Oh, Lovely

It's that wonderful time of year again. Time to train new employees. And guess who hates to train new employees.

Right.

Now guess who always gets assigned the delightful task of training the new employees.

Right, again.

For some reason, Brian always sends the trainees to line 2 to train. And I don't know how he does it, but he always, always, always manages to pick the day we are most behind to do it.  Not only that, when he sends us trainees, we always seem to have hard assemblies to braze. 

Today we had three trainees.  One is on the test tank, one is on the line, and I'm training one to sub braze.  She's doing OK, but being new, she's slow.  We're all slow when we start out.

After a couple of hours, Greg comes over and tells me to braze for the rest of the day, because the trainee is holding up production.  Why they don't train people during the slow season so they'll be ready when work picks up is beyond me.  But they don't.  We're supposed to train people, have trainees who leave absolutely zero leaks, and still run 500 units per shift.  Go figure.

Anyway, I take over and start brazing again, and we get the line moving.  IT doesn't take long until my trainee starts complaining.

"Everybody I came over here with has worked all day.  I'm the only one not working.  He's been working over there all day.  He's been working up there all day.  I'm the only one who just has to stand here."  Blah, blah, blah. 

I'm trying to tell her that what she's doing is more complicated than what they're doing.  They were difficult assemblies, the adapter tubes weren't made correctly, etc., etc.. This and that...because I didn't want to say right out loud that she was just too blasted slow.

The next order that comes up is pretty easy stuff, so I set her up and tell her to have at it.

It takes her 30 minutes to braze 10 assemblies. That's why she wasn't getting to work.  It should have taken 10-15 minutes to braze 10 assemblies.  She took twice that long.

The upside is, she got us so far behind that Greg talked Ronnie into letting us come in early tomorrow.  So I guess I'd better get off and head for bed. 

Four thirty comes mighty early around these here parts.