It must be a little worrying for any of Intel's 68,000 or so employees worldwide when one of the local bosses stands up and tells a journalist what a great employer it is. Excuse our cynicism, but generally this seems to happen just before a big company gives bad news to its employees. Yesterday's edition of the Malaysia Star featured an interview with Intel local boss Wong Siew Hai, saying that his company has sent 1,000 people abroad to re-train over recent years, mostly engineers. And even operators are getting sent abroad, the local boss says. The newspaper quotes him as saying: "Right now we want to consolidate ourselves" and that operators were being given "megatronic" training. Intel in Malaysia is the largest user of freight, he added. Intel is such a great place to work that people stay there for as long as 25 years, he said. This news might be of interest to regular Intel Irritant Ken Hamidi, who has just posted a piece about, yes you guessed it, disgruntled Merced employees at his Face Intel agitprop site. According to one of the latest postings there, Intel attempts to make sure that when there are married couples working at the same fab, they work on different shifts. Although that decision seems like common sense, people wearing the infamous Bunny Suits would have a hell of a job getting up to any hanky panky. Thus, in our estimation, there would be very little danger of any stray human particulates contaminating those shiny silicon wafers and affecting yields. ® * Tomorrow, Old Mother Chipton, who forecast that the end of the world would occur in the year 1999, will give her forecasts for chip technology in the year 2000...