Indian Wedding Jewelry Care Package

I drove over to Berkeley this weekend. Since Autumn and I are no longer together there is really no reason for me to be there anymore. It’s almost like a no-man’s land over the border that you don’t dare visit because memories will surface that you would rather not think about. Over the past few years I spent so much time in Berkeley with Autumn going to shops and restaurants there probably isn’t a single street that would not trigger a moment from the past. I’d rather try to forget. Something compelled me to make the afternoon trip though. It was going to be a quick dash to one location and then turn around to bounce out.

Through the mail I sent Jacinda some music CDs. She seemed to like them, and we’ve been in more regular contact since then. She doesn’t write or put anything in the mail. I send stuff, she calls and we talk. I’m cool with that. From the sound of things she really is bored and doesn’t have a whole lot to look forward to each day. So I been thinking it might be fun to send her some of those elaborate Indian wedding necklaces I used to buy for Autumn. Each one is different, with deep colors and bright gold or silver metal bits holding all the cut glass together. Honestly when I see a woman wearing one of them it does make me kinda squirmy. Especially the necklaces that plunge from a girl’s neck line down to the cleavage. I can’t help but let my eyes be dragged downward by the jewelry…

Taking the freeway exit I drove a couple blocks up University and parked the car around the corner from a shop Autumn and I used to frequent. As I shoved the door open and walked inside I was greeted by the owner. I don’t know her name, but the woman is always there. Dressed in a colorful sari and with her graying hair pulled back tightly she recognized me with a big smile and asked how Autumn was. I frowned, quietly told her we weren’t together anymore and mentioned something about being angry over the whole situation. The old Indian woman seemed very surprised at the news and changed the subject. It was an awkward moment. Leaving me alone I wandered away from the front counter to browse the latest arrivals on racks around the shop floor. I stared at expensive traditional wedding jewelry secured behind back lit glass display cases for a few minutes. Nobody else was in the store and neither one of us spoke as I walked around looking.

It didn’t take long. I found a nice emerald green necklace, and two others that I suspected Jacinda might like. After selecting them the old woman brought them to the counter, carefully wrapped them all up and gave me the bill. I paid and left just about as fast as I could. Driving home I thought about when I might ship Jacinda the first one and wondered if she would be happy, or if the gesture would somehow backfire in a way I might seriously regret.

Conversation With A Black Belt

So I survived my first compulsory Six Sigma brainwashing session this afternoon. The material we covered was bone dry, boring as hell. We were being indoctrinated in the ways of the Six Sigma White Belt by a tall slender man with bright blonde hair. Our teacher reminded me of a full grown successful Nazi eugenics experiment due to his master race appearance. I’ve never seen the guy on campus here before. My guess is he’s one of those cubicle dwelling drones from Building 2 upper, or maybe he’s buried somewhere in the bowels of Building 1. Whatever he does here the man has now apparently been trained extensively in Six Sigma by outside consultants. He’s supposed to be one of those experts in the methodology- a Six Sigma Black Belt. As he was running through power point slides and scribbling on a dry erase board while walking around the edge of our conference table I half expected him to kung fu chop me at the back of my neck with no warning. Maybe it had something to do with my apparent lack of interest during the two hour class. I don’t know for certain.

We covered far too much material over an inadequate amount of time. With all the bar charts and diagrams I felt like this was overkill, a solution to a problem we didn’t really have. Nobody seemed to have a better idea of Six Sigma or a direction on how to employ it in their daily tasks. I could see it in their faces. Waiting patiently for my fellow zombies to leave I sat in my chair thinking about asking one question of this Black Belt uber man. He didn’t notice I was still there. He immediately began collecting training materials strewn about the room and straightening his papers in a case as soon as the course was closed. When he realized a straggler was loitering I mumbled something about wanting to yap for a minute about Six Sigma on the down low. From his reaction it was obvious mister Black Belt thought it odd, but he didn’t tell me to get lost. I hung out.

When I felt like the flock was herding itself down a hallway and it was safe to speak candidly I began to rant.

“Okay so since you’re the expert on Six Sigma I wanted to ask a question. If you’ve been here for a while you know we have the Business Metrics program which is a long standing part of Bill and Dave’s workplace culture. It’s quite comprehensive. Now we’ve got Six Sigma being rushed in here like it’s the greatest thing ever, and I find myself dismissing it as little more than an elaborate repackaging of common sense data collection tools that are already widely accepted in business and industry. The six standard deviation junk doesn’t do much for me. Parts per million factoring on an instrument line I only ship thirty or so units a month from is kinda dumb. What I want to know is, is Six Sigma in your opinion the Emperor’s New Clothes? I mean, you’ve got the Black Belt now so what do you think?”

Mister Black Belt stopped cleaning up the conference room and sat down across the table from me. He kind of looked around to make sure no one was within ear shot and he said while nodding, “Yes. It’s just a repackaging job. They spent a lot of money putting five or six of us through a crash course in Six Sigma. For the most part everything we already do here is covered in Six Sigma. It’s redundant.”

I was surprised by his honesty. I did not expect that kind of reaction from him actually. Since I had nothing better to do I anticipated our Six Sigma Sensei to debate me on the subject for a while. With any luck I might make him angry which would be entertaining, until he used his lethal Six Sigma factoring skills to kill me. Instead I think I may have discovered another wise employee who saw through the corporate bullshit but was keeping his head down in an effort to not get himself laid off.

“Will Six Sigma change anything here?”

“Probably not,” He said.

That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Jacinda Jukebox

I’m in regular contact with Jacinda, we usually talk in the evenings a couple times a week. She sounds bored most of the time and keeps complaining about the sorry radio stations in her local area. Since she doesn’t have a CD collection or anything to listen to besides shitty college stations from Chico I decided to put together a care package of discs to listen to. The best way to do it up I figured was get one of those car CD binders that hold thirty or so discs. They’re small enough to fit in a glove box so that would make it easy to box up and ship via mail. I bought one and got a bulk pack of a hundred blanks. Then it was time for the difficult part. What to put on them? And what order should the tracks be in?

Making compilation collections of music can be tough. You’ve got to think about what the person you’re making the compilations for likes and dislikes; plus sneak a few favorites of your own in that won’t be too disruptive to the overall theme. Jacinda and I both had similar tastes in music which would make things somewhat less of a pain to put together. We had some common interests like punk, gothic/death rock, and industrial music. I chose to start with the gothic stuff, making discs with Christian Death, Bauhaus, Malign, The Sisters of Mercy, 69 Eyes, Chrome, Android Lust, and a bunch of others. On the Industrial side I made up discs of Front Line Assembly, GGFH, Skinny Puppy, 16 Volt, Diatribe, Godflesh, Sleep Chamber, and more. Included in the audio care package was a notebook. I hand-wrote in all the song titles and numbered each CD with a corresponding page so she would be able to quickly look up whatever it was she would play on her stereo.

Where I really got into time consuming compilation projects was with the punk stuff. It’s challenging to think of the best two dozen or so tunes from a band like the Dead Kennedys and put it into a cohesive collection. But, I had plenty to work with and lots of time on my hands so each night after work I picked a punk band and put together one anthology of each group’s work. Even though it was tedious I did have some fun listening to some stuff I haven’t heard in years. I raided my Misfits collection, The Cramps, TSOL, Agent Orange, Sonic Youth, Big Black, D.I., etc.

Nearly two weeks later the whole project was nearing a total of 32 CDs. There were a number of one-offs I added like Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Pixies, and Cocteau Twins. Standards like them never seem to become tired and boring. In a way I was trying a shotgun effect hoping to throw in enough material that there had to be a good enough chance Jacinda would be into it.

White Belt Bullshit

Six Sigma training works on a silly colored belt system like a martial art. It’s statistical analysis Karate. Take a bow facing your opponent, a software generated scatter chart and do the parts per million factoring. Roundhouse flying foot Karate kick to the head! Allegedly, basic Six Sigma training when completed results in an employee having a White Belt status. Wow. Can you tell how interested in Six Sigma I am? White Belt training will comprise of self-paced web modules that must be finished by a deadline set by corporate. The few people who have been assigned to act as internal trainers overseeing the project will be referred to as Black Belts. These folks are supposedly going to be the Six Sigma experts throughout the division. I’ve heard their Black Belt training with outside consultants is going to cost Bill and Dave’s $20,000 per person. Ouch. That seems really steep to me. Between the White and Black Belts there are a bunch of specialized training modules that would result in a different color of belt. It remains to be decided if we will be messing around with any of that junk.

