Now....number 1 on my Hot 123, Kaffred's Zune on shuffle, I give you
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Takes me back to 1993, and I was commuting about 50 miles round trip, working at Dynacircuits, a “punch and crunch” board shop in Franklin Park. The “punch and crunch” have all but disappeared in the U.S. (gone to China and India, for the most part). The simple, single-sided boards were punched with a die, as opposed to drilling holes and routing the outline with an NC-controlled driller/router. Mainly these were used in automotive and consumer products. Dynacircuits was a Q1 supplier to Ford in those pre-ISO/QS 9000 days.
I was one of three Quality Engineers working there at the time, the only company I’ve ever worked for in the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) industry with so much Quality and Engineering support staff. Most companies I’ve worked for have had a Quality manager and, if I was lucky, a Quality Engineer or Quality clerk to help maintain the Quality system. I’ve been the sole QA person at 5 of the 15 shops I’ve worked for. Quality has never been a priority, beyond trying to inspect quality into boards and fighting with customers when they try to reject boards for cosmetic reasons.
I had pursued a certification through the American Society for Quality as a Quality Engineer (CQE), passing a six-hour exam to get it, and when I went to my boss, the Quality Manager, to tell him, I got one of the blankest looks I’ve ever gotten. He had no idea what the CQE was, or what it indicated. To him, the Quality Manger’s job was to schmooze the customer into accepting borderline product, and smoothing ruffled feathers when the reject was a serious defect. He was great at it; we called him “Lar, the tap dancing Bear.” He was also great at lying to vendors to get them to pay us for what he claimed was defective laminate, paying two and three times for the same boards. (I finally told a laminate supplier to at least verify that the date codes were different when he signed off on the bad boards to make sure they weren’t the same boards each time)
Back in the 70’s, 80's, and 90’s we would jump on the next flight to a customer to sort boards ourselves, if need be, to support them and not shut down an assembly line. I have not visited more than 4-5 customers in the past 10 years. Now we just ship them back overnight and sort them and return them.
Our biggest customer at Chicago Etching Corporation (CEC), and, after the merger with Dynacircuits, there as well, was Chamberlain, the garage door opener company (Craftsman, Lift Master, Master Mechanic, etc) and at least once a year we would have a quality issue which would require me (as the Quality manager at Chicago Etch, as a Quality Engineer at Dynacircuits) to go to their plant in Nogales, Mexico. I would fly in the night before to Tucson, drive down to a resort just north of Nogales, Arizona, meet up with our sales rep, Gary Kelly, then after a good meal and a good night’s sleep, drive over the border the next morning to meet with Hector D., a former Chicago resident, who was the Quality manager at the maquiladora plant. He was a great guy. We would meet for a while to discuss the quality issue, and then go out for lunch at some local restaurant, and then we’d go back to the plant to sort boards for a few hours. After that Gary and I’d return to the resort for a nice dinner, then fly back home the next morning. Gary Kelly became a good friend from these visits and I later worked for him at night when he tried to set up his own board fabrication business a couple years later.
One memorable visit was due to the fact that the laminate we used as the base of the circuit board was paper based and the punching process usually left debris partially blocking the holes causing problems with component insertion. At CEC and Dyna we made fixtures for unplugging the holes by taking 14-15 boards and stacking them up, then placing straight pins in each of the 600+ holes. You would then place each board on the fixture and the pins would push the debris from the holes. However, it was not a foolproof method and occasionally several would get through to Chamberlain, causing me to have to fly down for a visit.
This particular time, they had over 30,000 boards at risk, so I took 6 pin fixtures in my briefcase to use to unplug them (if they would give me 6 people to help unplug them). At O'Hare they scanned my briefcase and were a little surprised to see thousands of straight pins on their screen. In those pre-9/11 (1994) days I escaped a cavity search, but I had to take out the fixtures and explain what I was going to use them for, which took awhile.
