jaymen

I did not post this to discredit Kevin, but it seems in the wake of Tekin closing, there were many rumors and speculation as to what happened. I felt everyone deserved to know the real story and truth about what went on at Tekin, and the odd events that led to it closing up. From where I stood, Kevin started something that got bigger than he could comfortably handle. It was too many interactions with people, and that was the one thing he specifically did not want to do, but it was necesaary for him to do if he wanted Tekin to grow. So he put his money into real estate, income property, and when those began to pay off he no longer needed Tekin as an income stream, so he let it go, it was no big deal to him. All the employees used to speculate jokingly about what he was "on", and in Kevins defense I really think it was just the way he was, although drugs would have made it more understandable.


Kevin it seems a few years ago applied for several medical patents, one for a method to disspense drugs, another for a girdle that had electric currents for weight loss, so he has been doing things, but in secret no doubt. Typical of Kevin though, they are a bit odd, but you can bet he's making money off it!

I also found a record of him purchasing a propery in South Orange County for 4.3 million a few years ago, so he ain't broke either. This confirms what we suspected, he rat holed his money and had millions stashed away that nobody new about. Once when Jeff was alive, he helped move Kevin into a large multiple unit apartment complex that Kevin had bought, it overlooks the entrance to San Clemente State park and the ocean on Calafia. Anyway, at Kevins old place Jeff said there was dried food, trash, and dirty cloths all over the floor and surfaces that had accumulated for months, maybe years, it was squaller, but more surprisingly was the trash bags full of cash, and alot of it too.

Now I know Jeff was not exagerating, it was all true, we just had a hard time imagining Kevin could live like that. That is why I empathised with him, and knew he was hurting deep inside, but he had a hard time expressing those feeling to anyone out of fear of rejection. He covered it up by ignoring the world, but his finnancial success brought him little comfort. I know he had real low self esteem too, or he would not have let himself go like that. I tried to build him up, tell him not to obsess on what Novak was doing, and realize he was a success in his own right and he should be proud of that. Often, he would start to open up to me and say things, but catch himself mid sentence and the shove me away saying"just, just go do it.." meaning ignore me and go back to work. I really felt for him, he was in pain, and di not know how to enjoy his success. I got more satisfaction from a day at the beach than he did from his millions.

All the employees used to ask me "what gives with Kevin?", as he would basically ignore them and not even acknowledge a good morning greeting from them. I confronted Kevin with this because it was affecting moral, and our productivity. He had it all figured out: "Jay...there are 800 minutes in the work day, now if I spend 2 minutes with each employee saying hello, and that is 25 employees, , I have wasted about an hour a day, and that is 5 hours a week. I draw $200 per hour so that is $1000 per week of my time and 5 hours of production lost per week too. I wish sometimes that I could replace everyone with robots, and come in here at 8:00 am turn on the switch, and shut them off at 5:00 pm when I leave." And there you have it, his rational was it cost him to talk to us, what he didn't get was it was costing him more by pissing everyone off! He would walk around the plant and stand behind people, sometimes for a long time, and when they asked him if there was something he needed, he would just shake his head and tell them to cary on, never explaining his actions. He was timing them, or in other cases observing the process, but the way he did it made everyone very uneasy. I used to have to try and explain his actions to put their fears at rest so production did not suffer. Eventually I learned it was no use to approach him on anything, as he was usually aware of it anyway and didn't care, that was Kevin. It was less stressful for me too, I had begun to fuction in survival mode to handle being around him. We all kind of became numb and mindless, ignoring our surroundings and becoming fully absorbed in our work, ironically like those robots Kevin had wished for!

You should have seen Tony Neisinger when he worked there, as Tony had some prior experience with Kevin. He was so quiet that we thought he had swallowed some glue, and Tony would not say "****" if his mouth was full of it! He knew the path of least resistance with Kevin was to be as invisible as possible. I loaned Tony my electronic theory texts as he was going to school on electronics, which Kevin disscouraged and made Tony sit away from the other techs and myself so we could not interact.

Anyone ever hear about the Joel Johnson fiassco? Seems Joels Tekin ProESC was giving him fits at a large important on-road race, may have been the Worlds, think it was in 1988? Anyway, Kevin determined it was a thermal issue with the ESC electronics and used freeze mist to ice down the speed controll before each heat(pun intended?). But about half way into each heat, it got warm again and went nuts, costing Joel heavily by not being able to finish. This was the last straw for Joel, as it was costing him races, so he switched to Novak gear which just about killed Kevin. It all boiled down to a great design that was not fully tested and had bugs that did not show up while driving in the back alley behind our plant....race testing needed to be done and hadn't. Eventually we had it working flawlessly.

Does anyone here have any contact with the man from planet Ort? I'm curiouse as to how he is doing.