J1 Be Gone

It's official. The rumors I'd heard about J1 wanting to leave the company were true. For the past couple of weeks J1 wandered around our department bitching and moaning about his job here. A few tech startup companies are hitting it big through lucrative buyouts from large corporations. Every employee at these little hole in the wall operations can end up becoming very wealthy like they just hit it big on the state lottery. With tech stocks still booming and visions of dollar signs in J1's eyes, he's decided to leave us and head over to a new job at a place I've never heard of before. The only thing motivating him to quit is a hope he'll be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and strike it rich. I asked him about his decision. J1 babbled at me. He feels unappreciated here. J1 is absolutely correct about that. He is unappreciated. Most of us are terribly sorry he was hired into Bill and Dave's in the first place.

J1 is angry we didn't get much of anything when we were spun off from our computer division. Our stock options are a joke and we didn't receive any bonuses or cash up front as incentives. J1 said the initial job offer package at this other place includes 10,000 shares of stock options as a signing bonus if he accepted a position there. He's probably lying through his teeth about how sweet the deal is or at least totally exaggerating, as usual. J1 also let it be known his new employer is excited to have him. I'm excited too, maybe I should buy dinner for everyone at their company as a thank you for finally getting that imbecile out of here.

The reality of J1's employment situation is very different from how he perceives it. Ever since we were on that instrument transfer up in Spokane, some people mistakenly thought of J1 as a truly capable electronic technician. They didn't know any better. J1 has very little aptitude or skill for this kind of work. Our supervisor at the time was The Drunk. She's been protecting him over the past few years and kept J1 working in her area no matter where she has been assigned. Until recently J1 was one of her star employees, but I think The Drunk must have finally sobered up for five minutes and figured out J1 is a retard. Things have finally caught up with him. The Drunk could no longer ignore J1's lack of ability or his habit of frequently causing personality conflicts with everyone that has to work alongside him. Two of his coworkers recently mentioned to me that The Drunk was getting ready to fire J1. He must have got wind of his boss' intentions and decided to quit ahead of being thrown out.

Last week a farewell party was organized by someone for J1. Hardly anyone attended the gig. Greasy Guy went and he said J1 got totally bombed. Then J1 attempted to drive home drunk. Not far from the pub they were drinking at a sheriff spotted J1 and tailed him. I guess he panicked and decided to pull over by a telephone booth to call a friend to come pick him up. The sheriff followed and busted him while he was in the phone booth. J1 got himself a nice, fat DUI. I've been laughing about that for the past couple of days.

Greasy Guy

The elusive source of our chamber area's mysterious grease coated windows has been revealed.

Thursday night I was sitting in front of a Spectral station trying to troubleshoot a problem. One of the units under test kept failing a few data points that normally don't give us any trouble. Those failures were probably bogus, but I couldn't find anything wrong. Everything looked okay with cable hookups and the test code. Nobody in engineering had made any software edits earlier in the day. Becoming frustrated with the situation and realizing I was getting nowhere fast I pushed backwards with my feet against the test rack while sitting in my chair. Rolling away from a frustrating mess I glanced over at another one of the chambers. The observation window on that chamber had a larger than usual nasty grease print. It looked very strange.

Walking over to the chamber door I stood there and stared at a huge filmy grey swirl pasted into the middle of the glass. It reminded me of a weather radar graphic that appeared to be an eye of a hurricane. A vortex swirled outward from the center where grease became thicker and spread outward into a spiral of milky colored fingers. Frowning at the filthy window I wondered what in the fuck could have caused this.

Tiny had been working with this chamber when I started my shift that day. I remembered something. Instead of turning on the chamber interior lights from its control panel and looking through the observation window like a normal human being, Tiny has a habit of head-butting the glass to see what's going on inside. His hair is shaved down to almost nothing and he's got a bald spot at the very top of his noggin. That greasy spiral on the window surface must have been caused by Tiny's stubble and the vortex in the center of it was created by Tiny's bald spot. Mystery solved! I should have known. That guy is covered from head to toe in shiny oil that excretes from every pore in his body. He's a biological grease generator. Tiny reminds me of Pig Pen. You know, Pig Pen is a character in Charles Schulz Peanuts comic strip that always walks around in a cloud of his own dust and dirt. Personal hygiene is not one of Tiny's priorities.

