Good Enough for Government Work: Day 1

I recently discovered myself stuck in a rut, such that the most interesting things I have had to talk about regarding my day-to-day work experience have been the epic poops I have taken during the day after drinking x cups of coffee or eating y portions of shitty leftovers pilfered from the corporate catering tables. The extent of such boredom, as you may well know, has all but killed my ability to write for the Plague, save that teensy sliver of hope somewhere in the back of my mind that I might occasionally have something of real interest to say (though some of you, I know, come straight here for the bathroom humor, which I will report has migrated to its own dedicated page entitled My Fearsome Craps). Today, though... today was a particularly exciting day in the world of purchasing - exciting enough to outshine my latest in gruesome excretions.

For the past several weeks, I have been relegated to the position of "Purchasing Bitch," in part thanks to the keen timing of my releasing my final PCB design to the fabrication house merely hours before the person who was originally handling the component purchasing for my board fell deathly ill and was rushed to the hospital. Needless to say, this unplanned absence left me "caught with my pants down shit halfway out," as my father was fond of saying. Rather than boring everyone with a detailed explanation of my board, I will draw the analogy to represent the situation:
Imagine yourself, if you will, as a chef in charge of creating a recipe for a custom wedding cake to be part of an extravagant 10-course wedding banquet. Through months of research and design, consulting with the bride, you create a recipe for a delicious chocolate three-tiered cake. In preparation for the upcoming reception, you hand a detailed shopping list to the person in charge of acquiring said ingredients - complete with brand names and a list of exactly where to find said items. Merely hours before the aforementioned banquet, however, your purchasing agent comes down with a mild case of leprosy and is rushed off to the quarantine room, leaving you very literally holding the bag. Not to fear, though - long before your purchaser succumbed to a flesh-eating disease, you were assured that your shopping list was 99% complete, and required only a simple dash of salt to complete the entire list. Fair enough! As you proceed to unload the groceries, however, you notice that the bag is missing key ingredients! Godiva Chocolate, Pillsbury Unbleached flour, organic eggs, Bailey's Irish Cream... these things are all missing, and the reception is but hours away! Naturally, after panicking and loudly swearing, you are forced to do what any caterer would do to avoid the wrath of Bridezilla - you improvise.

This is what I have been doing for the last two weeks. Purchasing is not in my job description, nor is improvising with stolen supplies from other laboratories and projects, albeit necessary for the completion of my project. Had this been the only speed bump thrown down in my path, I guarantee I would not be nearly so disgruntled. However, I was the unfortunate victim of the dreaded phrase "while you're down there." For those unfamiliar, "while you're down there" is the phrase uttered by every last lazy shit as a imposition on some poor sap who shows some sign of productivity in some manner that might benefit all the people involved if they were to piggyback onto said sap's efforts. An assortment of examples would include, "while you're down there, could you grab me a beer?" "while you're down there, could you also vacuum under the couch?" and "while you're down there could you please reach into my pants and pluck that one particular ball-hair that's greying down there, I don't want the ladies to think I'm older than I really am?"
This is what my coworkers have done to me. "While you are down there, could you handle the purchase orders for everyone else on the team?"

I BAKE THE FUCKING CAKE YOU WHORES! Do I look like the purchasing bitch to you?

Well evidently I do. Or at least I bear enough of a resemblance to someone that might bear the label "Purchasing Bitch" to warrant taking the job for a few weeks.

To further agitate matters on top of the unofficial demotion to Purchasing Bitch, I've also been grappling with the retardation of the persons in charge of creating test fixtures for the board I am creating. After having my design checked in triplicate and approved by all powers that be, I was stopped at the very last moment from hitting the "send" button and electronically sending my documents out to the fab house on grounds that it had no test points. The engineer in charge of the test fixtures here insisted that my 5 inch square board needed to have over 300 test points (.05''x .05'' in size) worked in.

Drawing back upon the wedding cake analogy, this is the equivalent of saying "the bride likes corn, thus the presence of kernels is required in every dish." After the recipe has been written and ingredients purchased and substituted. Despite informing the bride that it is an ill-advised idea, the last-minute chocolate corn cake is given the go ahead, much like my boss giving in to the poor planning and obnoxious demands of the test fixture engineer.

Of course, we all know the ending to this wedding story - the three-tiered chocolate corn cake made of substitute Hershey bar, with a Kahlua-based frosting (everyone knows that Kahlua is exactly the same thing as Bailey's Irish Cream, right? Well, at least according to that bartender at my cousin's wedding... I almost pimp-slapped him on principle) it looks and tastes like, well... a pile of shit.

I can only imagine what my board is going to look like when they're finished.

Further bulletins as events warrant.