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Dottie
I met Dottie while I was an assistant supervisor and prototyper at a power supply company called Todd Products, in Farmingdale, Long Island. At the time I was in my mid 20?s, and she was about ten years older. Blond and lively, she was from Florida, had separated from her husband and was trying to support a couple of kids. She was trying to keep up the mortgage payments on her house and had no prior experience in manufacturing. They had her doing the worst job in the place, floating assembled PC cards on a tub of molten solder.
After I settled into my job I started to teach her how to best do her work, as well as what the parts were and how to clean up the solder joints after the float bath.
My supervisor was trying to hit on her, even though he was seeing one of the assemblers and had gotten her pregnant. The assembler was kind of white trash, and didn?t mind the attentions of a good-looking, married, black man.
Dottie and I got along very well and ended up in a relationship. When I left to start working for Gould Simulation Systems I found a spot for her doing PC rework in another part of the company and got her a raise.
I left Gould after a year and went to Litton/Datalog to build up the Rework Dept. for the test group. After I got things in order I brought Dottie over to run things, getting her another raise.
That?s how things worked with the Defense contractors on Long Island. I was called a job-shopper (or a job-hopper, or a whore. Also a handy scapegoat.). The industry was so used to building up a work force to fill a contract job and then letting them go when it was completed that a workforce evolved which went from house to house following the contracts. We didn?t get benefits or job security, but the pay was better.
Dottie and I had started to go in different directions and she took a real wrong turn at Datalog. She started hanging out with the Tuesday night bowling crowd, which I thought was a pretty scummy group. Someone she met there was trying to set her up as a drug runner around LI to make some extra money. She knew I didn?t like the group to begin with, and when she told me about this I did everything to talk her out of it. I even offered to set her up with people I knew to drive pot up from Florida. She would have been a natural. That was where she came from, and he could talk her way around just about anything.
She opted for the dirt bags moving the hard stuff. On her first run she got banged over the head and the drugs were taken. Then she came crying to me, asking for money to get her out of the fix. Even if I had the money I probably wouldn?t have given it to her, but I offered to contact the people I knew to try and get it straightened out. I might be in to them, but I trusted them enough to make the offer. She was obviously set up for the fall, but wouldn?t tell me who did it.
They?d rough her up a little once in a while, burn her clothes with cigarettes and just try to scare the hell out of her. She?d come over to my place once in a while to hide and get in a good cry, but there was not much else I could do.
A year or so later I came back to Datalog to inspect some fancy high tolerance parts for a new job. They were designed using a method called True Positioning, and outside of the drafters I was one of the few people that understood it.
I spent the better part of the year checking the pieces as they came in, and when they started building the units I was transferred back to the Test Dept to get the bugs out of the system.
There were plenty of bugs. What we were building was a Full-Scale Development (FSD) run of the first digital fax machine. There had been a prototype built for a feasibility study, and the military Signal Corps were so hot for the unit they wanted it in production as quickly as possible. We were building the production model and getting the kinks out as we went along. It was combat ready and the size of those small college refrigerators. Up until then all of the fax machines were analog-based photographic transmitters. A photo was mounted on a drum and rotated past an optical sensor that sent a signal to another machine. It transferred the image to photographic paper that had to be taken into a darkroom for developing.
The TDF (Tactical Digital Facsimile) was a cutting edge unit at the time, and I was thrilled to be the hands-on guy for the unit. It produced a 720-dpi dry toner copy from a laser based onboard scanner in 16 shades of gray. They were as good as the analog transmitters and operated in a fraction of the time. Because it was an FSD unit it was filled with glitches and mechanical problems, so I was in heaven.
The first seven units were going into all of the phases of environmental testing; vibration, drop test, salt spray, fungus, temperature, atomic and Tempest/EMI, one unit for each test. I was the only one that was allowed hands-on for these units. I was working for the Quality Assurance Department at the time, so they went from my hands to the DCAS inspectors for a direct sell-off.
After these first units production began doing more and more of the work and I began fielding the working units to the Military test stations in Arizona and California. After the seventh unit was built I was transferred to the test department as an associate test engineer.
My dealings with Dottie had been cool up to then, but I knew there were problems. After she and her assistant left for the day the test techs working on other projects would bring me their delicate problems to fix. They weren?t being paid for overtime, but they were under the gun to get the units working. They were no longer confidant of Dottie's abilities.
I wasn?t about to let her screw up the job I was working on and put a lot of pressure on her to shape up. That led to a shouting match behind closed doors. Our boss, the head of the QA department, pulled us into his office and then walked out of it to let us hash it out.
I wasn?t going to give in and I embarrassed them enough that they both left soon after. I took over the Rework Dept. for a while and trained some of the better production people to replace them, then went back out to the field.
The military loved the unit, and wanted to contract for 16,000 pieces at $90,000 each. Datalog was a small division of Litton and the military didn?t want a company to build up to fill an order of that size. They wanted it to be just part of the production flow. To keep the contract our division was absorbed by one of Litton?s largest divisions, Amecom, which was based in College Park, Maryland.
I saw the writing on the wall and urged my superiors to come up with a good methods package so that Amecom wouldn?t have a problem with the build and would keep us around to do R+D and methodizing. It fell on deaf ears and I started looking for a new job. I hate waiting around for a company to close. I wasn?t getting any offers from Amecom to follow the job, which I thought was strange.
I wanted to go out with one of the Production Inspectors. She was well over 6? and gorgeous. She had a sharp tongue, which I love, had a couple of kids and had just separated from her husband.
I learned my lesson from Dottie; don?t work with someone you?re going out with. I asked her out shortly before I left. We were seeing each other for more than six months and were getting along pretty well. There were some occasional problems, and once in a while she?d give me crap for a few days, but nothing I couldn?t handle. Then one night I was driving her home. She had been riding me for over a week at that point, and I pulled the car over to the side of the road and asked her what the problem was.
She looked at me and said, ?I don?t understand you at all, and you used to beat up Dottie all the time.? I was shocked and asked her what was she talking about. She explained that Dottie used to come into work all black and blue, and then told people that I used to smack her around once in a while. I was stunned. I had no idea and no one at Datalog even hinted at it, even good friends. There were plenty of opportunities.
I had even locked horns with an administrator that had been hired for the Test Dept who made no secret of being a lesbian when she started bossing around the techs. They were all nice, nerdy guys that couldn?t stand up to her, and neither could their supervisor. After a few tiffs with her I told her to leave them alone. If she had any problems with their paperwork she had to come to me and I?d handle it. A truce was reached and we eventually ended up having sex in the front conference room after hours.
I waited outside Datalog the day after Valerie told me about Dottie to ask the girl I had trained when she left the building for the day. She confirmed the story, as did a good friend of mine in the test dept. It took me a long time to come to terms with it all. I was so stunned that for a while it didn?t occur to me that was the reason I wasn?t asked to follow the job to Amecom.
I never ran into Dottie again, and I never got mad at her. Confusion, cynicism and laughter at the absurdity are still mixed equally in my emotions, but I?ve never resented her for doing it. What the hell else was she going to tell them?
If I ever see her again I?m sure we could sit down with a couple of drinks and laugh about the whole thing.