Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [51]
“Because the problem is not that the machines do not work, they do not work as well as Chairman of the Board would like them to,” Bruce chimed in. “We have to make the machines better on our own with modifications.”
CB came in and said she needed my help in the next room and I went back to moving bins around in the finishing area.
“How long will it take those guys to fix the machines?” I asked CB.
“It has been months already, I don’t know,” she replied. “COB has been down here a ton of times asking them as well. They always tell him something that they have pulled out of their asses and then get assigned a condition of Doubt for false reporting.”
The next day I was told that I would not be posted in the final packaging area but would instead be posted as the quality control for the Gauss line. This was huge. The guy that did this before was the one that caused the whole flap that got everybody busted. Wow, I did not know about this. This seemed like a big deal and could end up being a catastrophe.
I had to study a bunch of manuals for the technical equipment I would be operating. In the Sea Org, if you operate any piece of equipment that you are not checked out on, you get assigned a lower condition. You have to read the manual from beginning to end and get someone else to quiz you on the operation of the equipment. The first of the operation manuals I had to study was several hundred pages long. It was a Hewlett Packard 8562A Spectrum Analyzer.
It took me a few weeks just to get through that one manual. The manual itself was written by an engineer for an engineer and I had no business even attempting to read this thing. I eventually got through the manual. After I had learned how to operate the machine and was fully versed in its capabilities, I tried to get a check out. Turns out that no one at Gold had ever read the manual for this machine and those that started had never finished.
“It’s not even ours,” Luigi said to me. “Church of Spiritual Technology sent it over when we needed something that was well beyond the analyzers we had around here. That analyzer costs around $85,000. These things are used at NASA to test space shuttle crap.”
“So I am the only one who has read the manual for this thing?” I exclaimed, after three weeks of having my head buried in five different technical dictionaries and reading about wavelengths and demodulators and radar frequencies!
After that first manual, the rest I had to read took me one day to get though and get checked out. They were a powered speaker, Studer tape deck, OKI data printer and a test generator/analyzer by the Gauss M2 company.
After reading the manuals, I was told to go down and help Luigi and Bruce get the machines fixed.
There was no science to what Bruce and Luigi were doing. Luigi would try something, and then test to see if it worked. When it didn’t, they would try something else. We would get all of the machines tuned up and spend all night getting them perfect. After, we slept on the floor for two or three hours right next to the machines, the next morning we would run tests on the machines and they would all be out of whack again. This had been going on for weeks and no matter what we did, the machines were not predictable and would change overnight.
Finally, after weeks and weeks of trying everything possible, it boiled down to several points:
1. The Production Masters – The production line that made the masters had faults on it that were introducing low quality directly into the masters being used to make the cassettes.
2. The master playback machines in the duplication facility – The actual machines that played back the production master to the slave machines had faults with it that needed to be modified.
3. Tape shedding – The cassette tape would shed particles as it passed across the recording heads of the slave machines and this created a loss in sound reproduction.
4. Temperature – The slave machines would have a variance in