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.