I hereby decree that from now on Tiny shall be known as Greasy Guy.

Project Everest Part Three

When rolling out a brand new software system such as Oracle that employees have never seen before let alone even heard of, you have to swiftly organize a major training effort. Tens of thousands of employees will have to be introduced to a new-fangled strange beast and become educated in its use. People need to be identified as trainers to run classes that will enable the peasant masses to run this stuff. So, who do you select to be those teachers? Who do you assign to be the champions of Oracle knowledge? You choose the most inept, useless, ignorant, and annoying managers in the company of course! There is no other possibility. After all anyone truly capable has better things to be doing with their time.

In my department Oracle training classes were taught by Miss Malta. The moment I heard she was going to be our teacher for a week or two worth of three hour Oracle sessions I knew we were completely screwed. Miss Malta doesn't communicate well with anybody, especially her fellow females because she has contempt for them. Why I have no clue. Basically she is a nearly illiterate manager that fails time and again to speak clearly in front of a group, read, spell, or write. Usually when she has to write a business report or do something simple like respond to an email she will make one of her subordinates write it for her. Her spelling is truly atrocious to the point of being comical and she's too stupid to use a program with built-in spell check.

That's how dumb she is.

During the first Oracle training session myself and twenty or so fellow employees sat through hour after hour of instruction that didn't make any sense. Miss Malta talked at us in pidgeon English and she was easily sidetracked by the most basic questions. At the same time the majority of our group became wildly confused by Oracle's myriad web pages and counter intuitive drop down menus. Things went so poorly that first day I spent most of my time in front of a computer terminal web surfing. Each day after that seemed like a bad television re-run in Oracle school. Nobody got anywhere with it.

Boredom forced me to experiment with Oracle on my own while everyone else in training appeared to be trapped in Oracle sub menus or lost on some other web page. I did no better than the rest of my group, but I didn't care about it. Miss Malta quickly lost control of the situation at every class. She impatiently mumbled instructions to her frustrated students which ended up making things entirely worse. Every so often I would look up from my flat screen monitor to scan over the rest of our class. I saw nothing but aggravated faces and computer screen chaos throughout the room.

The implementation of Oracle was going to fail miserably because it was being rushed onto the shop floor. Forcing Oracle down our throats wasn't going to work. Training appeared to be an afterthought. Super Geek decreed that everyone would learn to use Oracle or else by the deadline.

A few days' worth of digging around in Oracle's guts gave me the feeling this would become yet another example of a one-size-fits-all solution for problems we didn't have. The menus were over complicated, database load times took forever, categories in sub-systems made little to no sense. Every time I selected an action on a page, Oracle responded slower than dogshit. On the production floor we would be using Oracle to move instruments from station to station as work was completed in assembly and test. It didn't seem to function as advertised.

Project Everest Part Two

Once upon a time there was a company that manufactured substandard personal computers. That company was called Packard Bell. The people running Packard Bell decided it would be a good idea to sell their brand new computers with used parts in them at retail stores across the land. They also thought it was good to produce their computers with proprietary components so end users couldn't upgrade their PCs on their own if they wanted to. Swapping out parts on a failed Packard Bell computer was a nightmare. After a few years of abuse customers finally became so angry that they stopped buying shoddy Packard Bell computers. As a direct result this company was forced out of the US market. Nobody was sorry to see them go.

Around the time that Packard Bell pulled the plug on their US operations and ditched some of their upper management staff, our fearless leaders at corporate were doing a little head hunting for talent. They hired in one of the former Packard Bell guys. Note to the top dogs: It's probably not a good idea to hire corporate managers from failed companies. The reason why is because someone had to sink the ship, so to speak, and if they were capable and willing to do that in the past they'll more than likely torpedo the boat again if you give them the opportunity.

