The paycheck is not important. Go about your business.

Greetings. I must apologize for not blogging more, but things haven't been quite as utterly stupid lately. I can almost believe that the Mecca is a viable company, and that we will make it. Then, I take stock of things and think that I must be REALLY crazy.

The competent accountant finishes his last day on Monday. He was the guy who did the payroll. That made him the canary in the coal mine. I used to ask him routinely - Are we going to get paid this week? His answer was always, "I'm still here, aren't I? When the money's gone, so am I." Needless to say, I have to question the state of the Mecca's finances. My understanding is that it's not that bad... and they haven't cut my pay recently, so that's a good sign.

What scares me is that the accountant did all of the things that made it worth my while to go to work. He did the payroll, administered the benefits, and made sure that, in general, Swiper and his crew of merry backstabbers didn't treat the employees in a fashion that violated too many labor laws. With the accountant leaving, the Accountant that does the SOX compliance (or not... as the case may be) will be doing payroll. Yikes. He is always out back doing business in Spanish on his cell phone. If you walk in on him when he's holding a private teleconference in the meeting room, he scuttles like a cockroach. When things get really bad, he resorts to using really bad English in order to make you think that he's too dumb to be up to something. Not the kind of guy I want responsible for making sure I get paid, and can therefore pay my own creditors.

The "Director of Finance" is a used car salesman that feels it necessary to shake your hand every time he talks to you. (Let me tell you that grows tiresome really quickly. He drives a gigantic truck with Florida plates (does he commute in to California?). Moreover, he takes up four parking spaces with this monster truck that he supposedly "inherited" from his brother. Ironically, I asked him why he was running Florida plates one day, and the story terminated in his inquiring as to my interest in buying the thing. As I said, he really is a used are salesman.

The HR functions are going to be handled by the "Executive Assistant". This is the replacement for the Horsie Princess. I actually like the Horsie princess much better than this woman. She keeps bragging to the Dragon lady about how she "Married herself a white boy". She is Latino... which I didn't think was that far from "white", but apparently, being a Canuck, I am not cultured in such things. I really don't care about her white husband, or white kids the she brags about. However, it would be really nice if she would answer the phone when she is supposed to be working the switchboard. Too bad she's too busy flirting with all of the senior managers. (That would be men and women.) If you are a VP, she has all the time in the world for you. If you are low level scum, she can't even be bothered to talk to you. My desk is literally one cubicle from the front desk, and yet she will call me two or three times in fifteen minutes to come and get packages when they come in. If they are offending her so much, she could bring them over. Needless to say, I don't see any useful HR functions being filled there.

Then, there is the fact that Flyboy will end up taking on a bunch of the accountant's shipping duties. That would be fine, except MNB keeps threatening to fire him. Of course, I should probably talk to MNB, as Flyboy supposedly reports to me. I should probably feel upset about my boss threatening my employee all the time. Unfortunately, It just makes me feel relieved, it means that MNB can get his threats out of his system before he runs into me.

In short, the guy who does everything useful (at least as far as the things that are important to me... like getting paid) has quit. There has been no real plan to replace him, and everybody who is supposed to be taking up his duties is either lazy, incompetent, or likely to be sacked for no good reason.

It all seems to be running fine, until you take a good look under the hood.

Welcome Back

I have been back from vacation for two days. I haven't quit yet. That is good, I guess. But, it was a close thing.

MNB told me that I had to create unpacking instructions for the instrument, and that they had to be done for a meeting at three o'clock that afternoon. I will admit that I wasn't sure who I was writing the instructions for, as the equipment would be installed by our service engineer, who is actually competent and doesn't need me to tell him how to take the instrument out of the box.

At about noon, MNB came by my desk and told me that if I didn't have the document finished in time for the meeting, he would kick me out of the meeting. Of course none of the other guys had finished their stuff for the meeting, and they knew about it a week ago. I mentioned to MNB that I thought it was a bit unfair that he give me so little notice.

His response was "I sent you an email before you left for vacation. It was in the meeting invite. Check it now."

So, as MNB waited impatiently while I dug up the meeting invitation. I looked at the invite, and noticed that there was only one task on that list, which was order the crates. I told MNB "The only thing on this list for me is to order the crates. They have been here for over a week. No mention of the packing instructions. Do you wish to continue playing this game?"

His response was "No."

