Be Proud

Be proud of me.  Why?  Because I finally emptied that last five gallon bucket of water I'd been storing since before the ice storm.  Not only that, everyone in the tubing department now has power back on -- the last one having gotten his turned back on yesterday evening.  

Most of the leftovers that thawed when the power was out have been eaten, and I'm slowly re-stocking my freezer.  

Life is pretty much back to normal.  

I know there are a lot of people still without power, but it's a whole lot fewer than there were.  Yesterday I ran into Walmart and the parking lot was full of lineman trucks.  I mean, there were probably at least 20 of them.  As I came out, a whole line of them left and headed north, probably up to Oxford or Tippah County.  They got hit the worst. 

By the way, Elon Musk -- yes that Elon Musk -- donated 500 generators to the hardest hit areas.  When I heard, I went to X and thanked him.  I doubt he'd even see it; likely he gets tagged thousands of times a day, but still...it seemed the right thing to do. 

Speaking of work, Inspector Gadget said at the morning meeting that they are going to focus on reducing scrap this year, and I'm like, how many times have I told them to make tubing count their parts?  I'd estimate that 95% of the scrap tickets I write are for over run adapter tubes.  

True story:  A few weeks ago, I had a three piece order.  It had six adapter tubes...and four of the six were over run.  On a three piece order.  

One = 🍎

Two = 🍎🍎

Three = 🍎🍎🍎

Yeah, that many.  To make matters worse, those parts are bent manually, not on the automatic machine.  That means two people had to be too lazy to count to three.  But I still had to hand write four scrap tickets for a three piece order.  It took longer to deal with the scrap than it did to braze the order.

And they wonder why their production is dropping. 

But what brought all of that on is that yesterday, someone over in tubing put the hole for the tap fitting in the wrong place on the header, and the brazer brazed the order up anyway.  I'm not blaming him.  He's only been there about 6 months and is still pretty new to the job.  

Still, the person who drilled the hole should have checked, and the person who brazed the tap fitting in should have checked, too.  They say they don't have to.  To that, I say, "If they don't have to check the parts, why do we?"  

Come to think of it, if they don't have to count their parts, why should we?  Why can't I send an order to the line and say, "Oh well, if it's short, the line will just re-order one" like tubing does to us? 

Anyway, the brazing trainer was pretty hot over that.  She said, "The problem is that they've got their auditors in the wrong place.  They should be over there (in tubing), no over here (in sub-brazing)."  She said she was going to tell the quality guy.  A few moments later, she came back and said she'd spoken to Inspector Gadget and he'd agreed with her.  He said he even brought it up one morning in one of those meetings they have, and someone from the front office jumped all over him for even suggesting such a thing.  

What I don't understand is that the person has absolutely nothing to do with either quality or production, so why is he getting so bent out of shape over us wanting the parts from tubing to be correct?  It's no skin off his nose.  But that's how it is out there, and that's why that company is circling the drain.  They already can't find anyone who wants to work there, and this kind of lunacy only makes things worse. 

On a brighter note, the puzzle is moving right along.  

I almost bought a new one yesterday, but didn't.  I looked in my closet at home and found several more I can work when I'm done with this one.  I know it's the highlight of your day to watch me work jigsaw puzzles.  

Since we've all had enough of winter for a while, I'm starting to look ahead to spring.  So, I took some money out of my ibotta savings and bought two more of those raised beds for my herb garden.  The second one arrived today. 

I'm not sure why I thought you'd want to see the box that it came in, but there it is.  It's supposed to be pretty mild this weekend, so I'm going to try to get them water sealed and put into place.  That way, I can better judge where I need to put the two 4 x 4 beds that I got for the center.  It'll make more sense when I show you photos.  

And finally, I'm not sure why play sand needs to be gluten free, but that's the world we live in.  

 Now, if you'll excuse me, I found a new show on TLC called Suddenly Amish.  It's pretty interesting, but I'm sure most of it is fake like so many of those reality shows.  The premise of the show is that young people are leaving the Amish community -- I guess they don't really want to live like it's still the 1800s -- and their way of life is dying out, so this one bishop has invited six outsiders to come see if they want to join the Amish.  

The really funny thing about it, one of the Amish guys who is mentoring the newcomers has a secret cell phone and a stash of whiskey hidden in the corn field.  One of the outsiders has a hearing problem, and his hearing aids are connected to his phone.  Well, the Amish guy with the secret phone is the one who took the deaf guy's phone away.  It's all pretty interesting. 

Oh, and I'm five episodes in to Best Medicine, and I'm really enjoying it.  It's based on Doc Martin, but isn't just Doc Martin with American accents, so it's almost like a completely different show. 

That's about all I have for today, so I guess I'll stop boring you and knit a bit while I watch this show about the Amish. 

Laters.