With self-paced web module training employees here generally cut corners to get it over with as quickly as possible. Cheat sheets containing all the correct answers for each module usually surface, and then are circulated rapidly from department to department. Part of the issue is there are so few of us left working here that we are sinking. We are drowning fast with the workload. The water level is about ten feet above our heads and rarely can we swim up to the surface for a breath of air. I have mentioned it before, for those of us who have survived a dozen rounds of layoffs we are doing the work of multiple people. Not just our own forty hour a week assignments anymore. That’s why so many of us are burned out and uninterested in this place. Six Sigma is just going to have to take a back seat to all our other daily priorities. We gotta make those month-end shipments or Super Geek doesn’t get his glorious Shareholder Value.

The Beard sent everyone an email detailing how this Six Sigma thing is going to go down. Here’s what he provided:

To all WBU Manufacturing employees,

In WBU Manufacturing the Six Sigma White Belt team members must complete Basic Curriculum Quality Training and White Belt Training so they can provide project specific process and cross-functional support. Under the guidance of Black Belts, they will gather and analyze data as well as help sustain the gains created by the Six Sigma project. White Belts will work on projects as needed, by providing expertise on areas where they are directly or indirectly involved in the processes. On larger projects, White Belts may be asked to dedicate themselves full time to the project.

Within the company interweb you will find the Basic Curriculum Quality Training Course. The goal is to have 100% of WBU Manufacturing employees take these classes. Instructions on how to launch these classes will be available during the week of February 12th, the Kick Off week for Six Sigma’s White Belt Training.

The White Belt Curriculum will be made available as soon as the Six Sigma White Belt classes are complete. The goal is to have 40% of WBU Manufacturing employees take these classes. The following is a complete list of all the required classes for White Belt.

Required courses for a White Belt are: (classes with a Blue * are the Basic Curriculum Quality Training classes you will find on the web)

Introduction to Quality Series:
· Quality@Bill and Dave’s – Know Your Role*
· Introduction to Quality Tools*
· Introduction to Process Improvement*
Quality Tool Series:
· Pareto Chart *
· Cause-and-Effect Diagram*
· Process Flow Diagram*
· Time Series Chart*
· Histogram *
· Scattergram*
· Control Chart*
Root Cause Analysis Series
· Introduction to Root Cause Analysis*

In addition to the Basic Curriculum Quality Training you will need to take the following classes to meet the White Belt requirements:

· Basic Root Cause Analysis
· Corrective Action
Six Sigma Courses
· Overview of Six Sigma (yet to be released)
· Six Sigma Methodologies and Tools (yet to be released)

Thank you,
The Beard
Basic Skills and Quality Training Coordinator
WBU Manufacturing Center

Scanning over The Beard’s training matrix I realized there is very little new to us with Six Sigma besides the Six Sigma overview sections. Everything else appears to cover what we already have in our Business Metrics program. We currently perform in-depth root cause analysis when we discover serious problems with product platforms and we always have a Continuous Process Improvement policy. None of this is new, as I mentioned we’ve had all of this in effect at the company for decades. The only notable change in the past five years or so is nobody is paying attention to that data collection anymore. That’s why we are in so much trouble. With Six Sigma I think someone is trying to reinvent the wheel. Maybe at another company where they don’t already have some sort of statistical analysis program or a form of quality data collection Six Sigma would be a better match. Here, it will be entirely redundant to what we already have in place. I really don’t understand the point in bringing Six Sigma to life here at Bill and Dave’s.

Weeehooo. I’m gonna get me a White Belt.

Champion Of Six Sigma

I am now convinced the company is not at all serious about Six Sigma. If this is such a groundbreaking, important initiative key to our future success I would have expected management to assign a hot shot leader. Instead they announced Six Sigma training would be organized and lead by none other than The Beard. He’s been lingering here for a while as an “Individual Contributor.” They took away his supervisory role so he has nobody reporting to him anymore. He’s part of the good old boy network of managers in this division. While hardworking veteran employees are thrown out guys like The Beard are allowed to linger on until retirement. His pals have protected him from layoffs by granting him Individual Contributor status and assigning him projects nobody else would want. Most of those projects are like unwanted leftovers in your refrigerator. They don’t affect anything which is probably a safe bet he won’t be able to screw up royally. Let’s face facts. Anybody here worth a shit has better things to be doing with their limited time.

His previous assignment was some sort of vague training position. I heard The Beard routinely fell asleep during his meetings and training sessions. For example, he was supposed to be video taping technical training on Network Analyzers but he was too stupid to figure out how to transfer the video to software for burning onto discs. So his retarded solution was to present new technicians with power point slides instead. You can’t train green techs on circuit theory and PC board test that way. It’s not practical or useful. Before that he was directly involved in some goofy Malaysian initiative. The Beard made appointments in each department on each instrument line to observe how people did their job functions and then note ways to improve the process. I forget what that dumb program was called, but when it was my turn to show The Beard our button up process before shipment off the line he fell asleep in his chair. I was about two seconds away from slapping him across his knees with an instrument side-strap handle and asking him if he understood what I was explaining. One of his peers saved him though, he gave The Beard a nudge that startled him back into consciousness as I was reaching for a strap handle to hit him with that was on the edge of my work bench.

We used to call leaders of screwy corporate-backed programs “Champions.” Totally corny. Those were the unlucky employees assigned to lead whatever new industry trend crap being foisted upon us. I guess The Beard is now our Six Sigma Champion. I know he’s going to doom the whole deal somehow before it’s over with. But that’s cool with me. Six Sigma will fade away far sooner than it would in anyone else’s capable hands.

Six Sigma Spin

Well, here we go. It hasn’t even been a whole week since Super Geek dropped the Six Sigma bomb on us and mid to low level management types are already rubber-stamping the initiative. They’re such good little yes-men. Top Cat decided to follow up and then Scar Lip also chimed in. But let’s take a look at what Top Cat had to say first shall we?

Dear TeaM,

One of Bill and Dave’s priority is to “Achieve superior business results through Six Sigma.”
-What is Six Sigma ?:
It is a methodology that helps companies provide products and services of the highest quality and value. Six Sigma is a financially oriented, data-driven, structured improvement method that involves projects, teams, data-analysis tools and statistical expertise. It can help us in all aspects of the company — in satisfying our customers, in our product quality and delivery, in the way we manage our inventories and assets, in our new-product development processes, and also in managing our functional processes throughout GIO.

-Why is Bill and Dave’s company implementing Six Sigma now?:
We have lots of room to improve in quality, and it’s an important business issue. Quality has suffered during all the cutbacks, systems changes and focus on financial results. We have work to do to get refocused and start improving faster — Six Sigma is a proven way to accomplish and maintain that.

The bottom line is that Six Sigma achieves business results measured in dollars.

Let me quote B.S.: “If there is any message I would want to leave with you it is that this Six Sigma effort is not a Quality program. This is to build a foundation of rigor, a systematic approach to solving problems in the company. Without a systematic approach to solving problems, we will not make the systematic changes we need to do to improve customer quality, improve our financial performance, and getting our products to market.”

-What can you do ?:
Consider a White Belt training. It provides a great set of tools to help you make the most of your time. It is a self paced training available on the quality website that will clearly enhance your skills.

Have a great week,

Thanks and Best Regards,

Top Cat
FY05: How will We delight our Customers today?

Hmmm. Very interesting that Top Cat chose to actually mention anything about our ongoing quality problems. I doubt he knows how severe they actually are at this point in time. Since those serious issues were created by off-shoring to Asia, twelve or thirteen rounds of massive job layoffs, and subcontracting to a bunch of weasels, it is not realistic to expect Six Sigma is going to be able to turn customer dissatisfaction around at all. I mean, we already have plenty of data gathering tools to measure quality and I’m sure alarm bells have been going off non-stop for the past couple of years. The critical thing to remember is nobody with any real power in the company to change things has been paying any attention to those alarms. So why would they pay any attention to Six Sigma?

Top Cat included a quote from B.S. who happens to be Super Geek’s No.2 at Corporate in Palo Alto. I smell some confusion brewing between our fearless leaders. From his comment “If there is any message I would want to leave with you it is that this Six Sigma effort is not a Quality program” I can tell the big guys are already unclear on what Six Sigma really is. Super Geek told us in his communication that Six Sigma IS a quality driven program. B.S. just went and contradicted his boss, y0. Perhaps it matters little what Six Sigma can be defined as but I think it is becoming obvious our leadership has no clue what they just purchased for us and what it is that Six Sigma is supposed to do. Also of note, they did a thorough job laying the axe to everyone’s necks in our division Quality departments. So I guess for now we better hope and pray Six Sigma is not a quality-based program because if it is nobody will be here to implement it.

Now let’s see what yes-man babble Scar Lip has to add to the Six Sigma mix.

As a follow-up to Super Geek’s message launching the company’s Six Sigma program, we want to add our sponsorship to this exciting initiative.

