For a month now at work I've been doing what is known as hand testing. I hate hand testing. Everyone I work with hates hand testing. It's boring, tedious and unhealthy.

Boring = I sit at a table for 12 hours placing parts in a socket, waiting for the temperature forcer to get to where it needs to be then I hit "TEST." 60% of the parts I'm testing fail. That is why we're actually doing the hand test - to weed out the baddies at a hot temp. THEN, if we happen to get a pass, we have to place a little gold dot on the part with a paint pen. We used to have to pencil in the fail number on the bad parts but thank God they stopped that! The only good thing about this is I get to read while I do it. Otherwise I'd be completely non compos mentis by now.

Tedious = Pretty much the same thing as above. 12 hours, little parts, waiting, blah blah blah, you get the picture.

Unhealthy = I'm not making this up. After 4 weeks of constant handtesting, I'm pretty sure it will be the death of me one way or the other. My back hurts, my shoulder is in a constant state of cramping, the skin on my left index finger was actually peeling off the other morning from the heat on the socket and to top it all off - - I was looking at the new paint pen the engineer bought for us last night and noticed a little warning sticker: "This pen contains a chemical that is known in the state of California to cause cancer." Gack! Great!! Here I sit, dutifully marking the passes with toxic paint, breathing in cancer-causing chemicals!! And I'm not the only one. Ginny & Morris have been my constant companions in hand testing hell so they're doomed as well, not to mention the workers that come & cover us when we go to break. Soon, our whole shift will be dead.

I hope you'll come to my funeral.

Labels: work

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