Half My Life

Thirty years.  

Half my life I've given to that plant, and this is what I get. 

An acrylic statue of the number 30, and a basket full of stuff I shouldn't be eating, but am anyway. 

They don't give out the little catalog any more.   You know, the catalog where you can order a prize for your years of service.  You don't get one of those any more.  They give you a few Cool Points, but not enough to get anything really worth thirty years of your life.   

But look, I have a basket full of junk food!  And a little sewing kit, too.  How thoughtful of them to put that in there. 

To be honest, I was more excited for the basket than for the food.  It's just the right size to put on my side table and hold my knitting.  

Now, I can knock everything off on to the floor at once, instead of a piece at a time.  

Anyway, they fed us lunch -- me and the others who were celebrating work anniversaries -- and at one point, one of the office people who's been there longer than I have, asked me how things have changed over the last thirty years. 

I said, "I want to keep my job, so I'm not going to answer that!"  

Seriously, there were too many bosses in there for me to be completely honest about how bad it's gotten out there, so I just babbled off some nonsense about how things really got messed up when Nadir came in and rearranged the plant.

Ever since then, there just hasn't been the work flow that we had before.  I'm from the day when we ran 4000 units per day -- or 450 per line, per shift -- and now we struggle to get half of that.  They know that's a problem, but nobody really knows what to do about it.   There has been talk of putting everything back the way it was before, but somehow I don't see Lennox wanting to spend the money to do that, especially after they spent so much to rearrange it in the first place. 

After I got done, The Warden said, "You're not going to get into trouble for saying that, because it's true!"  He said that all of the visitors they bring into the plant mention the layout, and how inefficient it is, and how much of a struggle it is to get the component parts to the lines where they need to be, and it's all just a big mess. 

He also mentioned that they want to start a new employee training program, because these kids that are coming in today don't even know how to hold a drill.  When he said that, the first thing that popped into my head was, "Maybe you should make it into a video game."  Fortunately, I managed to catch that before it popped out of my mouth. 

Part of the training program will be to teach new hires how to read a blueprint and a tape measure, which is desperately needed.  I remember I had to got through that class when I first started, and I never understood why they stopped it.  Case in point, I had an order yesterday where three of the adapter tubes were bent wrong.  I know this, because I ran a print and checked them. 

They don't bend things per print any more.  They go get a brazing jig and adjust the bender until the parts fit, right or wrong.   And that's the ones who even bother to do that.  Most of them just punch the numbers in and whatever comes out is what they send us -- right or wrong.   It's up to the brazers to sort out the bad parts and re-order them. 

While we're on the subject, I had three orders Monday that I had to send back because they had the wrong tap fitting put in.  I asked Group Leader Shark, "Isn't there anything we can do about this?  We're never going to get ahead if we keep having to send stuff back!"  

Maybe more training will help, but what will really help would be for parent to get back to raising strong, competent children who know how to do more than stare at a screen.  

That's my rant for today. 

I'm going to get ready for bed now.  

Laters.