Six Sigma is an industry-proven methodology to create process rigor in all aspects of business operations. Many companies, including General Electric, Samsung and Motorola, have generated billions of dollars in savings that are directly attributable to Six Sigma programs.

Within our division, the benefits will include enabling the entire organization to simultaneously address financial goals and enhance customer satisfaction while improving our ability to execute through more efficient and organized processes. The Six Sigma program will also provide this division’s employees with a tool set to help generate breakthrough business results.

More details will be communicated soon by your manager.

Best regards,

Scar Lip

Okay. Any time one of these nitwits refers to an industry-trend program as “exciting” I am convinced it’s going to be mind numbingly boring. Not to mention useless. This shit is never exciting. I mean let’s think back for a moment. Was ISO:9000 exciting? Fuck no. That was just a quick way to deforest the entire West Coast of trees for paper due to all the printer copies of pointless documentation we generated overnight. Was BSOF hip and happening? Fuck no. That had to have been some sort of safety related insurance scam and it successfully introduced the safety Gestapo to our company. Diversity Training. That was a great one I will never forget. We were corralled like livestock into mandatory brainwashing sessions and encouraged to hassle minorities and gays. Totally insane. I still cannot believe we weren’t sued into oblivion on that deal.

Just because General Electric, Samsung, and Motorola adopt a program does not mean we have to act like Lemmings and jump off a cliff into the Six Sigma abyss. Besides I’m sure they all padded their numbers heavily in favor of how great Six Sigma was and then cooked the books on how profitable it was when they instituted the program. Especially if one of them created Six Sigma in the first place. Do you realize how much loot they could make by marketing a package like this? There’s training courses, books, seminars, video presentations, online resources, etc. all of which has to be bought by suckers like… us. Whoever packaged Six Sigma must be raking in the dough.

Scar Lip says this is going to “enhance customer satisfaction” as he puts it. Yeah, it’s magic bullet time again. It’s like we’re all passengers on the Titanic. Standing on the wooden deck we can clearly see the ship is going down, and the life boats are fading fast in the darkness, but the Captain and his immediate crew are all convinced it’s unsinkable. How reassuring. Will Six Sigma cause the company leadership to hire back skilled employees in the Quality departments? Probably not. Is Six Sigma going to reveal how badly the Research and Development labs need realistic schedules for producing rugged designs that last more than twelve months before crapping out? Nah. Could Six Sigma data prove how negative the impact was to off-shore our products to unskilled workers in other countries? Nope. Nor will it reverse these trends for one simple fact – the damage done is too severe for this company to repair.

Six Sigma

I was wondering how long it would be until corporate latched on to another tech-industry snake oil scam. Looks like I didn’t have long to wait at all. When I got in to work this morning and started my daily scanning of emails to ignore I came across a company-wide announcement from Super Geek hailing the introduction of Six Sigma to every division. Part of me wanted to laugh sarcastically as I read it, another part of me just wanted to sigh and shake my head at the futility of it all. Anyway I clicked on his email.

Dear Bill and Dave’s employees,

Our FY05 Priority to Achieve Excellence in Customer Satisfaction includes the strategy to “achieve superior business results through Six Sigma.” I am pleased to announce that, Six Sigma will be launched across the company. Six Sigma is an industry-wide quality approach that helps companies provide products and services of the highest quality and value. Specific to our FY05 theme, “Winning Through Innovation,” Six Sigma enables innovation by providing a method and tool set that can be applied to any business process to boost new ways of thinking and working. Additionally, Six Sigma has been proven successful in Bill and Dave’s ATG and Corporate Controllership. All employees can participate in Six Sigma. You can learn program specifics and answers to frequently asked questions via the Six Sigma website. And, going forward, you can expect project updates on this website and from your management team, InfoSpark and other communications. Six Sigma is an important element of our FY05 Priorities. My staff and I are fully committed to using this methodology to achieve a higher level of customer focus and operational excellence. Thank you for your efforts toward achieving all of our FY05 Priorities.

Best Regards,

Super Geek

I decided to look a little further into Six Sigma on my own by hopping onto Al Gore’s Internets. As I suspected, Six Sigma is another bolt-on industry standard that Super Geek and his platoon of yes men are going to force down our throats. Their hope no doubt is that Six Sigma will act as a magic bullet for all of our company woes. From what I could gather on the Six Sigma thing it looks like nothing more than data collection on your existing manufacturing process, and then you make common sense decisions based upon your findings. Uh, isn’t that what we are already supposed to be doing? I mean, we’ve got self-imposed systems here that do the exact same thing already and those seem to have been working well for decades.

For example, a huge cornerstone of the Bill and Dave’s method is what we refer to as Continuous Process Improvement (CPI). Basically anyone in the company is empowered to make suggestions on how to solve problems in our manufacturing processes or sidestep them entirely. All you have to do is gather some data, make observations, and present it to the group. It’s been effective in the past. We also have what we call “Business Metrics.” Business Metrics are a fairly comprehensive set of data collection tools that we use constantly. Each line supervisor is responsible for putting all the information together however he or she can delegate the data collection out to subordinates on the line. The end result is the same either way. We look at our problems and performance based on the data and make changes to resolve or improve deficiencies. It’s pretty simple.

So why in the hell are they rolling this Six Sigma stuff out now? The timing seems very odd. I mean if Super Geek was going to pull this out of his pointy nerd hat why didn’t he do it when the company was split up? Rolling Six Sigma out in the first year after the company split would still be dumb in my opinion but it would have made a little more sense on the timing. I think it’s also interesting he chose to mention the Automated Test Group (ATG) was used as a guinea pig for Six Sigma. Word on the street is they’re getting ready to sell off the whole ATG division to an outside company and jettison their employees without a severance package. That’s an awesome start here for Six Sigma. I guess Super Geek was too busy driving yellow Ferrari’s while plotting the wholesale destruction of the company’s United States workforce to think about Six Sigma at the time our company was unnecessarily broken into two. Remember folks it’s just like Super Geek always tells us, it’s all about “Shareholder Value!”

Here’s what I predict is going to happen in short order:

1) Management at all levels are going to get spun up on Six Sigma like it’s crack cocaine.

2) They’re going to mandatory training-session-us-to-death and pay through the nose for an army of faceless Six Sigma consultants. Not long after that we will all be good little Six Sigma zombies.

3) Within a year after zombification the whole program will wither on the vine and die, like so many other half-baked corporate sponsored industry trends Super Geek has picked up.

4) All the cash we threw at Six Sigma will have been pissed down the toilet.

I don’t know, call me a skeptic. This shit just keeps getting more and more stupid around Bill and Dave’s company. I am not sure how much longer I want to hang out here and deal with it.

Commiseration

Jacinda and I have been talking a lot over the phone lately.

She tells me about her ex-boyfriend. They moved to Oregon and got a small place together in a rural area. He got a job with the Forestry Service as a firefighter. Jacinda was not working, so she played housewife. Both of them were getting by, they even bought a new car. Things were good. Months passed with little changing in their daily lives. He worked and made enough money to pay the bills while Jacinda kept the house in order.

She wasn’t allowed to go out alone much and she didn’t have many friends or acquaintances in the town they moved to. At some point her man became possessive, and controlling. Jacinda tells me he threatened her. He was becoming abusive. Maybe it had something to do with hours being scarce at his job. They argued. Bills went unpaid. He lost his job, debt collectors were calling. They fought often. Fearing for her safety Jacinda abandoned her belongings and fled back to California. On her own with little in the way of income she was able to find a single bedroom apartment and move in with some help from her family. Jacinda tells me she barely has enough money each month to survive. Most of her income goes to rent, anything left over goes to food and basic utility bills. She has no job prospects. There is nothing to do where she lives and the local radio stations suck. She says her town has to deny her basic social services because illegal immigrants have used them all up. Local government agencies are broke and turn her away.

I tell Jacinda about Autumn. I describe her in detail and I tell her how Autumn kept my relationship limited to her liking and my frustration. I talk about how we were together for five years and the same problems continued to surface like bad re-runs of syndicated television shows. Autumn always left me with no workable solutions. I am bitter as I describe Autumn’s problems and remember some of the incredibly stupid disputes I had with her. In hindsight these problems seemed so simple to resolve, but she would never allow it to happen. I deliver a skillful monologue about Autumn’s social activist tendencies and how meaningless it is to everyone else who lives outside of Berkeley. And I talk about how sick of Berkeley I am in general. It’s full of freaks, losers, and filth. For all the social activism and ecological awareness Berkeley residents proclaim to be fostering daily you’d expect the city to be a Utopian model for the rest of the nation, and the world to follow. Yet there are plenty of homeless and hungry people sleeping on the streets of Berkeley every night. Violent crime is high. Trash piles up along the streets. It’s like many other American cities, and it’s a hypocritical joke.

