DOPE

You know what my place of employment needs?

A D.O.P.E..

Seriously.  A department of plant efficiency.  Someone needs to come out there and do a thorough audit of their policies and practices so they can streamline the place and make it a functional, successful business.  Not that they'll listen, mind you, but yeah.  

They can start with all these unnecessary positions that someone in upper management literally made up so that they could give their buddies a job.  Yes, Stalker's job is one of those, but not the only one.  I'm thinking of someone else who was hired simply because she was someone's buddy, and from day one, she's never had a real job.  They have to keep making up stuff for her to do so they can justify giving her a ...somewhat hefty paycheck.   There's probably dozens more similar positions in that place -- almost all of them are office jobs.  And none of them are vital to the plant's day to day operation.  

I am so old I can remember when the plant had one supervisor per shift instead of five, and one production manager for the entire plant, and the same person handled HR, Safety, and First Aid.  I can remember when we didn't have any quality auditors -- not the buttload we have out there now. 

And then there are the useless and redundant things they want us all to do, like filling out those papers every day where we write down the order number and how many headers we brazed off of that order.  Why?  If they want to know which orders we did or how many parts we brazed, they can just look it up in the computer.  Why do we need to waste our time writing it down?  

Do you know what else they want us to do, in addition to filling out those papers, sorting out bad parts, ordering shortages, and handwriting scrap tickets?  Now, we have to keep track of how many headers we braze each hour and write it on the white board in what I've come to refer to as the S.W.O.T. chart.  

In case you haven't guessed, that stands for Stupid Waste Of Time.  Because that's what it is.  It's just something else added onto our plates, and what's it going to solve?  It's not going to make tubing get the parts out faster, or get them to make the parts per print, or get them to count so we don't have to spend half our day either ordering shortages or writing scrap tickets for their overruns.  Those are the issues they need to be resolving.  As I told my coworker while I was down waiting for headers because for some reason tubing had only done half of the order I was working on, Junior is standing over the wrong people.  

I can reach no other conclusion but that they want us to fail, because that's what they seem to be setting us up for.  Failure. 

After a seemingly interminable, hot, frustrating, stressful day, I finally made it home, and I hadn't even gotten to the bathroom when there came a knock at my door.  I opened it to find the man from the tree removal company that's working on the tree next door.  He asked me if I'd happened to take any pictures of the tree.  He said he was in such a hurry to get the tree off of the house before the next round of rain came through that he'd completely forgotten to take before photos.  

I told him that I had, and he asked me to send them to him.  As I was doing that, I said, "I'm going to go ahead and add you as a contact, because I've got a tree I'm going to need cut down pretty soon."  He replied that it would be cheaper for him to do it while he's already got his equipment in this area, so I showed him this little tree that's growing up through my back fence. 

He said he didn't think he could get it down without cutting a hole in my fence, and I assured him that it would be OK, since I was going to have that whole fence pulled up  anyway.  So, he's going to come cut it down probably tomorrow, and that's one more thing off my list.  

Then he turned around and saw the big old limb that had fallen on top of my chicken coops, and said, "That needs to come off of there."  I said that I'd tried to pull it off, but it was too heavy so he just reached up there and tugged a bit, and came right off with no problem. 

Another thing taken care of.  And another chunk of firewood for the fire pit.  I'll have to get my mini chainsaw out and cut it up, but that's not a problem. Oh, and he's going to leave the tree, too, to burn in the fire pit.  

And finally, the basil seems to be perking up quite a bit. 

I propped a few of them up with twigs from the yard, just until they get their feet back under them.  

Now, I'll just have to figure out what to do with the other nine I still have in the pots.   Why on earth did I plant so much basil?  

The world may never know.