President 2016

[Sanlmar]

That type of stuff does happen unfortunately. I def lost out on some overtime over the years to guys who were buddies with the boss or were ass kissers.

License to ramble. You get lol wow or you get a story.

I wrote about the Blue Box Esquire story in the Hacking thread and its affect on me.

Father worked for Digital Equipment in Mass. I took a TTL electronics course. They also taught you some machine language to push those 1's & 0's through the gates and make shit happen.

Father ships me to a prep school. I am a poor kid surrounded by kids in Corvettes. Became obsessed with money and the social pecking order at school. Took a job working 3rd shift in an insurance company computer room. There were no background checks or work permits for students back then. I also looked older.

I worked alone and pretty much was only responsible for seeing that the customers policy paperwork for that day, various mgmt reports and the COBOL programmers test reports got printed by morning. I figured out how to get 10 hours of work out in 4 hours. Management had no fucking clue.

I slept, did my homework and watched David Letterman on an old tube portable tv I brought in. School and parents had no fucking clue what I was up to.

Lol, I bought a brand new Suzuki rice rocket and used to drive it up the handicap ramp and into the building and parked it outside the computer room. Used to stare at my new bike through the computer room glass. That is how solo I was at night.

The insurance company had 20 COBOL programmers that worked during the day. Clueless. They had no idea they would be working at Safeway in a few years.

One day, I see an IBM PC outside the computer room. The first model IBM sold. Insurance company just wanted to see what they could do with it.

One night I took it apart to see how it ticked. I was well aware that if this didn't go well I was fucked.

There were retail stores during that era that sold nothing but computer and programming books. I bought a few and used to fool around programming the PC at night. I was absolutely amped.

When you are a kid your ability to focus on one thing is unique. I could go endless hours lost in the machine. There were stretches I got no sleep for days.

The technology back then was mostly discrete components and all very accessible. This experience tooled me up to do some fun stuff later on.

A few years later, something came up. There was a building control system (fire alarm) that was made by a defunct and obscure Canadian company.

Somebody won a bunch of low bids and this shit got installed in buildings across North America. Company goes out of business. People moved on and no one knew how to trouble shoot this crap. The buildings HAD to have functioning fire alarm or they would be shut down.

What kicked everyone's ass was that it was one of the first microprocessor based networked systems.

If you could fix this system you could name any price you wanted. The buildings were absolutely hostage to this system and the tech who could keep them operating.

Somebody fed me the engineering schematics for the product and I had access to one of the engineers who worked in Hollywood at that point. I reverse engineered the shit.

I am a fucking kid. But I am polite and could schmooze the shit outta the building maintenance guys. I had some fantastic and crazy experiences.

Union

One of my first gigs was a General Motors AC Delco plant in Buffalo NY. Talk about Union.

This building did vehicle testing. They would take a car and put it in a room and bring it to -20 degrees. They would take a car and tip it on its side and run the engine to see what would happen. Every room had crazy tests.

Other manufacturers would bring their cars in to be tested. Porsche I remember. When the tests were done they would bring them out to a yard. Acres of cars.

"What do you do with these cars?", I ask. Can I get a deal?

"No, we scrap them", they said. I was a car guy. Basically, this whole thing was the result of wanting a Corvette or a Cuda like the rich kids. I stifled a sob.

I would say, "I digress", but this is a ramble.

Anyway, this a Union site. These guys would not let me touch my tools as I was a non-Union punk. I left my multimeter in the car. I had to tell them (there were 3 men at all times) what screw to turn or what cabinet to open. Some guys fucked with me but I understood why and tucked it up. A job that might have taken 6 hours took days.

I made a fucking killing. I remember writing a report and the hours before I left and meeting the boss. I truly believed I would never see that money. I experienced a rare moment of guilt.

Parts I used (scavenged from other jobs) I just made up random prices to the penny. I still left money on the table. General Motors didn't give a fuck.

The GM electricians didn't give a fuck either. They would not have cared if I was there all year. I remember driving away wondering how General Motors stayed in business. I got my answer years later, lol.

Those Union guys hated AC Delco GM. They also made a god damned fortune. Overtime and the endless breaks and rules. Thing I remember the most is that their union contract allowed them to buy a heavily discounted vehicle every year. These guys all had some choice ride.

Union Upshot

So while I am philosophically aligned with bigdick...

I would say that Union situations like construction - where there is a shared labor pool that business/contractors draw workers from is god.

Union situations where workers are not transient to that business develops some very tricky situations. It's less pure.

Anyone know the MarketBasket supermarket story? Nonunion workers go on strike in support the company President who was getting ousted. The workers shut down the business in support of management?

Chinamaniac and Shizz knows this one.

This Union discussion triggers some pretty powerful memories for me. Affected me a lot. Bigdick's accusation that Druff's limited life experience doesn't qualify him to comment is harsh but not wrong.