No shit. If thing’s had gone slightly different today, all of you would have been sitting here talking about how a Doper snapped and killed almost everyone he worked with. And, no, Pete Puma had nothing to do with it. Let me describe some of the worthless pieces of shit I work with.
First, there’s the mold maker. I have him to “thank” for this job. He constantly drops hints that he’s a multimillionaire. He also claims to hate the place as much as I do. Now, call me crazy, but if I had a month’s salary in the bank, I’d quit the job. Yet, the mold maker continues to stay. He’s even said to Pete, “I was here before you started, and I’ll be here after you’re gone.” WTF? I also get to listen to the mold maker’s near constant stories of him screwing his wife. (Oh yeah, he’s decided not to have more kids, because he doesn’t want his wife to lose her figure.) He’s also told management that he doesn’t know how to weld aluminum, while bragging to me that he does. He’s also told management that he can’t make certain molds because he doesn’t understand the software well enough. Okay, I can barely get the software to do anything, but I’ve piddled with it enough to know that if you can do what he does with it, you can do what he says he can’t do with it. I should also mention that the mold maker is a musician and claims to have played with all kinds of big name stars. He also claims to have made parts for Jesse James.
Next, there’s Braaaad. Braaaad is the “expert” hired to save the company. Braaaad talks about everything like he’s a high school basketball coach, there’s two minutes left in the game, his team’s down by a hundred points, and he think’s that there’s some way his team can pull it out and win the game. Braaaad has come up with a whole bunch of “brilliant” ideas. One of his ideas was to buy a huge “coffin” freezer. The idea being we’d take the wax filled trees and freeze them. That way, we’d be able to burn the wax without distorting the ceramic trees because of the different rates of expansion between wax and ceramic. Of course, if the ceramic isn’t fully cured, then freezing the trees will prevent them from curing properly and they’ll disintergrate when they’re put in the preheat oven. Any guesses as to how I know this? Another one of Braaaad’s “brilliant” ideas was to put the furnace operator on the pouring crew. Instead of standing up at the furnace, while they’re pouring steel and keeping close eye on the furnace (old and poorly maintained), he’s now down on the pouring floor with everyone else. The furnace operator admits that it’s only a matter of time before the furnace blows up and someone gets hurt.
Then there’s One Eyed Jack. He’s one of our parts inspectors. Any guesses as to how he got his name? He calls his wife “Mommy.” Every conversation he has with you, seems to have started ten minutes before you got there. Add to that, One Eye’s inability to enunciate correctly, and his complete lack of understanding of what he’s supposed to be examining the parts for, and it’s a wonder any of Pete’s numerous mistakes ever get caught at all.
The Owner’s a real piece of work. He screwed his own father over to get control of the company a few years ago and has been running it into the ground ever since. He’s not really paid a helluvalot of attention to the daily operations of the business (i.e. he hasn’t given a shit if Pete’s done anything or not), until recently. The Honda contract was supposed to save the company. Of course, he didn’t think about the fact that we’d totally have to change how we do business. And now that the shit has not only hit the fan, but sprayed around the room before getting sucked back into the fan so it can be sprayed about again, he’s got no idea of what to do to save our bacon. Which is why he hired Braaaad.
Now, that’s just a partial cast of characters, but this damn thing’s getting long, it’s getting late, and I’m starting to lose my buzz, so I’ll just skip ahead to what the hell I’ve been doing for the past month. Myself, the mold maker, and Pete have been machining Honda parts. 400 parts a day, on a “good” day. Most of the time, we’re not able to crank that many out, however. Not that it matters, of course, since we need to be doing twice that many a day to keep up with what Honda wants. We wouldn’t be in this mess, if the Owner and Braaaad had bothered to do some planning before we ran the Honda job. You know, figured out how long it was going to take us to do the job, what kind of problems we were likely to run in to, that kind of thing. But they didn’t. Nope, they just figured that we could run the Honda parts like we run everything else: Kind of to specifications and we’ll ship it to you, whenever we get around to it.
