I'm probably not going to write a lot about geiger counters in the future.

GC Guy: Sorry about doing the soldering in here, Joel. It's just too windy outdoors.

Me: Hey, I'm a child of the fifties. I'm just glad you weren't grinding uranium.

This has been a high-stress week for GC Guy and his wife. When married couples are under stress, they tend to bitch at each other. I've never regarded this as much of a spectator sport. So I try to keep my head down and just do the thing so I can go home.

Finding ways to do the thing without supervision really isn't difficult, because most of this isn't rocket surgery. Assembling geiger counters is just like assembling any other electronic widget; once you know the order of the steps and where the wires go, you really spend most of your mental energy on ways you'd improve the process if you were in charge. Which I'm not, and the few polite suggestions I made were pretty firmly rebuffed. He's been building these things in lots of five and ten for years, and his way of doing it always worked for him. Now all of a sudden he's got hundreds of them on trays in various states of construction, and it's easy to get the trays mixed up and forget something vital. Like, before you glue down the speakers it's very important to clean the inside of the cases with alcohol because there's something in the mold-release agent that doesn't get along with hot glue. So today right around quitting time, the speakers started falling off a whole tray's worth of production. The good news is that it was very easy to establish I hadn't been responsible for cleaning the cases on that tray. Like I said, the guy's stressed out.

I really hope the panic ends soon, because this is going to massively suck in another couple of weeks.