Berkeley has a place near the college campus called People’s Park. It’s a rundown city block where addicts hang out in broad daylight smoking drugs. They’re all the same. Gray hair and wild smiles from behind scruffy beards wait for anyone to come close enough so they can tell you how they “stopped the war” while their vacant eyes glisten in memories of protests past. I have little use for these burnouts and in my opinion they were nothing more than a circus sideshow of the Vietnam War Big Top. There was a group of people who did stop the war and none of them were in America. They had an unbreakable will and determination to retake their country, which the Vietnamese did at great cost. It’s easy for anyone to get loaded, hang out in public parks with a cardboard sign over your head, and stink. That does not take any effort at all. The sixties free love generation has given themselves far more credit than they will ever deserve.

Talking with Jacinda I realize how angry I am. She listens, and I feel better.

In The Zone

Buying a membership for a local twenty-four hour gym was more expensive than I guessed it would be. I’m so sick of the petty employees up on the hill at work that I decided the less I have to interact with them the better. Their sense of entitlement and spoiled brat behavior disgusts me. The cost of the fitness center membership is worth it to me. After the incident with the Wednesday evening cubicle-dicks dressed up like Olivia Newton-John extras from the “Let’s Get Physical” World Tour I chose to boycott the company exercise room. I suppose now that the company has more or less stabilized from job attrition in the United States, those who still hold a position that comes complete with it’s own little office at Bill and Dave’s are even more arrogant. They’re buying into corporate management’s propaganda that everyone who is left standing is now safe from future layoffs, thinking they will be there until they retire or some shit. Can’t wait to see the look on their faces when they get thrown out with a severance package next year.

I workout at the gym three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I gave myself weekends off to relax and drink beers. My routine is a half hour on a stationary bike in the cardio-room and then I spend 45 minutes to an hour on the weight floor. I alternate between upper body and leg machines until I’m too tired to continue.

On the bike after ten minutes or so I start to zone out. I don’t listen to music or watch the televisions on the far wall of the expansive room. It’s like I’m hypnotized or something. Time disappears until all of a sudden the red LED display on the bicycle tells me the session is complete. Sometimes before the time is up I have a moment of clarity and I scan over all the bodies in front of me, organized by equipment rows. They jump up flights of stairs to nowhere and run in place endlessly. Some of them seem so incredibly active and in good health I wonder why they are here. Others are terribly overweight and I am surprised they don’t drop dead on the spot. Standing up from the bicycle I wipe sweat off of it’s handlebars and control panel. Then I walk away towards the weight room and slide into a vacant machine to punish my arms.

I zone out on the weight machines too, but not as much. There are more distractions on the weight floor. More people wandering about talking with each other or on their cell phones. Some people just don’t know when to ditch their ever important cell phone. It’s like life might end for a half hour without it. As I sit working on my shoulders a stranger will be at the machine directly across from me sitting on another machine babbling into their cell phone about their job, what they bought at the store earlier, or what the neighbors have been up to. It’s all mindless bullshit. And these jerks are blocking anybody else from using the machine they’re on. Seems oblivious, selfish, and inconsiderate of others. Nobody can use that piece of equipment until they get up. But what do I know maybe I just constantly complain about people no matter where I am. I try to tune them out and get back to the zone.

Oddly enough I have observed a new kind of female nitwit here at the twenty four hour gym. It’s some sort of workout-makeup-zombie. These horrible little monsters are rail-thin, wear skin tight metallic outfits that make them look almost naked, and they’ve got makeup caked so thick on their small faces that they might as well have gone to Tammy Faye-Baker’s cosmetics school. Here’s what is so weird about them. They arrive at the gym already dressed in their bodysuits and they proceed to come onto the weight room floor but they never actually exercise. I haven’t seen one of these broads lift a single weight. What they do is position themselves near a busy area and sit on an unused abdominal machine for example, and watch. That’s all they do. Besides talk on a cell phone of course. I suspect these women are here man-hunting. And they need to be seen, badly. I guess it’s an attention thing.

I fade back into the zone until it’s time to leave. At least the beat-downs are helping me get to sleep at night.

Cubicle Dwellers Workout Too

Cubicle people are annoying. I’ve got just as much right as anybody else here to use the employee gym after work. Each day after five o’clock I walk to the workout room and beat myself up pretty good. Generally I hit an exercise bike and peddle away on it until my legs painfully cramp. Then I use some free weights on my arms until my muscles are too sore to pick anything up off the ground. It’s the only way so far I’ve found to knock out some of the stress and get to sleep at night. Ending the relationship with Autumn has really fucked me up, far worse than I would have expected. 

Today I walked into the gym to find about ten other employees from the cubicle maze in Building 1 all decked out in expensive workout clothes. They looked like retards. Almost all of the machines were occupied which was kind of a drag. I walked past a few of them in my street clothes and hopped onto an exercise bicycle. A couple of the cubicle-dicks were looking at me obviously irritated that I was there. Ignoring them I set the bike for a 30min warm up routine and began to peddle. Then this scrawny office skank comes over in her little two-tone gray and pink spandex rig like she’s straight out of an Olivia Newton-John video and yells at me for messing up their regularly scheduled routine. I didn’t know what the hell she was babbling about. Apparently a small group of these jerks show up in the gym at five sharp alternating turns on the machines in a certain order. By being there I was messing it all up for them. How was I supposed to know? It’s not like these self-entitled office workers posted their meeting time on the front doors to the gym or anything.

I didn’t feel like arguing so I just got up and left. As I was driving home I thought about getting a membership at a fitness club or private gym someplace else. There’s a big one nearby the factory, maybe I should just hang out there from now on and skip the employee facility.

Blown Transmission Karma

My emergency room hospital bill arrived.

I didn’t think much about it as I opened the envelope with a sharp letter opener made of mahogany and brass. I got it at the Asian mall in a store that only sold goods made in Thailand. The blade was wavy, like a Balinese Kris. I bought it years ago as a gift for Autumn but when we split up she left it in a bag of stuff at my house. My guess was she didn’t want it anymore. Maybe it would be a reminder she didn’t need on a regular basis, or perhaps she never liked it to begin with. Realizing I would never know either way I continued cutting the envelope open along it’s edge as if I was slitting the belly of a trout I just hauled out of the Eel River.

Unfolding the letter’s contents I thought about how much my insurance company might cover. They warned me before I drove to the local hospital it was “out of network.” I didn’t give a rat’s ass at the time because I thought I was about to keel over dead and the insurance nitwits were trying to get me to go to a clinic that was much further away from where I live. Skimming through the form letter bullshit I landed near the bottom of the second page at a dollar figure. The bill with my insurance coverage came to nearly twelve hundred dollars.

Holy shit.

Looking over the details I noted that the insurance company did get my fifty dollar co-pay the month before. So what the hell was this all about? They didn’t cover a damn thing. Well that isn’t entirely true. The benevolent insurance people did manage to pay for a measly forty-two dollar item. How gracious of them. Then I wondered, why in the hell am I paying these bastards if they can’t take care of straightforward business like a late night emergency room visit? Screw ‘em. I called up that moment and dropped them like a sack of hot bricks. They weren’t going to get another dime out of my wallet.

This is what I get for not paying attention to my insurance election choices when they come up for renewal once a year. Also, this must be some sort of karma payback. Not that I really believe in that junk or anything, but it did make some awkward sense. Years back I had a little slip up while driving Autumn’s car. I never could be certain about it but I may have damaged the manual transmission in her car late one night after work. Coward that I am I failed to bring it up until we were on a fateful road trip to Reno. The five-speed in her Japanese hatchback imploded, leaving a trail of heavy gear oil streaking through the slow lane for a couple of blocks. We ended up stranded over night in a redneck town. That incident cost Autumn over a thousand bucks.

So maybe this was Autumn’s revenge. She caused me enough grief and pain when we broke up to check into a hospital. I got the hateful bill in my face now, for about the same amount of loot. Thinking about it I couldn’t help but wonder if we were even.

BAMA Mission Accomplished

True to his word Top Cat emailed the right people inside our company. He knew which cages to rattle I suppose. Impressed with his follow through I finished reading his emails and attached forwards from other employees feeling like Top Cat meant what he said. In my eyes he had more credibility. More importantly he made the right decision to question our poor handling of BAMA.

Factory Peasant,

Looks like it is solved. Thanks for bringing this up.

Top Cat
FY05: How will We delight our Customers today?