The meeting of infamy happened, and sure enough, despite the short notice, I was closer to finished than anybody else. He didn't kick anybody else out of the meeting though. After the meeting, I pointed out that he had scheduled the meeting over our weekly one on one meeting (which is really just a scheduled chance to threaten and insult me). He told me that he had already spent enough time with me today, and he knew what I was working on. No other interaction was necessary.

Thanks. Of course he did finish up by saying "Welcome back. We missed you." Really, he must have meant that he missed having a punching bag around. Either that, or he's getting soft.

We shall see. It's good to be back. Well... not really, now that you mention it.

The Official Airline of the Biotech Mecca

Greetings.

I apologize for the hiatus, but I have been back in the homeland (that would be Canada), renewing my driver's license. Apparently, my old license has expired, and if I let it go for too long, I will have to start back at the beginning, should I ever want to return home. If you really want to know... read this. Of course, I don't know why I would ever consider such an action, seeing as how loved I am at the Mecca, and how well the company is doing.

In any case, I decided to return back to the land of ice and snow (No... not Washington DC, although I did end up there.) I booked my flights based on the cheapest flights that I could find on the days that I wanted them. I didn't pay attention to who was offering the flights. Strange, I had forgotten my experience going to Maui, where they sat us on a plane for eight hours and gave us half a lousy can of pop (or Soda if you will). On the way home, our single connection in Chicago was canceled due to weather. They told me on the phone that we would connect in Dallas. I KNOW that is what they said. Once we were on the plane, I found out that it was really DULLES (as in Washington DC), but they omitted the fact that the plane was also stopping for four hours in LA, and we had to get off. In any case, that bit of mayhem was brought to us by United Airlines. Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks poorly of them.

There was a certain musician that had a dispute with them over mishandling his guitar. After a year of fighting with them, he posted a song on the internet. It made the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) six o'clock news. Then, it made Fox news. Then, all of a sudden, United decided that they would pay him for the guitar. I have included the link to the original song, as well as a related post, that is even more funny.

United Breaks Guitars

Response to United Breaks Guitars

In any case, I found myself humming this song last night in Buffalo airport. This was shortly after phoning my wife and announcing that I was almost home. After all, I had cleared customs and security. That was the hardest part. Right?

Our flight was supposed to board at 7:00 pm EST, and leave at 7:30. At 7:20 I noticed a distinct lack of airplane at the gate. Funny, even one of those little Embraer commuter jets is hard to hide. Also, there was the lack of person at the gate.

Finally, somebody asked. Strangely enough, I think that United is run by Swiper's cousin (or maybe Swiper himself.) Apparently, they never updated the monitor or rerouted anybody because they didn't realize that the aircraft was sitting on the tarmac of an airport hundreds of miles away in Washington DC. Maybe they could have looked out the window and noticed the lack of aircraft. What about the passengers from that flight? Perhaps they were kidnapped by aliens. Space aliens, not the illegal kind. Or, are space aliens also illegal? Sorry... you can blame the computer glitch on that one too.

Of course, the problem was weather related, as the flight attendant couldn't get to the airport due to the weather. No other flights were canceled that day, however. Then the angry mob began to form. By the time I got to the front of the line, the ticketing agent was too busy complaining about the whining woman with no money and a three year old son that was going to have to sleep in the Buffalo airport because United Airlines was too poor to pay for a hotel room. After all, it was the weather's fault that their flight attendant went on a bender and couldn't make it in to work. That poor woman with the kid should have made contingency plans. At this point, I asked if I could get a new ticket should I get stuck in bad weather driving to the airport. That got me sent off to DC too late to catch my connector. I also noticed the cops coming to hang around the counter. They were obviously on break, fondling their weapons.

In the end, United did pay up for the hotel room in DC. That poor woman with the young child in Buffalo... She probably slept in the airport. I'm sure that my friend at the ticketing counter didn't try to find her a warm bed for the night.

I made it to San Francisco about ten hours late. Of course, United had to call my home at 3:00 AM PST to make sure that I didn't miss my flight. Hey... wasn't I in DC? Didn't they know I was in DC, since it was their idiocy that put me there? They woke my family up. So... while I was sleeping at the DC Hilton, my family was getting crank calls from United Airlines. Nice.

The final insult was finding my luggage already at the airport. It got there before I did. How did they get my luggage there before me, since I was supposedly on the first available flight?

