Smart Mouth

I had a friend who once said of me, "You have to watch her. She doesn't say much, but when she says something, it's something."

I work in a facility that manufactures evaporator coils for home air conditioning units. We have been hit hard by the downturn in the economy, but it was not always so. One day, several years ago, I was brazing header assemblies for assembly line 3. What that means is, I was using an acetylene brazing torch and a silver alloy brazing rod to join copper components into pre-specified units.

Anyway, I was brazing and I ran out of the larger of the copper components, called headers. I went to the tubing department and requested the amount of parts I would need to finish the order. Unfortunately, tubing didn't have any of those particular headers in stock. The only thing I could do was to wait while they made some more.

While I was waiting, the group leader for line 3, whom I'll refer to as DYM, which stands for dirty young man (that's a story for another time) came over wanting some more header assemblies.

"I'm out of headers," I told him. I'm waiting for tubing to cut me some."

At this point, DYM got right in my face and began yelling at me. "I've got to have some headers! My line is fixing to go down! What am I supposed to do without headers?" Blah blah blah...just yelling at me.

I stood there and didn't say a thing until he'd finished his tirade. When he finally stopped yelling, I reached around, grabbed my --uh, posterior, and shook it hard.

"Sorry. There ain't none up there. You'll just have to wait until I get some from tubing."

.