———-

Hello all,

I just exchanged VMs with the owner of the BAMA website and think all is well. We have sent him a copy of a license he is happy to sign. He can then return the manuals (all 530 of them) to the site. To make sure this doesn’t happen again I’ve asked legal to draft a new more user/customer friendly policy and they have agreed. I have also corresponded with almost all of the BAMA users that sent complaining e-mails to our lawyer.

I’m just waiting for an LSCA input to launch the lawyer on writing the new policy.

Mike

———-

In parallel with Top Cat I continued following public discussions on Yahoo equipment forums. Rather wisely, Bill and Dave’s company planted an employee on the forums to help ease the situation. Many Yahoo forum users reacted negatively to our heavy-handed policy against BAMA. Lurking on the forums for some time I watched an employee named “Dave” run public relations interference and solicit suggestions from the forum community with regards to other product documentation they would like to see on our customer-facing website. Prior to the arrival of Dave I used the Yahoo equipment forums on the down low to help people fix their gear or source parts we were not willing to assist them with. In order to throw Dave and any other sneaky employees off my trail I posted to the group infrequently using my alias. Sometimes I deliberately answered forum user’s questions incorrectly or acted like a wingnut just to keep them thinking I was not working for Bill and Dave’s company. After laying low over a period of a couple of weeks and reading Dave’s posts I decided to email him from inside the company to see if there was anything I could do to help.

———-

Hi Dave.

I’ve been following your posts on the Yahoo equipment forum and I wanted to say you’re doing a great job on this. I assume this is happening as an offshoot of the XXXXXXX vs. BAMA episode that took place recently, as well as finally addressing a customer feedback issue with regard to the lack of content on the main company website. This is all really positive and I’m very happy to see it taking place. It’s excellent PR for the company and it will demonstrate to customers we offer some form of support long after a product has been discontinued. It will also be useful to some of us here working in the product lines.

Recently we had a customer 837X RF Sig Gen come back to the factory for warranty repair. Unfortunately when the 837X line was sent into obsolescence and discontinued earlier this year everything as far as documentation was jettisoned from the line. Our technicians didn’t even have a product manual anywhere on site to help with troubleshooting the box and when they checked the XXXXXXX website they were extremely frustrated to discover no .pdf of the service manual was available. So, adding these manuals to the company website will be helpful to external customers as well as internal employees.

I’m sure you’re already aware of the resources available to you for processing manuals into electronic form, but just in case I’ve forwarded along some info from Mike K. He mentions a fairly quick process for scanning service manuals but I have no idea if this is already available to you. In any case good luck with this. If there’s anything I can do to help out feel free to hit me up, I’d be happy to volunteer some of my own time to expedite the project.

Factory Peasant

———-

Factory Peasant,

I’m smiling as I write this. I actually work for Mike K., and I just sent out 3 minutes ago a request to support people across EPSG to track down manuals for this very reason. My message is attached in case you want to forward it along to anyone. I’m trying to make Mike’s “quick process” into something more robust and ongoing. The drive for it comes from consistently strong customer feedback that content for older products is one of the key things missing from our site. We think it will boost ACS/customer satisfaction scores to add these manuals–that’s the bottom line.

I also was in contact with the BAMA folks during their struggles with us, and I will probably approach them to use some of the scans they currently have out on their site. This effort isn’t a result of the BAMA incident, but that certainly points out the importance of these old manuals to our customers. The reception I’ve gotten from the Yahoo group has really been heartening!

I’ve also spoken with Jim S., our legal beagle. We’ve standardized our approach to these manuals providers to let anyone who asks place out-of-support manuals on their sites IF it’s for free. I’ll be mentioning that as I work with customers in the Yahoo group and other places.

Thanks for your support. Please feel free to direct anyone with good support ideas my direction!

Regards,

Dave

Escalation

Hi Pattie and Mike,

I got this escalation from one of my employees and promised I’ll come back to him with some explanations.

Are you aware of this?

Mike, why don’t we have those documentations available on our site?

Please let me know what your take is on this.

Thanks,

Top Cat
FY05: How will We delight our Customers today?

———-

Top Cat,

I did get a call about this. Mike G. (Santa Clara) has responsibility for this. He is creating a new policy and I’ve given him my input. The issue resides around our policy that customers cannot allow downloads of our manuals. It’s actually quite interesting (amusing?) because customers can put them on a CD and send them to someone, or even sell them — they just can’t allow downloads off the web.

My suggestion is to allow BAMA to have online versions of our manuals (at a minimum let them put manuals that are 20+ years old) and change our policy. In return we want a copy of all their Bill and Dave’s company manuals so we can put them on our website. We are always scrounging for all manuals and we’ll put any medium quality PDFs on our website (there is a smooth process to get these into Lit Station and onto the web within a one week timeframe). I believe that BAMA would welcome the offer to put these old manuals on our site. Most customers come to our site first and will have increased satisfaction if they find them on our site.

Top Cat, some of these manuals are available on our web site — although I haven’t done a thorough analysis. We just put 150+ more obsolete manuals on our website. We are trying to balance the requirement for increased customer satisfaction with financial business results. We chose the 150+ manuals based on a thorough analysis of “most often visited product pages that didn’t have manuals online.” There will always be some very old, low volume products not available on our site. I actually welcome the work of BAMA and other groups that have interest in keeping documentation for our old, old products.

Hope this is helpful. This is a small site but it brings to light the passion customers have for our old products. I consider this a great opportunity to raise the awareness on the value of our old documentation. We just got our web ACS survey back. The #1 request, by a large margin, was to increase the content for our old products.

Mike

BAMA Rescue: Legal Threat

Returning to my desk I decided to hit the BAMA website and see if I could find a copy of our lame-ass legal threat letter. Sure enough after logging onto BAMA’s site I scrolled down about one third of the way to find in bright red letters a news article linking to a .pdf copy of our lawyer’s stupid shit. Reading it made me realize how adept we are here at shooting ourselves in the feet. I was also kinda angry. So I followed up with an email to Top Cat that better summed up my thoughts. I didn’t even give Top Cat the few days wait to see what may or may not happen. Fuck it, let’s do this now I thought. Sitting at my technical workbench I hammered out the following email:

———-

Hi Top Cat.

Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me this afternoon. I do appreciate it. To follow up a little further and clarify, I found a letter from Bill and Dave’s company to BAMA regarding this issue and I’ve attached it for you to read. Our Corporate Counsel, James S. mentions BAMA was “marketing” our product manuals from their web site, but I am certain BAMA was providing them completely free of charge. The problems I see here are:

1. We are forcibly removing a useful source of free public information about Bill and Dave’s legacy products that we as a company are not providing.
2. Negative public relations towards Bill and Dave’s and a perception that we refuse to offer the most minimal support for our older products.

I hope some sort of compromise between Bill and Dave’s company and BAMA can be worked out soon. I’d like to suggest that we make .pdf’s of our obsolete/legacy product manauals more available on our main external website. This would eliminate situations like this from happening in the first place, and be useful to customers as well as our own employees. I believe it would also foster a perception that we continue to offer valuable information and support long after a product is no longer in service life.

Thank you,

Factory Peasant

———-

Via email to: k4xl@arrl.net

Re: Copyright Infringement

Dear Sir or Madam:

It has been brought to our attention that you are marketing via your web site http://bama.sbc.edu/ materials as to which the copyright rights belong to XXXXXXX Technologies, Inc. These include but are not limited to manuals for XXXXXXX (formerly Bill and Dave’s) products.

This will confirm that XXXXXXX owns the copyright rights to those materials and to all other such materials for Bill and Dave’s company or XXXXXXX test and measurement products. XXXXXXX has not consented to you copying or distributing them. If you were not previously aware that a copyright owner has the exclusive rights to copy of publicly distribute its works, or if you have been under the mistaken understanding that you have XXXXXXX’s consent to do so, this is to correct that misunderstanding. Further, any implied consent is hereby revoked effectively immediately.

In the absence of a license from XXXXXXX, you must immediately stop copying, publicly distributing, and advertising these materials, and remove them from your site.

Sincerely,

James S.

Corporate Counsel

Rescuing BAMA

I scheduled an Open Door meeting with Top Cat for earlier today. Invoking the Open Door policy with upper level management is always risky, but I had a gut feeling that Top Cat would be willing to listen and act on what I had to say. He’s got some clout with management teams elsewhere in the company and he appears to be well-known by them. Thoroughly disgusted with corporate over the BAMA legal threat I decided to work through management and attempt to beat them at their own game. Armed with a copy of W’s email asking me for help I walked over to Building 4 early this afternoon and sat down to talk with Top Cat in his office concerning this issue.