Apparently, United does more than just break guitars.

They told me it would work

First off, I must apologize for the length of time between postings. All I can say is that I have been busy and I will try to make up for it with an entertaining story about the CTO.

I was talking to the accountant at the Mecca last week. He's been around since the beginning. This is not the weasel accountant that does the SOX compliance, but rather the competent accountant that (thankfully) does payroll, administers the health plan, and generally does the things that actually make the company run. (If you can call it that.)

Anyway, the accountant threw out the comment that despite his wacky (unfeasible) ideas (that would have defied the laws of physics to actually work), there would be no company without the CTO. I think that I have to concede that point. He was one of the founders of the company. Of course the company's strongest skill is the ability to blow cash, so I am not sure that everybody would agree that the Mecca should have EVER existed in the first place. Regardless, it does, and I have another story of the engineering genius that is so prevalent at the Mecca.

Let us say that you have several thousand little holes that you want to dispense a very small amount of liquid into. There are basically two ways in which you can do it. The first way is to take a single needle (or a small number of independent needles) and dispense the liquid into the holes one (or a few) at a time. This is not a bad solution, provided you can fill each hole quickly enough. The other method is to dump the liquid into all of the holes at once. This has the advantage of being quick, but also the disadvantage of being much more difficult to control.

The original solution adopted by the Mecca (led by non other than Captain Fantastic) was the former. Unfortunately, he picked a machine that not only took too long to fill each hole, but couldn't do it reliably enough to fill several thousand of them. Of course that endeavor cost the company over a 1/4 million dollars, and wasted over a year while we tried to remedy the situation.

The CTO came to the rescue. I believe that his original project plan called for a solution inside of 8 or 10 weeks. This was a brand new device that was only a concept in his head. The concept was simple though, he would make a disposable array of several thousand capillaries, using the fabulous material that Captain Fantastic tried to make the sample holder from. Remember the photo-polymerized material that leaked and seemed to be incompatible with the sample? No bother, they told him that it would work.

Now a reasonable engineer would try to make an array of two, four, ten, or even 100 capillaries in order to test out the concept. Not the CTO. He knew this would work. He ordered the capillary arrays, and had his favorite engineer (a relatively competent guy, but prone to fits of sleeping in his cubicle) start on the rest of the machine. They hired a machine vision consultant to rig up a way to align the capillaries to the sample holder. It was all so simple.

Each capillary had a volume equal to the desired well volume. All you have to do is dip the array of capillaries into the sample, and it will pick up the liquid. The first miscalculation was that the space between the capillaries was roughly the same as the space inside of the capillaries. Of course that means that you will pick up lots of extra sample that will go pretty much anywhere, but where you actually want it. Apparently, this behavior was completely unanticipated and incomprehensible. Naturally, myself, the Sarcastic Brit, and the Mad Man from Down South were neither consulted nor welcome to offer our opinions on the matter.

No matter, they would dip the holder in mineral oil first and fill all of the capillaries. Then, they would use air pressure to blow the oil out of the "real" capillaries, and dip the array into the sample. From there, the sample would be ejected via an air stream and land in each of the holes in the sample carrier. It sounds easy. They missed a few things.

First of all, I remember making peashooters as a kid. Somebody had the bright idea to make a peashooter Gatling gun by taping a couple of dozen straws together and putting the peas in each. By blowing on all of them at once, you could pepper your victim with projectiles. It didn't work. You would get one or two peas out, and then no matter how hard you blew, all of the air would come out of the unblocked holes. Something about about pressure differentials and mumbo-jumbo that doesn't apply to the CTO of a company as grand as the Biotech Mecca.

Of course, this issue was brought up on many occasions, and always the CTO had "several ways to deal with it". Of course, they all involved differential air pressure and no way to block the empty capillaries and allow the others to see sufficient pressure to eject.

The other issue was one of the difficulty in making thousands of very small, perfect tubes using a bulk process. This meant that the tubes that did eject often missed the holes they were intended to fill.

The CTO chalked all of these problems up to the machine vision being too inaccurate. He brought the machine vision guy in again. I have no idea how much that guy charged, but we paid him as a consultant, and he worked full time at the mecca for six months. (So much for the 8 week project.) Strangely, each improvement in the vision system brought nearly no improvement in filling the holes with sample. A sane (or technically competent) person would have figured out by now that the problem was in the basic premise for how the thing was supposed to work. Not the CTO, he still felt that he was one machine vision miracle away from solving all of the Mecca's problems.

