Crazy Day

It all started last night, after I'd made that comment about cranky poop-eating dogs.  Almost as soon as I'd hit the publish button on my post, I heard a very strange noise.  Following the sound to investigate, I discovered Rylea had dragged the litter pan out of the bathroom and had dumped it out into the bedroom.  On the carpet.

Immediately, I decided that investing in another pet gate was a must.  As a manner of punishing said cranky poop-eating dog, I made her stay in the bedroom while I vacuumed up said scattered kitty litter.   She tried to tell me that was cruel and unusual punishment, but I wasn't buying it.

That brings us to today.  After another one of those every-man-in-the-world-is-glad-he-wasn't-in-the- bed-with-me nights of tossing and turning, I got to get up and go to work.  Yay!

I got there and took one look at my line's schedule and nearly started crying.  I'm still over there by myself, which is hard enough.  It's even harder when your schedule is full of small orders -- 4 piece orders, 8 piece orders, all day long.  Usually when it looks like that, I spend more time setting up than actually brazing.  That makes it very hard to stay ahead of the line, even when you have two brazers.  Doing it by yourself is nigh on impossible.

As if that weren't enough, several of the orders were units for mobile homes.  That means I had to do the florators, too.  Now, I know most of you won't know what a florator or a liquid line is, but you don't need to.  Just roll with it.  All you need to know is that it is an extra step I have to do besides brazing the header (manifold) assembly.  Sigh...

One of the orders on which I had to do the florators, I couldn't find the liquid line.  I looked all over and finally had to go to the tubing department and ask them to redo the order.  About an hour later, one of the people on my line brought me a handful of florators and said, "What do you want me to do with these?"

"Where did you find those?" I asked.  She said they were in a bin on the line.  Alas, they were not the florators I needed.  The ones I needed had been brazed onto the wrong order by a previous shift.  As I was walking down the aisle to the computer to print out a blueprint, I flung my hands out and shouted, "Stop the presses!"

I'm not sure why.  I just seemed the thing to do at the time.

And the day just went down hill from there.  I won't go into all the gory details, but it was rough.  Let me just say that when the second shift group leader came in and asked to explain what the problem was down at the end of the line, I had to ask him "Could you be more specific?"  Seriously, machines were breaking down, parts were getting lost, people were being cranky.  It was so bad, I started counting down the days until I get to do jury duty, because I'm looking forward to the break.

Oh, and I almost forgot.  One of the tubing machines was leaking oil.  The maintenance man took the cap off, but didn't lock out the machine.  When the day shift operator got there, she didn't know the cap was off -- or that anything was wrong, really -- so she turned on the machine and oil sprayed everywhere.  It was actually kind of cool.  But not her fault.  It should have been locked out.  But I digress.

I ended up staying until 4:00, and by that point, I was seriously wondering how necessary that dog gate was.  In the end, I decided that running to the store was preferable to another night of vacuuming cat crap out of my bedroom floor.  While I was there, I ran into the garden center, because I just can't seem to stay away.  A man in there whom I didn't know from Adam called me over to show me a really cool machete.  It had a smooth blade on one side and teeth on the other.  "You could kill a lot of zombies with that thing!" I exclaimed.  He laughed and said, "Yes, ma'am, you could."  I didn't tell him that axes are my preferred zombie killing weapon.

It's the whole Viking thing, you know.