The indispensable – you read that right – test engineer.

A holiday-season scramble exposes how “always on” offshore manufacturing ideals collide with real-world AXI limits.

A Yuletide surprise, courtesy of The Anthill. The same Anthill that wouldn’t answer emails, phone calls, texts or carrier pigeons the other 332 days of 2025. Things change, and snubs become embraces overnight when year-end revenue is threatened. Lucky us. Their AXI machine was down indefinitely; ours was definitely up. Meanwhile, an impossibly unrealistic, unreasonable, irrational name-brand tech superstar du jour was expecting results, no excuses, to fulfill a product launch.