Top Cat is an odd character. I have heard he worked for twenty years in our Singapore division and is of French descent. He pronounces his name radically different from the way it’s spelled which strikes me as pure comedy. In his office he has a surfboard against a wall and some framed sports jerseys with autographs on them. As I mentioned in the past Top Cat has a habit of communicating directly with employees through daily emails. In his mind I’m sure Top Cat thinks he is doing everybody a favor with his weekly reports and write-ups during overseas business trips, but he has rubbed many employees wrong by doing so. His tone frequently comes across to them as insensitive and naive. Some have judged him as being entirely out of touch with reality. My opinion of him is that he genuinely cares about the company and our customers however he does not fully grasp what is going on at any given time. I can only speculate as to the reasons why.

At two o’clock sharp I met with Top Cat and sat down in his office to discuss the BAMA episode.

I said to him, “There’s something I am concerned with. Earlier this week I received an email from a long time customer of ours that disturbed me. I would like you to take a few moments to read it keeping in mind I have removed his full name and the name of his company.”

Top Cat asked, “Is this something that I should be aware of?”

“Well, yes. Uh, no. I mean I don’t think this is an issue you already know about that is why I am bringing it to your attention now. You should be informed of this.”

I placed W’s letter on the table in front of Top Cat and he began to read.

Factory Peasant,

It appears that lawyers from Bill and Dave’s company have descended on one of the many on line manual sites (which are totally free), in this case the widely used BAMA site, and told them to remove all Bill and Dave’s content or be sued for copyright infringement. These older documents in question clearly show they are from Bill and Dave’s company, and that Bill and Dave’s company is the copyright holder.

Tektronix has already publicly discharged all their older stuff into the public domain for free, and posted notices to that effect. Very admirable. The Bill and Dave’s policy is to forbid this copying or transmission. Now, what makes this especially Bill and Dave’s-like, is that they offer much of this for free off their own site, or don’t offer it at all for any price, in either case, it is hard to perceive the harm involved..

In addition, the lawyer from Bill and Dave’s corporate intimated that a free license to offer this is available, but BAMA failed to secure one. They weren’t then offered one, just told to cut it out. The net is alive with rumblings over this, and none of it is Bill and Dave’s company-positive.

W

Top Cat finished reading. I gave him a few moments to think about W’s email and then I offered my viewpoints.

“I see a number of serious problems here. As I am sure you are aware we have been receiving an increased amount of negative customer feedback on a wide range of issues. There is a growing perception in the industry that we as a company do not offer an adequate level of support to customers. By threatening a popular website like BAMA we are adding more fuel to the fire in that regard. Also, this incident was big news globally within minutes of the legal threat being made public. The last thing we need right now is more negative public relations and that is exactly what this episode is generating. BAMA is used by a wide range of people including electronics students.

“Consider that documentation and manuals for older products are not only useful to past customers, it’s useful to current customers and even our own employees. For example we frequently have to service gear for instrument lines from other divisions. A product group may have a specific use for an older piece of gear that is not replaceable. When it comes to us for repair and troubleshooting we can’t obtain an instrument manual from our own company website which makes the whole repair cycle more difficult. Lately technicians in my area are complaining more often about this. They’re frustrated, and this is such a simple thing to fix. Not including this kind of information on the website is insane. It doesn’t cost much to scan an instrument manual into electronic format and post it on the web. If a small competitor like Tektronix can publish their old material online free of charge why can’t we?”

Top Cat asked, “May I keep a copy of this letter?”

“Yes. That’s for you.” I said.

“I will investigate. Please understand it might take some time so if I don’t respond back to you I have not forgotten.”

“No problem but if I don’t hear from you would you mind if I follow up in an email to you?” I asked him.

Top Cat nodded that would be fine. I thanked him, stood up from his table and went back to work. I thought to myself this would be interesting to see if he actually follows through with helping BAMA.

Clandestine Service Center

During the past week I have been busy as hell. Loyal customers of Bill and Dave’s test and measurement products who cannot get any support from our service centers have discovered I am the last stop inside the company for a shred of support. In my spare time and on breaks, I research our legacy products and provide information the company is unwilling or unable to provide. It is a sad state of affairs. A few months ago I asked the Bossman if he would be willing to hook me up with an engineering account so I could research our records for Nixie tubes. That’s a personal project of mine. Knowing that we were major manufacturers of Nixies back in the 1960s and 70s I figured we had to have some pretty good records scanned into the company’s internal databases by now. Sure enough, I was correct. Once I got in there I downloaded all kinds of good data sheets and engineering drawings.

Our company is out of control in many aspects. For example, not long after Bossman authorized an engineering account I got a weird email from a division in Scotland informing me I had to upgrade to a hotrod laptop computer. At first I thought the email was some sort of a joke, but it turned out there was no oversight on their part as to whether or not I was in fact an engineer. They only saw me on the system logging in to the engineering databases on an old PC therefore I automatically qualified for a new computer no questions asked. I fucked them and took the fastest laptop they had. Since then my research efforts have been drastically more efficient. Thanks, corporate chumps.

There are a number of factors that are placing long time customers in a nasty situation. One, when we obsolete a product or instrument line we don’t have equivalent platforms available to replace them with. Marketing says we do but the plain reality is we don’t. All a tech-savvy customer has to do is look at the performance specs of the new replacement product. If the specs do not meet or exceed the specs of the previous instrument it is not an equivalent box. Period. More often than not this is the case. Two, we do not offer any product support on legacy equipment unless the customer paid for long term extended service or had it in their contract with us up front to provide up to ten years worth of support after reaching obsolescence. That means once a product is jettisoned there is no online manuals available from our external website, no part information, no schematics, nothing. Basically Bill and Dave’s company takes you on a cruise out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, kicks you overboard, says “Peace!” and keeps on sailing.

Part of this is a shrewd marketing strategy to force customers into buying our new crap. Service call centers won’t help you with part information, JEDEC numbers so you can source parts on your own, manuals, or anything really. That’s where I come in.

Last week I provided service and parts to customers all over the United States and Canada, South America, Australia, and even Serbia. I have access to hundreds of obsolete product manuals on microfilm as well as tens of thousands of component data sheets and drawings also on microfilm. Most remaining divisions don’t have these records anymore and even our main manual library in Silicon Valley is lacking in material. Armed with these resources, decades of the company’s newsletter “Bench Briefs” and my engineering account I have been kicking things into high gear. I’ve cut deals with technicians in vintage departments to get desperate customers unavailable components and cross reference parts to industry standard items. My whole goal is to keep customers swimming rather than sinking. I’m having a good time doing it, too. All of this is under the radar so to speak. Nobody in management or outside of this division will ever know about what is going on.

Microfilm records are badass. The only problem is some genius decided to throw away one model of microfilm reader. They kept the ones that weren’t meant for the abundance of our records so they have to be focused manually and are a pain to print out. We can’t do anything right around here anymore. Printing manuals for a desperate customer is tedious and time consuming. I recently decided to provide those only if they were for a simple unit like a digital time clock or a basic frequency counter. Otherwise the paperwork is a beast to deal with.

W emailed me a few days ago with some bad news. Looks like the management fuckups pulled another boner that I predict is going to backfire on us heavily. Since we don’t provide instrument manuals for old equipment on our website as a courtesy, a privately run website called BAMA has been collecting our material for distribution in electronic format and making it available free of charge to anyone who wants it. BAMA stands for “Boat Anchor Manual Archive.” What are you going to do with an old oscilloscope that you can’t figure out how to trouble shoot or operate? Tie a rope on it and throw it overboard to anchor your Chris Craft. That’s about as useful as it’s going to be if you can’t figure out how it operates or how to fix it.

BAMA is a popular website for ham radio enthusiasts, electronics students, retired engineers, and huge nerds like me. Corporate decided BAMA is committing copyright infringement by providing our obsolete equipment manuals even though we don’t have physical copies of them anymore. Hell, some of that documentation is even useful to techs working on instrument lines internally to keep critical pieces of gear alive. So, our legal team descended upon BAMA with a threat letter. Cease providing manuals or be sued into oblivion. Brilliant. With all the bad publicity we’ve already got this was not what we needed right now. W told me the news of our legal threat went worldwide within 80 minutes of hassling BAMA. The news spread like wildfire on Yahoo message boards, electronics websites, etc. That’s how W found out about it and he’s asked for my help in rescuing BAMA.

I thought about it for most of today and I may have a plan on how to get BAMA out of this mess.

Autumn Dream

Walking along a gravel driveway I looked up to see Autumn’s house. It was a large well maintained Victorian with a wide open porch wrapping around the whole building. The place was five or six stories. I couldn’t remember how many years she had been living there but I knew it was a long time. The front yard was immaculately groomed with tasteful arrangements of brightly colored flowers placed along the driveway’s edge. To my right I glanced over to see Autumn had planted a garden of sunflowers that had grown quite tall. In the distance on her property there was a single, giant oak tree.

