Lots to Catch Up On

But I am soooo tired. Johnny was on one of his rampages this morning, and frankly, once he told me what had happened, I couldn't say I'd blamed him. First, I'd better familiarize you with the hierarchy at work.

The top position is the Production Superintendent, a guy named Jake Spears. This is only dealing with the shop floor. I won't get into the managerial structure of the front office, since they are insignificant to this story. They are pretty insignificant anyway, but that's another post.

So we have Jake, the production superintendent. He is over all the production on all the shifts. Under him, each shift has two to three supervisors. Each area (on each shift) has its own supervisor. On day shift, the supervisors are Ron Bourne (Air Handler area), Ronnie Patterson (A-Coil Assembly), and Calvin Miller (Component Parts). Under the supervisors, each department within each area has a group leader. This is where Johnny Lindley comes in. He is the group leader of my department (tubing).

Now, Johnny is not one to normally inspire warm fuzzies in a person. Quite the opposite, Johnny Lindley can drive a grown man to tears, so when I say he went on a rampage, I mean we were all walking on eggshells.

Some of the other shifts don't seem to like taking their scrap copper to the scrap dock, so they've been hiding it under conveyors and buggies and such. Now, neither Johnny nor Calvin can control what the other shifts do, but Jake can. Johnny had been complaining to Jake about the scrap being left in bins on the floor for weeks now, but Jake hadn't done anything about it. He hadn't made the other shifts take it to the dock. This morning, he had jumped all over Johnny and told him he needed to get those bins of copper up off the floor because we are having company. This made Johnny mad, justifiably so, and he decided we wouldn't just clean up the scrap copper, we'd clean up everything.

And clean we did--all morning. When I got home, I decided I wasn't going to clean a darn thing, and I didn't. I'd had enough of cleaning for one day. Even my sketch for today was a bit pitiful. By lunch time, my arms were so tired, I could hardly lift them, much less sketch anything.

Here is what I did:
It is the handle of my brazing torch. The left knob looks a little funny because I ran out of time and just threw something up there.

I sure didn't feel like going to karate tonight, but Cody was anxious to go and see if he'd been promoted. Sure enough, sensei promoted him to san-kyu. He's done a whole lot better since we started back. I hope he keeps his effort and motivation up.


The white belt on the far right started tonight. He just tickled me. He was so excited about starting. He said he'd always wanted to learn a martial art, but never had. For his latest birthday, his wife came and signed him up for class, bought his gi and some sparring gear, and of course surprised him with it. He was quite effervescent in his enthusiasm. He even said that he would bring his sparring gear up and leave it at the dojo so everyone could use it. I guess he didn't think we would have our own.

While sensei was teaching him and another guy who was observing, I led the big class. We did basics and kata, which is what karate is really all about.

James asked sensei when he was going to test for his full black. Sensei was hemming and hawing around trying to think of a diplomatic answer, but I felt no need for such hesitation. I promptly told James, "When you're ready." I wonder how he thinks he's going to get ready if he doesn't even come to class. He wouldn't have even dressed out tonight if I hadn't leaned on him a little. Even then, he didn't do anything. Somebody's going to have to get it through his head that he is going to have to earn his belt. The board isn't going to baby him. Neither are they going to give him a rank he doesn't deserve.

He needs to just grow up a little.
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