Shortly after the ex-Packard Bell manager joined us he began to act like a used car dealer. He spent a large amount of time making a hard sell for our company to abandon internally designed software systems. In his mind, worldwide streamlining of operations was a priority. Customers were complaining that it was too troublesome when placing orders for our instruments, making this process easier was necessary. Sales would increase if these problems were fixed, he claimed. Fortunately for everyone he knew exactly who to go to for solutions. This man of few ideas spoke openly about a magical Oracle. Glorious promises of short term profit increases and reduced overhead costs were made by the outsider from Packard Bell. Unable to resist his amazing business plan our top dogs at corporate HQ gathered together and gazed with wonder towards the Oracle. So it came to pass that a journey was undertaken to seek this Oracle and claim it as our own.

Project Everest Part One

Corporate managers are some amazingly brain dead people. Because they seldom have any creative business ideas of their own these fools eagerly latch on to whatever so-called new industry trends happen to blow across their desks. I've seen many stupid initiatives and programs rapidly forced into place only to be discarded just as quickly or simply allowed to wither on the vine and fade from view. The constant factor is we waste more time and cash flow on each one of these hairbrained schemes. For the past year I have been closely watching one of the biggest disasters to ever hit this company. That disaster has been called "Project Everest" by our CEO Super Geek and his cronies. Apparently they refuse to call the project by it's real name due to some legally binding contractual obligation which makes no sense to me.

Project Everest is Oracle, which you may have heard of before. Oracle is a company that builds software databases for customers with an emphasis on web-browser styled user interface. In order to switch to Oracle's software a company has to spend a lengthy amount of time consulting with them about what kind of data systems are needed, beta test their software builds, train employees in it's use, and switch from existing in-house software systems to Oracle's stuff. Something this big doesn't happen over night, and in our case we've been working with Oracle for a damn long time.

We went live with Oracle's systems recently and you know what happened that day? Everything fucking imploded. I mean, our shit was wrecked and bad. Customers could no longer place orders for instruments, production lines were unable to get parts and supplies. Administrators could not see real time where work in progress was out on the shop floor. Inventory went haywire, which threw the bean counters in accounting and finance into a tailspin. Assembly workers who were supposed to use Oracle to move products from station to station quickly discovered they either didn't have enough training to understand how to get the systems to function properly or Oracle just didn't function properly.

Before we flipped that switch to go live with Oracle all of our existing internally designed software systems were still working fine like they always had been. Seeing a company wide emergency situation develop within hours of Oracle's deployment I found myself wondering why in the hell we bought this junk. And who talked the corporate board into thinking this was a good idea?

21st Century Indentured Servants

During the 1600s people who migrated to British Colonies in the New World frequently made the trip as indentured servants. Because these individuals didn't have money to pay for passage across the Atlantic, they would enter into contracts as laborers for two to seven years once they arrived in the Colonies. Typically a master would have to house, clothe, and feed their servants for the duration of their contracts. More often than not indentured servants were treated very poorly by their masters.

Here we are in the 21st Century and I see many parallels between indentured servitude of the Colonial years and the way this company is treating our Malaysian employees.

Malay are arriving in larger and larger numbers here Stateside to train on our instrument lines. While they are here the company continues to pay them their Malaysian wages, which are a small fraction compared to what we make. If an American assembly worker takes home $3,000 a month a Malay doing the exact same job only makes $200 a month. The Malay are also expected to work long hours. We work five days a week, eight hours a shift plus overtime if we want it. Malay employees have to work a mandatory six days a week ten hours a day minimum. Because they take home such small salaries they're hungry for overtime so many of them end up working longer shifts than ten hours a day. Part of the deal Malaysian employees get while they are living and working here is the company provides them with apartments nearby our factory. They also have someone assigned to transport them back and forth from work as most of them don't drive a car.

Some of the Malay I've talked with have expressed an interest in staying here in the US. Their efforts to immigrate have been blocked by management at almost every step of the way. No employee transfers from Malaysia to the US are allowed. If a Malaysian employee quits the company and comes to America seeking a job in one of our divisions, they are automatically disqualified from being hired back in. In the meantime while they are working with us here the company has been exploiting loopholes in the work visa system to keep Malay employees Stateside for much longer periods of time than are normally allowed. It's pretty dirty.