Stopping for a moment I looked upwards towards the sky. A few wisps of pure white clouds were here and there, but it was a mostly calm clear blue day. Peacefully still air. With each footstep forward my black wingtips crunched down hard on clean gray shale. Then I remembered I had to be extremely quiet. If I made enough noise her dragon would hear me, and I’d be toast. The last time I was here I got caught.

Autumn’s house is guarded by a dragon. I may not have mentioned that before. It’s one of those flying fire breathing types with an extra bad temper. Fortunately it’s eyesight is rather poor, but it’s lacking vision has been more than made up for by it’s keen hearing abilities. I would have to creep through her house to the very top floor without making a sound. Standing at the front door I placed my hand on it’s decorative iron latch and silently let myself in.

Suddenly I was standing on the last step of an endless flight of stairs. I teleported to the top floor of the house.

Near the attic is where Autumn dwells. Why she chose to live and sleep there I never really understood. But that’s the way it always has been. Autumn’s bedroom door was wide open. Walking stealthily as possible on hardwood flooring I arrived in her doorway. Without saying anything Autumn seemed to already know I was there, she sat up from her desk and stared at me. My unannounced visit had interrupted her afternoon reading. Autumn looked beautiful, her jet black hair shone brightly in sunlight coming from a nearby window. She was wearing a long, flowing cream colored dress that hugged her curves nicely. Her lips were the color of blood.

Opening my mouth to speak Autumn swiftly rushed up out of her chair and across the room to where I was standing. I needed to tell her something.

“I…”

Autumn’s hand rose up towards my mouth. Placing a finger across my lips she said sternly, “You have to be quiet. You know this. Don’t say anything or it will hear you.”

“But… I…”

“Be quiet.” Autumn frowned.

“I… mi…”

With a strong rush of wind a huge hole opened in a outer wall of Autumn’s vintage house. I could see blue sky outside through that gaping void. The dragon materialized out of thin air and came flying through the wall. Down the hallway like a Japanese Kamikaze pilot, it was headed for me on a collision course. Autumn saw it at the same moment I did, and she gracefully took a few steps backwards away from me through her bedroom doorway. There was nowhere to hide, nothing I could do. I was caught again and I knew it. Flying with fury and speed I was knocked backwards by the dragon’s passing body. As I was falling away, Autumn continued to stand there blankly staring at me. I had made a long tiresome journey to say something to Autumn. Once again it was a wasted effort.

Barely managing to speak, I said “I miss you.”

Autumn couldn’t hear me of course. There was too much noise coming from the hallway commotion. It didn’t matter anyway because I fell backwards over a wooden railing and did a somersault into nothingness. Free falling downwards into total darkness I couldn’t see anything beneath me. I was picking up speed descending towards a bottomless pit. High above Autumn’s house became a tiny speck far away, then eventually it disappeared and was replaced by thousands of stars. They were everywhere in all directions as far as I could see. A terrible sense of despair and sorrow, welled up inside me. I was feeling pain in every part of my body as I continued to fall.

With a strong shock my whole body jumped and twitched into consciousness. I was sleeping on my stomach in the exact position I had been free falling. Rolling over in bed I immediately kicked off my covers and sat up. Placing my face in my hands I continued to feel a great sense of loss. I sat there like that motionless for quite a while shaking myself free of a sleepy confusion and a vivid nightmare.

Today was going to be a difficult day.

Most Excellent

At home I sit in front of a television or a computer. At work I sit at a technical workbench all day long. For years this has been my daily routine. I’m out of shape and due to breaking up with Autumn I am stressed to a level I have not experienced before. Hence the extreme anxiety diagnosis from that emergency room doctor. Knowing nothing serious is medically wrong with me I decided maybe now is the time to start working out at a gym or fitness center. If I can beat myself up on gym equipment enough I hopefully can become tired and sleep better. Probably help out with the stress, too.

Between the cafeteria and Building 2 there is a well equipped gym for employee use. Bill and Dave’s company spent a ton of money loading the gym up with all sorts of exercise machines. I haven’t taken advantage of that benefit until now. Today after my shift was over I decided to stop in there and ride a stationary bike. Nobody else was there, I had the whole facility to myself.

DJ Danny Mac burst through the gym’s double doors about twenty minutes into my session on the bicycle. He was wearing his usual attire, long sleeve khaki button up collar shirt with jeans. He had a pencil jammed behind one ear and a small yellow paper notebook in his hand. You will never see him leave his notebook behind. Without missing a step he dropped his notebook on the ground, leaped onto a machine and started doing rapid pull-ups. He didn’t say anything to me but DJ Danny Mac noticed I was present.

I watched him as he tore it up. No breaks on the machine he was using. For such a scrawny little guy I was impressed at how many repetitions he cut loose without breaking a sweat. Just as fast as he had barged into the room he dropped off the machine, picked up his ratty notebook and walked over to where I was riding.

“What are YOU doing in here?” He asked. DJ Danny Mac seemed surprised and intently curious at my presence in the employee gym.

I explained that I was going through a bad time because of a relationship ending and my reasons for wanting to tire myself out before going home. He listened to my story about Autumn and the emergency room visit, nodding occasionally. When I finished up with my reasoning for wanting to get in better shape DJ Danny Mac smiled wide and said, “Most Excellent.” Then he shoved his way through the gym’s double doors and was off like a shot.

Many of our coworkers don’t know this, but DJ Danny Mac is an ex-Marine. You wouldn’t ever peg him for it due to his small size and mild demeanor. Frequently TT makes fun of him when he’s out on the instrument line. She will get his attention and knock with her fist on the edge of a workbench and ask him, “Do you know what that is?” He shakes his head no and then TT will say, “That’s you trying to get out of the closet!” She’s rough on the crew sometimes, but so hilarious. The guy is married and has kids though. TT enjoys beating him down for no particular reason. DJ Danny Mac just doesn’t look like your stereotypical leatherneck Marine type. It’s his motivated, unstoppable drive that kind of gives him away. I didn’t realize it before today, but he must go back and forth between the Engineering department in Building 4 and our production line in Building 2 dozens of times a day. With each trip I suspect he stops in here to churn through pull-ups like they are nothing and then continues on to his next project out on the shop floor. That’s very Marine-like and it’s one of the things that sets those guys apart from the rest of the services. High motivation.

A Burned Bridge

As soon as I came home from the emergency room the only thing I could think of was to call Autumn. Daylight was upon the world, people were hustling about heading off to work. Ten million dingbat housewife soccer moms were busy fucking up traffic in their mini-vans; taking their kids to school while playing with their makeup and hair in rear view mirrors stopped dead in front of emerald green lights. They descended upon the city like a plague. I expected Autumn must have been at the office by then. I was so strung out that I could hardly function. With shaking hands I dialed Autumn’s work number from memory. A coworker answered. I asked for Autumn which was followed by a long, hesitant pause. The office employee probably recognized my voice and wanted to ask Autumn sneaky-like if I should be put through. Surprisingly, she took the call. I don’t know why I did it, but I told her I was unable to sleep all week and how I checked in to the hospital because of sharp pains in my chest. Autumn listened as I talked for a minute until I had nothing left to say. Her response was, “I’m sorry.”

Autumn’s voice was cold. The phone call ended immediately afterward. There was no point in calling her again. I should not have bothered in the first place.

What was I expecting? I mean what else could she say? If this was a subconscious attempt on my part to win her sympathy or get her back it was futile. I made up my mind that morning never to speak to Autumn again. This relationship breakup was so avoidable and pointless. Thinking about it made me angry. I would treat Autumn just like my father from this day forward. There would be no phone calls, emails, hand written letters, or messages passed through mutual friends. If at some point she tries to get in touch with me I will ignore Autumn completely. She’s a non-person now. Someone who will be shunned and eventually forgotten like a bad dream.

Something else really hit home from my late night hospital visit. For the first time in my life I knew I had no support from anyone close. My mother was dead, I would never speak to Dad again, and my sister rarely had anything to do with me under any circumstances. If I was suddenly ill with a serious condition there wouldn’t be anyone there for me rely upon. If I got into a brutal accident and died nobody would care. This was a sobering moment. If and when news reached my father that I kicked the bucket he would probably be happy about it. I doubt my younger sister would give a shit. On the other side of the family my Aunt and Uncle would probably be the only people I could count on. They would surely be upset if I met with an untimely demise, but it might be weeks after the fact before anyone contacted them.

I felt strange, and suddenly alone like never before.

Good Evening Mister Torrance

I haven’t been able to sleep for a week. I can’t stop dwelling about my failed relationship and losing Autumn.

