Attitudes are Contageous

The Biotech Mecca seems to be hard on mechanical designers. Our current designer is Buffalo Bill. (His real name is not Bill, but he does hale from Buffalo.) Incidentally, Buffalo is an "All American City". I know this because it is announced in proud white letters when you enter the city on I-90. "Welcome to Buffalo - an All American City." But, I digress.

Buffalo Bill came to us from a temp agency. (Body shop in the local parlance). After a couple of months, Buffalo Bill was offered a full time gig at another company and left. He was an adequate mechanical designer (at least he was a good draftsman, which was all we really used him for.) We replaced him with another body shop hire who was very quick to come up with designs with minimal input. Unfortunately, he had the annoying property of being a first class A**hole. I think the final straw was when he referred to my boss as a "Punkass Motherf***er". Funny, that kind of thing doesn't tend to make you popular, and he was let go. This particular character will require almost as many posts as Captain Fantastic, so I will let it go for now.

It turned out that Buffalo Bill was available again, so we hired him back on an hourly basis. The Mecca was somewhat broke, so they didn't want the overhead of actually hiring him as a permanent employee. A promise was made however, that he would be offered a full time position as soon as more suckers... I mean investors were found.

To make a long story short, we got the money (the one advantage of having Swiper the Fox as your CEO), and Buffalo Bill was offered a contract. One of the terms of the contract was that he take a 5% pay cut in exchange for medical, dental and vision benefits, as well as 2 weeks paid vacation. By my calculations, the vacation and paid statutory holidays makes up almost 5%, so the other benefits were free. Seemed fair to me. It seemed fair to the Sarcastic Brit, who is nominally his manager. It did not apparently, seem fair to Buffalo Bill, as he tried to do an end run around the Sarcastic Brit and negotiate with our boss. This has been going on for roughly four months now, and Buffalo Bill becomes more belligerent by the day.

The original idea was that Buffalo Bill would clean up the drawings from his predicessor (and also successor), fix a few problems with the design and get things ready for manufacturing. He also offered to order stuff for the instrument builds.

The first sign that there was trouble was when he had no idea what he had ordered. The next sign was when he didn't know how many of each part was used in the system. He ordered single pieces of parts when two were needed and ordered sets of five when one part was needed. This may not seem so bad, until you recall that he had spent the previous two months checking every part of the CAD model, had changed many of the parts, and was supposed to be in charge of the bill of materials.

Buffalo Bill asked if we could assign Jar Jar to help with the bill of materials. That should have been a clue that he was in REAL trouble. In general, getting Jar Jar to do anything right is much more difficult than just doing it yourself. I should have clued in at that point and asked to hire him some real help. I was too busy to think about it.

Next, we hired a friend of my boss. Although I have no idea what my boss does all day, and I wouldn't want to ask him to design anything, he is pretty good at judging competence. His friend is fantastic. Flyboy is a member of the Airforce Reserves, and approaches his job with true military discipline. His work has not escaped the notice of the management at the Biotech Mecca. He is actually competent. I'm sure that it will be career limiting in the long run.

We figured that Flyboy would be welcomed with open arms. He was cleaning up a mess that Buffalo Bill would no longer have to deal with. In fact, Buffalo Bill has shown Flyboy nothing but poorly veiled hostility.

The next discovery was that there were many mistakes in the model. The "minor tweaks" had resulted in several key assemblies not fitting together when we had them fabricated. The last set of parts fit together, so the errors were new. In fact, when we tally up the errors, I suspect that we are running at about a 30% error rate. Not good for a product that is supposed to be going into manufacturing.

The Sarcastic Brit decided that it was time to act. He consulted Jaba (who is actually a pretty good manager) and asked him how to approach the problem. The advice was sound: focus on the fact that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. Offer to help. The Sarcastic Brit suggested that he and I take up all of the remaining design tasks, leaving Buffalo Bill to integrate the stuff into the overall CAD model and produce blueprints. This was on Friday. Buffalo Bill seemed happy enough.

On Monday morning, I got into work to find a post-it note on Buffalo Bill's monitor. It read something like "you are a nobody. Just shut up and do the drawings". Apparently he had a chance to think about his discussion with the Sarcastic Brit and come to the conclusion that we were getting ready to fire him. Of course, up until that point, the thought had never crossed my mind. In fact, I thought that he was doing a good job, and he was just stretched way too thin.

Over the course of the week, Buffalo Bill's attitude has gotten progressively worse, despite the fact that the Sarcastic Brit and myself have both tried to assure him that he is not in line for the firing squad.

After a week of Buffalo Bill's surly comments and generally antagonistic attitude to several members of the staff, the Sarcastic Brit and myself were summoned to a meeting with our boss. His question was simple, "Are we hiring another mechanical designer?" I changed the subject. I had just finished an interview with a mechanical engineering candidate - Cindy Lou Who - who when asked to disign a simple mechanism and record her assumputions, recorded the assumption that the device had to be designed. She left us with a blank screeen and a couple of scribbles on the pad. Unfortunately, she was better than the guy we interviewed last week. When compared to that, I'm not so quick to get rid of Buffalo Bill. Being called a Punkass Bitch seems like a viable alternative.

Needless to say, we have a problem. We have a mechanical designer who can't cope with the fact that he makes mistakes and is jealous of our new technician because he is cool, and is able to banter with the Sarcastic Brit and myself. Unfortunately, Flyboy is about ready to throttle him (and could probably do it blindfolded with both hands behind his back.) This could get ugly. Of course, the Sarcast Brit will probably try to say a few words to smooth out the situation, but he has earned his title, and will most likely only succeed in turning up the heat. Perhaps I should book some vacation. Things could be ugly next week.