In Singapore some fairly shifty things are going on with work visas as well. Malay employed there have been told to lie to Singapore authorities when crossing the border to go to work each day. If Malay are stopped at the border and questioned about their business, managers have ordered them to lie and say they are going to our factory for a "meeting" rather than tell the truth which is they're going to slave away on instrument lines. Every day the same scene plays out. Malay get on buses to go to Singapore for "meetings" at our site. This allows the company to arrange for a different class of work visa that requires less red tape and probably carries a smaller fee than a proper one.

I've been hearing about some other questionable practices going on at the Singapore site, but I haven't been able to confirm those rumors yet. Regardless, I am concerned. Currently Singapore is the only US Government approved site in Asia for instruments purchased by branches of the military. Until recently all Government rated orders had to be 100% built and tested in the US, but now that's changed. The situation now is that 51% of a military ordered instrument has to be built in Singapore and the rest can be done in Malaysia, but that isn't what is going on. Malay employees have been telling me that 100% of US Government ordered boxes are built and tested in Malaysia, then they are shipped across the border to Singapore where they change serial numbers on products. They're trying to make those units look like Singapore built them. If this is true, we're doing some hectic illegal shit. I'm attempting to locate some sort of hard evidence that this is what's really going on over there.

Throwing Away Oscilloscopes

Since I built an army of test racks a few months ago I've been psychologically altered. Scrounging for pieces of equipment and supplies consumed so much of my time during that project that I have become a permanent super scrounge at work. Nobody has tasked me with building any more test stations but no matter where I am in the buildings here I'm constantly on the lookout for unwanted anythings, whether they be attenuator switch drivers, signal generators, oscilloscopes, pulse generators, noise filters, I mean almost anything. If I can't use a particular kind of instrument in my area someone else may have a need for it. So if I swipe a box and get it to a person who was desperate for it, I'm the cool guy. Plus I can trade for stuff with engineers as long as I have something they want.

Last week I was hot-footing it across the back lot between Building 3 and Building 2. As I was approaching the recycling center I spotted a whole mess of nice blue CRT vintage oscilloscopes stacked up on an old workbench. This happens all the time around here, employees don't want perfectly good gear for whatever reason so they haul it outside to let it rot in the open air. I don't see too many of those around anymore, generally 1970s era o-scopes like that only go up to 100Mhz which means they aren't exactly useful. Our new model oscilloscopes go up to 500Mhz and have tons of built in features. Anyway the old blue screen models are kinda cool looking and I wanted to salvage one to tinker with at my desk. Instead of grabbing an oscilloscope from the pile outside I decided to play it safe and ask my boss for permission to snag one.

I went to my supervisor's desk and mentioned I saw a pile of obsolete gear outside. I asked him, "Can I grab a 'scope to mess around with at my cubicle? They're being thrown out I think."
He looked up at me from his chair and said "No."
That wasn't the response I expected.
"Uh, how come? None of those pieces of gear are useful just sitting out there in the sun. What's the big deal?"
"Do you need an oscilloscope to do your job properly?"
I said no, I didn't need a scope to do my job. I wanted one to fool around with in my spare time.
My boss said, "Then you can't have one. Those boxes will probably be junked for a tax write off or sold as scrap. You would have to get permission from a department manager to salvage one of those units, and more than likely that ain't gonna happen."

I was bummed.

The next day a storm blew in from the coast, and it started to rain. It rained solid for the rest of the week. Every afternoon when I showed up at work I looked out the windows from Building 2 and saw all those perfectly usable pieces of gear getting ruined. Leaving electronics like that out in the elements for long periods of time doesn't do them any good. It was such a waste. Ham radio geezers would probably kill to get their hands on equipment like that. Local schools could have used them in their science programs, but the longer they sit outside the more wrecked they become. That's one of the most aggravating things about this company, the sheer scale of waste we generate. No other electronics company that I have worked for ruins and throws away as much useful equipment as we do on a daily basis.

Next time I'm not going to say anything and swipe the shit. Honesty doesn't always pay...