Every night as I tried to sleep a sharp pain in my chest kept me wide awake. Didn’t matter if I turned on my side, lay flat on my back, or rolled over on my stomach. I could not get comfortable. It felt like a corroded railroad spike had pierced me below my heart and was sticking out behind my left shoulder blade. Dwelling on it seemed to make it hurt more. I flopped around like a fish out of water trying to sleep. As days began to pass without any solid rest things at work became more and more difficult. I was unable to focus on what I was doing at any given moment. That’s one of the things that adversely affects me faster than anything else. Lack of sleep. Really fucks me up. On the job my chest discomfort nagged at me but it wasn’t as fierce during the day.

Around two in the morning last night the stabbing pain seemed to worsen significantly and I started to worry something was up, like I was heading for a heart attack. Since I couldn’t crash out and I felt insomniac crazy I decided to fire up the computer and research medical websites for symptoms I was experiencing. Sitting in my office I read page after page of online self-help medical advice. Everything seemed to indicate something was really wrong- which of course made me much more anxious. Thinking about my options I decided to call my insurance company to find out how much a hospital emergency room visit might cost me. It surely would be better to go to the hospital and have them tell me I got a life-threatening condition brewing and catch it before it’s too late. Or they could inform me I’m fine. Either way I’d be better off knowing for sure instead of lying around the house still wondering and worrying about what the hell is going on with my insides.

Last November my HMO went bankrupt. I’d been with them for over a decade. That particular HMO was a good deal. I had premium medical coverage anywhere I went for a reasonable monthly deduction. Eventually I took the HMO for granted. When they financially spun out of control and shut down I wasn’t paying too much attention at the time. So I didn’t make another insurance election choice before a few months passed with a deadline. Bill and Dave’s company chose for me. They put me on a system I’d never heard of before with an unknown medical insurance provider. This was my first time dealing with them as a new customer of their service. When I called I burned twenty minutes navigating my way through a rat maze of useless phone menu choices and canned pre-recorded messages. By the time I finally got to speak with a living person I was fairly irritated. Explaining my situation to a complete stranger over the phone made me feel kind of stupid, but what I really wanted to know was how much loot a hospital visit would set me back.

The insurance company employee did not give me a straight answer. My co-pay is fifty bucks. I wanted to go to a good hospital that is less than a couple miles away from where I live. The insurance minion wanted me to go to a clinic I never heard of located one town away, miles further because it was “in network.” I opted against the late night clinic adventure. It sounded bad. I put on some clothes and drove to the local hospital.

When I got to the emergency room lobby not a soul was there. Behind a stylish counter you’d expect to see at your bank a fat blond haired woman wearing a light green jumpsuit and white coat handed me a stack of paperwork to fill out. I scribbled personal information across each page and then was whisked away down a long corridor leading to wide open rooms with dark green curtains. The curtains were on rails in the middle of each room splitting them in two. I was told to take off all my clothes and put on a ridiculous robe made of thin cloth. No sooner had I put on the robe when a small army of hospital staff placed me in a reclining chair, hooked me up to an I.V., pasted white discs all over my chest, and clipped a plastic spring-loaded sensor on my finger. A machine directly behind me and above my head beeped with each beat of my heart. I had little clear plastic hoses under my nose feeding me cool air. If I was feeling stupid before, now I really felt dumb. Nurses fled away from my side of the room. Nurses failed to return. I sat alone for a long time wondering what may happen next.

Chest pain stabbed through me towards my back.

Across from me an old man with a crater-marked bright red nose as big as a golf ball and a head covered in silver white hair lay in a similar reclining chair. The curtains blocking off each side of the hospital room were drawn back so I could see him. He was passed out cold breathing steadily, fully dressed in his street clothes. Beyond him through an open doorway on the far wall, high pitched female voices chit-chatted away. Their conversation was inane. I could clearly hear one woman rambling on and on about her household interior redecoration project, her living room curtains and kitchen redesign. Pages were being flipped in a magazine. Those nurses were completely absorbed in their mundane banter as if it was more important than their own lives.

The old man lying on the other side of my hospital room twitched. I watched him from the corner of my eye. Unconscious, he manged to flick a sensor off his left hand with two fingers. Medical gear began to sound an alarm which shortly thereafter produced an annoyed nurse. Walking next to old guy she picked up the sensor and shoved it with rough force onto a fingertip, then left quickly in a huff. This was interrupting her all-important kitchen cabinet discussion after all. A minute later my geriatric room mate repeated his crime. Without opening his eyes once he ditched the sensor. It dangled from a cord a few inches off the floor, swinging gently next to his chair’s metal frame. Again the nurse came into my emergency room but this time she was visibly angry. She shoved that sensor assembly back into place and with a chiding tone to her voice she told the passed-out man not to remove his heart rate sensor again. He didn’t hear a word she said.

A tall man wearing a bone white coat came out of nowhere and stood next to the red-nosed old guy. He raised his voice enough to practically shout in his ear saying, “Hi Mister Torrance! What seems to be the trouble tonight!”

Fidgety, the old man squirmed a little. His eyes opened and he cocked his head towards the doctor. Mister Torrance appeared to be trying to say something but it wasn’t coming out. His face turned red as he mustered up enough strength to control his body. He yelled, “mmmmmMMMMMmmM uuuuuuUUUNNNNNKKKK!”

Without missing a beat the doctor yelled back at him. “What was that mister Torrance? I didn’t quite hear what you said!”

“MMMMMMMMHHHHhhhh UUUUUUunnnnk!” As mister Torrance shouted unrecognizable words from his lips he allowed himself to slouch further into his chair’s cushions. Whatever it was he wanted the doctor to know he sure put some effort into it. Then he had to lie back and rest like he had just forced a coke bottle out of his ass. I was entirely fascinated by the scene. I propped myself up a little to my right so I could see better.

The old man’s last name made me think of Jack Nicholson’s character, Mr. Torrance in “The Shining.” I remembered a scene in the film. Mr. Torrance sat at the saloon of a vacant mountain resort having a conversation with an imaginary barkeep who poured him round after round of stiff drinks. As Mr. Torrance got up to pay his bill, the barman calmly said to him “Your money is no good here, Mr. Torrance.” With a smile he puts a few crumpled bills back in his pocket and leaves…

Neither the doctor or I could figure out what mister Torrance was saying. Again and again he shouted out the same two mangled words as if his mouth was filled with marbles and somebody had punched him in the face so hard that he had a fat lip. But, as I listened I thought it was starting to make a sliver of sense. The first part, he was maybe trying to say “I’m” or “I am.” The second word still wasn’t coherent enough yet to make any translation.

“mmmmMMMMMM! rrrRRRRRUUUUNNNNNNKKKK!”

I got it before the doctor did. Mister Torrance was trying to tell the whole hospital he was drunk. “I’m Drunk” is what he wanted us to know. Man, to be that far gone he really must be a booze hound. I imagined he must have been hammered on rotgut liquor walking around loose in the middle of the night downtown and passed out cold in a busy street. Somebody must have found him and called an ambulance. That’s how he showed up here tonight I bet.

Hours passed. A technician wheeled in a mobile contraption and zapped my chest while I wore a heavy vinyl shield across my stomach and legs. Must have been an x-ray machine. I didn’t know how long ago I checked myself in to the emergency room because there weren’t any clocks. Guessing that dawn was upon me I told myself I would not be going in to work today if I was lucky enough to get out of here without any surgery or terminal illness.

While I waited for something to happen mister Torrance passed out again. The bum. Eventually a doctor wearing one of those green jumpsuits came in and pulled up a chair next to me. He had a big gray handlebar mustache that made him look like a wild west cowboy. The doctor flipped through pages stuck on a clipboard and asked me how I was feeling. I told him about the chest pains and that I had lost sleep for a week. Curious, he asked me if anything in particular was bothering me, or if there was something that recently changed at home. I told him about my breakup with Autumn and that I was very unhappy about it.

He asked, “Do you smoke?”

“Nah, I got bad lungs. Asthma. So I don’t smoke anything” I said.

The doctor seemed pleased. “That’s good you don’t smoke. Did you take any medication earlier this evening?”

“Yeah. I took some Ibuprofen.”

“You couldn’t have done anything better for yourself. Ibuprofen will really help out. Okay, so we took x-rays of your lungs and they are clear of blockages. Everything around your heart looks good. Blood tests came up clean, no problems there. Your heart rate is a little higher than normal, but it’s nothing serious. What I think you’re experiencing is extreme anxiety. Go home, and take it easy. Go ahead and use some more Ibuprofen every few hours and if the chest pains become worse all of a sudden by all means come back.”

“So there’s nothing serious like a clogged artery or a tumor or something?”

The doctor said, “Nope. Everything seems fine.”

I got dressed and split.