girls whatever he thinks they want to hear hoping to rope them into a date. Lame. So that's what he spends most of his time doing when he gets home from work every day. He showed me his ad and I read through his profile. The one thing I noticed about it right away was he made absolutely no mention of his disability. When I asked him about that point he didn't say much. I told him I thought he was misrepresenting himself. That's fucked up. There's probably quite a few people like him doing the same thing, completely misrepresenting themselves online.

Before we restarted our movie I walked upstairs and asked Dangerous D to turn the volume on his PC speakers down way low. He was a little pinched about it, but he complied. Autumn and I were able to eat our dinner and watch the film in peace after that.