Personal Dork Assistant

Life as a Stiff

It's a little embarrassing to be coming in when everyone's already here, and leave when everyone is still there. I think 8:00-5:30 is doing my part, though, especially considering that my part right now consists of reading lots of email between KB-TW and KB-US. In theory, I'm not drawing a salary so I wouldn't have to punch the clock. On the other hand, I can't exactly be slacking very much (yet), either. I'm getting screwed at both ends here.

Not that there's been much for me to do other than plowing through the piles of email that's generated by communication between KB-TW and KB-US. It's interesting to see the US salespeople get steamed when there's a problem, as they have to ask Taiwan to relay their concerns to China. Three emails and two languages later, what was a 10-item list only four or five would be resolved, necessitating another trip around the merry-go-round. Also interesting to see the US salesforce wins the design from big-name US tech companies, but the factory ends up shipping the parts to outsourced manufacturers all around Asia. At least business seems to be good, factory seems to be barely keeping up with the demand. I'm having trouble keeping up with the avalanche of product numbers, though. For such a standard little component, there sure's a lot of ways to make it. Now I see why they wanted to implement an ERP system ASAP.

So there's suppose to be this little training course for new hires that I am to attend, which I thought would be a nice intro to things. Turns out that the sessions were about the technical aspects of the LED. Now, I admit that I never did get much use out of my copy of The Art of Electronics, but a refresher on the electromagnetic spectrum and P-N junctions is just about the last thing I need right now. At least I'm meeting some people instead of just hangin' in da cube. Remembering names is probably my biggest problem so far, mostly because names tend to use more obscure characters, and there's no context, so I can't associate the sounds with characters in my head. Although the Taiwan workforce is small enough that I can probalby brute-force memorize the employee list if I had to.