In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. This morning, we walk into the shop, and Braaaad is already in there, nosing about, his clipboard in hand (Hey, coach! Where’s your stop watch?). Naturally, we all realize that this is a bad thing, since when Braaaad starts poking around at work, he tends to foul things up. In an effort to minimize the damage, I ask Braaaad what’s he’s looking for.
'I’M LOOKING FOR PART 21135! DO YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS?"
“Uh, yeah, Braaaad, they’re right over there on that cart, with the print. You know, with the part number scribbled across the top of it in big numbers.”
“AH, YES. WE HAVE TO SHIP THESE PARTS TODAY! ARE THEY READY?”
Now, the parts as they sit on the cart are raw castings. They’ve been sandblasted to get the ceramic off of them, but that’s it. It should be obvious to anyone who’s spent any time in a foundry what a raw casting looks like. Now, I don’t expect Braaaad to have a clue what the finished parts should look like, but he ought to be able to tell if they’ve been machined. I should also point out that these parts are of an odd shape. They look sort of like a deformed coffee mug with a square rim. They’re replacement parts for late 60s/early 70s Mercedes climate control systems. The original parts are some kind of phenolic plastic that tends to crack after a while, since that means you wind up with anti-freeze all over the inside of your nice Mercedes, restorers have taken to using aluminum parts instead of the original plastic.
Given the odd shape of the parts, there’s no way that they could have any of the machining they need done on the lathe. It’s got to be done on the milling machines and/or the drill presses we have. All of which are quite obviously tied up running Honda parts. Pete, being the shop supervisor, proceeds to explain to Braaaad that there’s simply no way we can run those parts if he expects us to get out the 400 Honda parts today.
Braaaad seems puzzled by all of this. Pete relates how it takes all of our time to machine the Honda parts and that we haven’t had time to work on anything but Honda parts for the past month. Pete then shows Braaaad all of the other work that has been piling up in the shop that we haven’t been able to do.
“WELL, IT SEEMS TO ME THAT IF WE CAN’T GET THE WORK DONE. THEN WE NEED TO SEND IT OUT TO SOMEONE ELSE FOR THEM TO DO IT. AM I RIGHT?” I can’t really duplicate the patter which went on between Pete and Braaaad at this point, but suffice it to say, if you’ve seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and recall the scene where the valet is telling Hunter that he can’t park his car there, and Hunter keeps insisting that it looks like a reasonable place to park to him, you’ll have some idea of what it was like. Pete, BTW, has the role of the valet, and Braaaad has the role of Hunter.
Pete, of course, can’t out-source a job without Braaaad’s permission. Up until this very moment, Pete hasn’t been able to make Braaaad understand that there was a backlog of work in the shop. And I really should give Pete some credit here. Ever since we started running the Honda job full tilt, Pete has really worked his little Puma heart out. He’s spent most of his time at one or more of the machines, running the parts as fast as he can. Okay, how big of a dipshit do you have to be to not realize that if everyone in the shop is spending all their time cranking out parts for one particular job that they’re not going to be able to do anything else? And we’ve pointed out to Braaaad, in the past, not only how long it takes us to run the Honda parts, but also that we’re shaving four ounces of metal off of each one. Yet, it’s never sunk it. Nevermind that we’ve got fifty five gallon drums filled with metal chips in the shop, it all slips past him. Until today.
As Pete’s explaining all of this to Braaaad, and hoping to get Braaaad to agree to out-source a bunch of the shit we’ve got, the mold maker starts whining to me. He’s upset because he’s been informed by the foundry supervisor, Mullet Man, that he’s going to have to put in as much over time as Pete and I are. This pisses the Mold Maker off to no end.
“I’ve got a family! I can’t be spending all my time at work!” :rolleyes: Geeze, ya little bitch, while I’m sure everyone would agree that the more time Pete spends away from his family (thus lessening there being any more Puma’s [Pete’s already got 3 kids] in this world) is a good thing, I’d sure as shit like some time off so that I could start a family (or at least get a little nookie), but I’m not bitching about having to work the overtime. I don’t bitch, not simply because I need the money, but because, well, it’s my fucking job to work overtime if the company needs me to! But not the Mold Maker! No, he thinks that he’s only supposed to work on molds. Thus completely ignoring the fact that he spends most of his time running parts, even before we started the Honda job. Since we started the Honda job, the Mold Maker’s not worked on any molds. (He’s also hourly like the rest of us, so it’s not like he’s a salary slave.)
I do my best to tune out his rantings about how he’s going to kick Mullet Man’s ass. The Mold Maker’s about 5’ 4", 165 lbs. Mullet Man’s 6’ and probably weighs in at around 200 lbs. The Mullet Man, when he gets pissed (which is fairly often) punts 75 lbs pans of parts around without hesitation, while the Mold Maker often struggles to pick up 40 lb molds, my money’s on Mullet Man.
Of course, this isn’t the high point of the “entertainment” for the day. Merely the prelude. Because the Mold Maker’s mill got torn up by the constant fly cutting of the Honda parts (necessitating over $500 in repairs, and it’s still not working right), the Owner had Pete order $500 worth of specialized tooling so that we can fly cut the Honda parts on the CNC mill (since, you know, it makes more sense to tear up a $20K machine, than a $10K machine, and both those options are preferrable to fixing the mold so we don’t have to fly cut the Honda parts to begin with), these had showed up yesterday, so the Mold Maker wrote a quickie program to run them on the CNC program, and while he was ranting about having to work a whole extra two hours a day, plus half a day on Saturday (The horror!), he set the CNC machine up to fly cut the Honda parts.
I busied myself running the part of the Honda job that was formerly done on the CNC on the Mold Maker’s machine. It’s times like this that I wonder if I’m an asshole, and am being overly sensitive to legitimate gripes of other people, or if I’ve just been cursed to be surrounded by jack asses. One of these days, I’m going to flip a coin to decide the matter. What I’m going to do when I get the answer, I haven’t decided yet.
I don’t know what Pete was doing, but eventually, I saw him fapping around the shop. I did my best to tune everything out, so I’ve got no idea what all happened in the shop. I do know, I saw Pete working on the Mercedes parts, also showing them to Roger, who is a machinist we some times outsource work to. At the end of the day, Pete had about 12 of the Mercedes parts done (it’s been so long since I’ve done the Mercedes parts, I can’t say if that was a good number or not), and he’s describing to Braaaad, who’s come back into the shop at this point, what all we have to do to the parts. When Pete describes a particular operation to Braaaad, Braaaad looks at Pete and asks why that isn’t into the casting to begin with.
“That’s something I can’t answer.” Pete replies.
Braaaad shakes his head and says, “THE WAY WE DO THINGS IN THIS PLACE BEFUDDLES ME SOME TIMES.”
I immediately offer Braaaad my hand and say, “Hi, I’m [Tuckerfan]. Welcome to [Amalgamated Moron Manufacturing Co.]. Glad to have you aboard.” Braaaad shakes my hand, and walks out, still shaking his head.
