A couple from the same factory, neither was mine:
The usual “entry level spot” was as a production peon (actual job title, ok?) in the weekend shift, but they’d spend the first four weeks working the day shift as on-the-job training.
One day, I went to have lunch and the latest arrival was looking terribly sad, like a kicked puppy… he was feeling so bad he couldn’t even eat (and on a 21yo man, that’s a lot of “feeling bad!”). Turns out that, while trying to place one of the m[sup]3[/sup] containers (called “cages” because of the metal cage around the actual plastic container) “just so,” he’d pierced the one behind with the cart’s “horns”. The other guys laughed and explained to him that actually they figured it meant he’d stay. They said, “you did it for trying to do better than the cart and cage specs allow, not for going too fast or somesuch. Most of us horned a cage during our trial period :D” A quick poll proved that the only two people in that room who’d never “horned a cage” where the only two who had never pulled a warehouse shift.
One fine, cold Saturday, I get to work at 6am and the lab tech from the previous shift tells me to change into a borrowed blue overall instead of my lab coat.
Turns out that one of the night batches wouldn’t start reacting; after running through the first steps of the standard protocol, it was time to call the Emergency Duty Person… but seeing who it was (let’s call him Bob), the foreman said “oh no way, screw it, I’m winging this myself and if I do it wrong let them fire my ass.” It looked to him like heating more or adding more reagent would be likely to cause an explosion or at least an explosive polimerization, which would in turn be dangerous for life and limb or at the very least involve long and dangerous cleaning. So he dumped the load instead, by opening the trapdoor at the bottom of the reactor. Part of the load reacted when it touched the cold floor, part went into the drains (the factory had its own sewage purification system) and stayed liquid.
We spent the whole weekend and part of Monday morning cleaning up the white, spongy, sticky cake off the floor but it was nothing compared with what any of us knew could have been. And it was during the slow part of the year, so there was no impact to customers.
The manager started to berate the foreman for not calling the emergency guy (as well as congratulating him for solving the situation correctly), but when he said “it was Bob who was on duty,” she couldn’t find the courage to go on.
About ten days later, a different factory had the same situation… only, there, they pulled what we called “a Bhopal:” they kept bouncing the decision up, add more reagent, heat up more, bounce it up… until they got an explosive reaction which didn’t cause personal harm but required over two weeks of cleanup. Everybody above the foreman (foremen weren’t supposed to take the “dump it” decision, but those above could) got fired.
Why Bob got no respect:
I’d worked in that factory for over a year and wondered why Bob got no respect. After all, he was an engineer, most “bluemen” would respect anybody with any kind of tech education, so why not Bob?
One of my duties was to prepare small batches to test new recipes. Bob had tweaked a recipe and told me to test it for him. I ran the recipe as written but the reaction wouldn’t start. I followed the usual protocol until the point where if it had been a weekend I would have had to scrap it and start a fresh one, but it wasn’t the weekend: it was a weekday and Bob was there, so I went to inform him. He said “oh, add more starter reagent!” “I already did, twice per protocol, and it’s not starting. Protocol calls for scrapping.” “Nah, can’t be, let’s go take a look at it.” (Btw: he was a mechanical engineer, I was lower on the factory’s totem pole but I’m a chemical engineer, so when it comes to organic reactions I’d like to think I know a bit more than he did)
So we go, and the foreman on duty (different foreman, Joe) was there, having brought a sample from the Big Reactor for me to analyze.
Bob told Joe to wait. This was a serious breach of protocol: running a sample from the Big Reactor was higher priority than anything other than fire, broken bones, heart attacks and bleeding wounds. But Bob was higher in the totem pole than we were, so Joe waited while Bob poked at my minireactor and… poured all the starter in :smack: Can you spell “volcano”? Well, the eruption was white, but you know what I mean.
And while I stopped the explosive reaction he had caused, Bob freaked out so badly that Joe had to grab him out of my way and was seriously considering bitchlapping him from the factory to Bangkok by the time Bob collapsed into a chair crying “ohmygod, ohmygod, what can we do?” “What she’s already doing… :rolleyes:”
Joe and me cleaned things up, including Bob’s shaking nerves. But I understood that day why he wasn’t someone you’d want to call when you had a problem, indeed.
