Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Ok, the guy who took all my boards and pre-dipped them awhile ago got moved to machining. YAY! But before he left, he made about 50 flat cables. We have to measure them out, cut them to the correct length, put a cramp on one end, take a razor blade and split the tips of the other end to separate the individual wires, then strip those tips, tin them, and solder two crimped wires and an LED to them. There are 8 stripped wires, and we have 4 wires to solder onto them, and they go in a two-on-two-off pattern to specific wires. So, it takes awhile to do this flat cable. That's life, it takes time to do quality work, get over it, right?

WRONG. Mr. NC decided to speed up the process by dipping the wires that we needed soldered together into the tinning pot and letting the heat from the tinning pot bind them. Well, ok, it's a waste of tinning because the wire insulation gets that stuff really dirty and then we have to scrape the top off, but I'm not high enough on the food chain to tell him they need to be soldered, so I go about my business and let him go about his.

Then all the cables got sent back downstairs (the day after he got moved to machining) because the connections were breaking left and right because they weren't soldered together like they were supposed to be. So since he's not there anymore, I volunteer to fix them. I have to take wire cutters and snip off every bit of heat-shrink without cutting the wire insulation, so that's a nerve-wracking, slow, and tedious task. Then I have to separate all the wires from the cables, then I have to make sure the cables are stripped and tinned in the right spots (because some of them weren't, I have no idea how that even happened.) Then I have to slide heat shrink back onto the wires, solder the wires back onto the cables, and use a heat gun to shrink the heat shrink over the solder joints.

In short, it takes forever to make these, and when we have to take them apart and re-make them, it takes forever squared. Urgh.

And all this would have been all right, he had no idea that they were going to break and need re-done, don't be too mad at the kid.

UNTIL. He comes prancing back into assembly, one of the other guys calls him over and says "Hey check this out, all your flat cables are wrong and she has to fix them all for you." And ok, I wouldn't have necessarily called him over, it's not like he can do anything about it now because he can't leave machining for any large length of time, so why make him feel bad? But he could at least say "Oops my bad," right?

WRONG. Instead he says "I don't care. I'm in machining!" (To the guy who called him over, who just so happens to be the guy he beat out in interviewing for the machining job. So that was simultaneously rude to me, to say he didn't care that I had to fix 50 of his screw-ups because he can't handle following rules, it was also rubbing the machining job in the other guy's nose. I am so not impressed with this douchebag.)

So. I'm ready to be done with that turd. We got a new guy in to replace him, and we're slowly getting to know him. I asked him about his family today, where we was from and such. And he said that he used to live back east, but when his town started integrating blacks and whites his folks wanted nothing to do with it so they all moved to Idaho. What. The. Truck! Why the hell isn't everyone already integrated, and since when do people cheerfully admit racism to a room of strangers (not one of whom even batted an eyelash, by the way?) The guy is in his 40s or 50s, I thought integration happened a hundred years ago. And I'm just not cool with racists.

Then he started talking about his sisters, and he said he hopes to get some land here so that his favorite one will come live with him because he loves her so, and he told her that he'd be her boyfriend until she found one here (at which point I did pipe up and say that's kinda creepy) and he responded with "Well it's too bad she's my sister, otherwise I'd marry her." And he was being dead serious. Not a twinkle in his eye of mischief or trickery, not a fluctuation off of his matter-of-fact tone of voice, nothing. Dead serious. What. The. Truck!

So we went from one guy who messed up a truckton of stuff and cost us way too many manhours to fix it because he can't follow instructions, to an incestuous racist guy. I don't even. Why. WHY.