After nearly a year of wasting vast amounts of money, Swiper finally decided that the thing might not work, and that his CTO was merely wasting money and manpower. Did he scrap the project and get rid of the crap? No. We are paying to store it.

But, it does provide an amusing show and tell as part of the history of the Mecca. Unfortunately, new employees rarely believe the Sarcastic Brit or I when we tell all of these stories. It seems that it's too outrageous to be true.

Sleep Well Wesley

I did the unthinkable yesterday - I stood up to MNB. I told him that veiled threats were not useful, and that if he wanted to fire me, he should probably just do it. I told him that constant tantrums were definitely not the way to get the best out of his engineers, and that he should try a different tactic. We were all in this together after all.

I also made a point of asking him where I fit in the organization. He spent entirely too long thinking before giving me a line of crap which basically meant that he couldn't think of anything meaningful to say.

It's strange. You would think that my level of paranoia would increase, when every interaction with my boss contains thinly veiled threats. After my discussion with him yesterday, I am no longer worried. I know what is going to happen, and strangely enough MNB told me a whole bunch of things that I am sure he didn't realize.

1) He told me that he wasn't afraid to fire people. I take that to mean that he ENJOYS firing people. As I said in a previous post, he would like to deep six the Sarcastic Brit and Myself, but he doesn't figure he can get away with it.

2) He is the only member of his family without a graduate degree. But, he has brothers who have doctorates from Oxford. What that tells me is that he hates people with graduate degrees because his brother probably lords his academic achievements over his head. No wonder he hates the Sarcastic Brit so much. The Sarcastic Brit also has the Oxford pedigree.

3) He only wants people doing what they were "trained to do". Only mechanical engineers can use CAD, only electrical engineers can design circuits. That tells me that he has a hard time picking up new skills and can't believe that people (especially young people) can be good at more than one thing.

4) He is a very good manager. People follow him from when he changes companies. This tells me that he is incapable of hiring new people, probably because he isn't a good enough judge of talent, and he can't inherit a team because he is unable to trust the guys who were there before him and don't owe him their loyalty. In short, he is unable to earn the respect or loyalty of others. He would rather just move his old team. It's easier.

5) He keeps telling me how expendable I am. Oddly enough, I have never said that I am indispensable. I am neither that arrogant nor that stupid. He also told me that he doesn't lose sleep at night over whether I will quit or not. The fact that he keeps telling me that indicates to me that he has some issues over my employment being terminated. I am not sure if it's because he wants to fire me and can't or if he figures that he's screwed if the Sarcastic Brit and I leave.

6) He is a pathetic man, working for a pathetic company. He is a bully who can't lead an engineering team that was functioning fine before he arrived. His boss is a weasel who convinced the EWA that she would be his pawn if she were made COO, so he pulled some strings to make it happen. She then screwed EWA and showed her true allegiance (only to herself). Her boss, in turn, is a fictional character that steals things from little Mexican girls and their friends. Need I say more? (Sorry for recycling that one, but I just enjoy it too much). MNB's behavior has only convinced me that my leaving the Mecca is inevitable. The only thing that worries me is that I won't get the chance to quit before he fires me. Sleep well Wesley. You have done a fine job today. I shall most likely kill you in the morning.

Fantastic!

The Sarcastic Brit has been working diligently on the new sealing method for our sample holder. This brought on a visit from the host of projects past. Somehow, I never remember how brilliant people were. At least not at the Mecca. Perhaps that is because the inexplicably stupid seems to reign supreme. Perhaps it's just the brilliant engineering doesn't make for very good stories.

Back in the early days(before we realized how bad Captain Fantastic actually was), I remember having many discussions regarding the sealing film that had to go over the sample to prevent evaporation. Our sample is mostly water, which boils at 100C, last I checked. We are heating it to 95 degrees, which is pretty close to boiling. For those of you not keeping track, that means that the the water vapor is exerting nearly an atmosphere (15PSI) worth of pressure on the inside of the sample holder. In addition, there is a bunch of air dissolved in the sample, which is good for an additional 5PSI, or so - I don't remember the exact numbers. When you work it all out, you get a total of about 20 pounds per square inch pushing from the inside of the sample holder.