When I got to Chamberlain, Hector took me to a table in the plant and said, “Here you go!” I was not going to get any help from Chamberlain personnel. There was a skid with 30 boxes of boards that I had to open, unload and open shrink wrapped stacks of 25 boards, unplug them, then put them back into the boxes. At best, I could do about 800 an hour, which meant I would be there about a week. I spent about 4 hours unplugging, then drove back to my resort room and called back to Dyna, telling them that unless I found some help, I would be down there for at least a week.
Then I picked up a flyer in my room and saw “Little Pedro” in an ad for a company in Nogales that did assembly work. I called them and asked what they would charge for doing the 30,000 pieces. The guy who owned the company was originally from Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois, and if I would hook him up with Gary Kelly (he was looking for representation in the Chicago area, I guess) he would do it for $500. Dyna had given me a blank check to cover this contingency so I hired him on the spot. And home I flew.
Dyna was the only place I’ve worked where I was able to commute with someone, an Engineer named Neubaum, who we called Neuberman, after the butchering of his name over the PA by the receptionist. He lived about a third of the way along my trip and I would pick him up and drop him off each day. When he was not in the car, I would listen to this song on tape, rewind, listen again, rewind, and listen again, until I finally memorized the lyrics. In the early AM my voice was a bass/baritone, like Brad Roberts, the lead singer of the Crash Test Dummies. Later in the day, not so good on the low notes, as Neuberman would remind me.
As I said, Dyna had a lot of Engineering and Quality support staff, and some of the best people I’ve worked with over the years: Oscar Salazar, Rich Mankiewicz, John Holmquest, Dick Golden, Raul Chaidez, and Carl Neubaum. Work was fun, as I look back on it now and compare it with subsequent workplaces. We had a lot of laughs, and got together socially as well, something that doesn’t happen much any more. Or maybe we all got older and had families and other commitments. It was also when office people still dressed for work, men in button down shirts, with a tie if a customer was visiting, no T-shirts. The women wore skirts and dresses, for the most part. Casual day had not yet become everyday as it is now.
The merger between Chicago Etch and Dynacircuits had started out with high hopes. Dyna even tried to foster a family feeling by taking the whole front office staff, and their significant others, probably 40 people or so, to Medieval Times for dinner one night. This was just before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, laid off a bunch of people, and screwed all their suppliers and sub-contractors. Gary Kelly, when all was said and done with the Chapter 11, got about 4 cents on the dollar for what he was owed in commissions (over $50,000).
I worked at Chicago Etch as the Quality Manager and we bought Dyna, yet I became a Quality Engineer at Dyna because they were Q1 and they wanted to keep tap-dancin Lar in place. Also, the previous owners of Dyna were slightly louche by the early 90’s. They had added on to the 50,000+ sq. ft. facility with new offices, and on the 2nd floor, a “health club”. It had keyless entry, an eight-person hot tub, sauna, steam room, weight room, and a “relaxation” room, plus a full kitchen and conference room. When CEC moved in, all that was cleared out to make room for accounting offices. The hot tub could not fit through the 18” wide windows, it had been dropped in before the roof was put on, so it was cut up with a chain saw and thrown out the second floor. The cedar wall paneling was left for the Controller’s new office.
When I first met one of my fellow QE’s, Rich Mankiewicz, he always seemed to have some outlandish story about the previous owners. At first I took him as a fabulist, until he proved the most outlandish was true. He told stories of debauchery in the “health club” that would curl your hair and one day he said that when a woman went to the bathroom up here, the two owners would race downstairs, to a spot under the restroom (which was their private garage for a car collection) and watch for them to flush and see what went by. “How would they know?” I asked. “There’s a clear section of PVC pipe there!” he replied. “You’re full of s—t!” “Come with me”. And he showed me the pipe, because by then that former garage was used to store all the punch press dies that CEC had used.
I never doubted Rich again.
MMMM….MMMM…MMMM, indeed.