Big Shot

Eavesdropping in on people's phone conversations can be amusing. Since Dangerous D moved in and got his phone line hooked up I've been able to listen in to almost all the calls he makes. Even though I only get to hear his side of the action it's pretty easy to tell what the other person is saying to D. Now that he's finally got himself squared away and paid back Shitfoot that five hundred bucks he owed him the two of them are on speaking terms again. Sort of. From the sound of things today Dangerous D must have been a little bored around the house. Woman hunting in chat rooms wasn't enough to keep him occupied so he began calling the few people he knows here in the area to see if someone wanted to go out with him and do something.

No matter who he called, they were all busy. By the time Dangerous D called Shitfoot he was frustrated and a little angry that nobody wanted to hang out. I was standing in the hallway around the corner from our office listening in when D picked up the phone one last time and dialed Shitfoot's number.

"hEY BudDIe. hOwZ iT GoINg? wWHaT ArE yOO UpP tOo?"
There was a long pause.
"i WuZ wWoNdERinG iFF yOO WANtEd ToO gO GEt SOmE bEeRs WItH meE."
Silence.
"wELL HOw aBoUt i bUy?"
Silence.
"wWHaT IFf i buY aNd i'LL DRiVe?"
Longer silence.
"oHHh... OkAy. lATeR."
Dangerous D slammed the phone down on his desk and shouted "fUCkINg PUsSie!"

Holy shit. I couldn't help but start laughing, which gave it away that I had been listening in. D didn't react like he was startled or anything. Instead he stopped me as I walked past the office towards my room. He said there was something he wanted to tell me. I stepped into the office and shrugged. "What's up?" I asked.
"mY FAmiLy iS cOMmInG ouT FRoM kAnSAs tOo viSIt soOn."
"That's cool. Have they ever been here in California before?"
Dangerous D said, "nOpE. i'M pAYiNg tOo FLy tHEm ROuNd TrIP."
"I'm sure they'll like it when they fly out and you show them around San Francisco. When are they planning on arriving?"
"aUGuSt. aNd tHEyRe gOnNa sTAy hErE."
"Which hotel?" I asked.
D looked at me kinda funny and he said while pointing at the floor, "THEyRE sTAyINg HERe."
I yelled at him. "WHAT? No fucking way, man! I don't run a Motel 6 here, friend. I'm not going to have your whole family jammed up in this place. It's just enough room for two people but not enough for like six or seven. You make sure they book themselves into a hotel around here or something. They ARE NOT staying here at my house. Got it?"

I left the room.

Seems to me Dangerous D is broke most of the time so I think I know what he's up to. He must want to try and prove himself to his family back in Kansas that he's a totally successful electronics guy now and he's a big shot. Ironically he's so irresponsible with his money that he makes me look good. I'm pretty dumb when it comes to managing my finances but let me tell you I got my shit under control compared to that little guy. He's a fiscal train wreck. If he's going to pay for his family's plane tickets that won't leave him much loot and I bet that's why he's trying to weasel them in here at my place for their stay. What a punk.

Curvy

Skinny, scrawny girls aren't where it's at. Lately the overwhelming trend being foisted upon society at large is for women to appear as though they happen to be strung out on heroin. Little toothpick slim girls with dark circles under their eyes and rib cages barely visible through their emaciated skin don't do it for me. Every time I see a girl like that it always makes me think she recently made a successful escape from a Nazi death camp. Doesn't anybody feed these women? Not only do they look unhealthy as hell, but who in the world wants to get down and dirty with a toothpick skinny female that makes you feel like you are hugging a cyclone fence post? "Not I," said the king.

That's one of the reasons I like Autumn. She's got curves in all the right places. Curvy is good. When Autumn is wearing a tight top with a knee length skirt and some cute shoes on her feets she looks great. Friday nights when I head over to Autumn's place after work she frequently goes out of her way to dress up a little bit and put on some bright blood red lipstick. I got a thing for her wearing that bright red lipstick. Drives me nuts actually. When she's really going all out Autumn will also do up some black eye liner 1960s style. I love it. Seeing her like that makes me forget instantly if I've had a rough week at work, or a particularly shitty Friday. She could ask me for almost anything done up like that and I'd probably do it.

Sometimes, things are pretty good.