Captain Fantastic didn't see this as a problem. Apparently, the fact that each well in the sample holder was only 0.0001 square inches meant that the sealing film would definitely hold. After all, that means that each well only sees 0.0015 pounds (or about 0.7 g) of pressure meant that there was no way that the glue would fail to hold.

Strangely enough, every other instrument uses a great big plate to hold the film to the top of their sample holders, with hundreds of pounds of pressure. Apparently, Captain Fantastic forgot to count the wells. The design called for 33,000 of them in the sample holder. By my math, even at 0.0015 square inches per well, works out to 52 pounds of force pushing on a 3.5 by 5 inch piece of tape.

Not only that, but people use hot water vapor to remove adhesive. They rent things called wallpaper strippers. Hmmm... steam. How about removing stamps from envelopes? Hmmm... steam. I bet that hot steam would be pretty effective at removing the adhesive from the top of the sample holder too.

We mentioned this to Captain Fantastic, and he started going on about "peel" stress, and how the glue was really strong in tension, but not in "peel". As far as I have been able to determine, there is no such thing as "peel force". And, of course, the plastic blew off the sample holder the first time we tried it.

It was OK though, both the Captain and Slimy Indian Barbapapa were convinced that the glue would hold. The CTO was backing them up. We must have tried fifty glues of various types. It should have been no problem to find a glue that was transparent, chemically inert, non-fluorescent, and able to give a totally airtight bond capable of withstanding 20PSI of hot water vapor. Of course, we never found one. Every now and then, however, I am asked why the instrument is designed as it is. My response is always "because the glue will hold of course."

As an interim solution, I found a way to hold the seal on a sample holder 1/6 the size. That means that I only had to push down with about 50 pounds of force. No problem, right? And, it had to be designed to fit into the instrument without significant modifications, and it had to be finished in less than three weeks. No problem. Not impossible, but definitely improbable. I accomplished the improbable. Did I get a medal for fixing another one of Captain Fantastic's spectacular derailments? Nah - nobody even noticed that there was ever a problem.

Hard to kill

Greetings!

It has been quite some time since I have written, what with the impossible schedules at work, and the extra effort of trying (in vain) to find a job with a company that doesn't suck. At this point, I would settle for a company not run by a fictional character that steals things from little girls.

It seems that MNB may be finding that several members of his engineering team resemble Steven Seagal - that is they are hard to kill.

First, I would like to relate a discussion between myself and the Fearful COO.

COO: How are you doing.
Harbinger: Still here.
COO: Where else would you be? You NEED to be here!
Harbinger: The only reason why I am here is because there is too damned much snow in the mountains to drive back to Canada.
COO: Why ever would you say such a thing?
Harbinger: Perhaps my boss extolling the virtues of being fired has something to do with it.
COO: What do you mean? Surely you are taking it out of context.
Harbinger: Really? I don't think so.
COO: Tell me exactly what he said.

After I told her, she went white. That's pretty tricky for somebody who isn't Caucasian, but she managed.

Two days later, I was called into MNB's office.
MNB: Do you take everything I say seriously?
Harbinger: Shouldn't I?
MNB: You know I hear what you say. It gets back to me... I have sources.
Harbinger: Oh yeah. (Thinking - only what I want to get back to you).
MNB: Have you ever taken a project management course?
Harbinger: Not a real one.
MNB: You should find a course at UC Berkley or Stanford. The company will pay for it.

I would love to know what was said between the COO and MNB. Alas, I am sure that I never will know.

Next, MNB tried to get rid of the enlightened one. I have since been told that the Enlightened one is now my problem. Seems he too is somewhat hard to get rid of. Apparently, MNB didn't count on the fact that the Enlightened one has known the Fearful COO for over a decade, and that she was the person who brought him in to consult in the first place.

Finally, MNB told the Sarcastic Brit that he was being obstructionist, and that he was either with MNB or against him. And... if the Sarcastic Brit were against him he would be replaced very quickly. That sounds like a threat to me. I would advise the Sarcastic Brit to tell the COO about it, but alas, I wouldn't want MNB to think that he was powerless to fire any of his engineers. That would take all of the joy from his life.

Apparently, he didn't realize just how dysfunctional the Biotech Mecca really is. Maybe they are keeping his old job for him. I doubt it though, as he has already poached three staff members to come work at the Mecca. Replacements for people he isn't allowed to fire?