Or maybe all three. Actually, that would be kind of creative.
I think Tuckerfan 's job is really on the ninth circle of hell, he’s just not aware of it. See he takes the highway to hell everymorning to work.
Ok. I think I’ll shut up now.
At first, when I started reading Tuckerfan stories, I was a bit nervous. I have done a tidbit of health and safety with metal shops, and I kept dreading the appearance of the Lily-esque character with her clipboard (Braaaaad’s cousin?).
As I have not seen her appear, I can only assume that Tuckerfan’s work has no time for such concerns, so I can read the stories without fear. 
( <— eye protection)
Okay, here’s a sample of what happened:
Yesterday started out beautifully. I started to leave for work, only to discover that i had a flat tire. It being faster to yank the plate of my Pontiac and slap it on the back of the Chrysler than changing the tire, I did that. Still, I called work to let them know that I was going to be late. The Owner’s wife, Squawker, answered the phone. I told her what was going on, and she said, “Of course you are. It’s eight o’clock already. What time were you supposed to be at work?”
“Eight.” I replied.
“Oh. I thought that maybe you had to be here earlier.” :rolleyes: The company put me on this half-assed schedule over a month ago, totally against my will and without any advanced notice. Squawker has her mitts in every aspect of the company, just about, so the odds of her not knowing when I’m supposed to be there are pretty slim. (BTW, in case you’re wondering, it was Braaaad’s idea to change my schedule.)
I get there, endure a bunch of wisecracks about why I was late, and I draw the “lucky” job of drilling holes in the Honda parts on the Mold Maker’s machine. Almost immediately, I shatter the $16 cutter I was using. Whoops! I grab another cutter, load it up in the machine, and try it again. This cutter lasts about 10 parts before shattering. It’s also our last $16 cutter, which means I have to switch to the $2 cutters that were only lasting about 5 parts when we were using them before on the CNC machine. Pete and I confer on the situation, since there’s no way we can keep on going like this.
As Pete’s trying different adjustments, the quill on the machine completely seizes up. Uh, oh. We don’t have any open machines we can drill the parts on, and swapping the fly cutting job from the CNC to the Mold Maker’s machine is out of the question, since that’s how the problems with the machine got started in the first place. So Pete faps off to alert management of the problem.
I move over to Pete’s machine, and start tapping the Honda parts, while the Mold Maker, who’s running the CNC, and I try to think of the most absurd work around to the problem. The best idea we could come up with was raising the knee on the mill up and down manually. Better ideas come later, though.
Someone, somewhere, figures out some kind of a solution. I’m not paying any attention at this point, because I really just don’t care. It doesn’t matter what happens, I know that I’m screwed. We keep running things as we are, with Pete finding some piddly little piss ass job involving him using a pencil grinder to clean up some parts while seated in a chair.
After lunch, a couple of professionals show up to remove the head of the Mold Maker’s machine and haul the corpse off to see if they can try to revive it. Right after this, Braaaad and Clayd’oh, the “engineer” (I use that term loosely, not the least of which is that he’s the Owner’s son-in-law) bring in their solution to our problem of the dead mill. which is this cute lil number. Now, compare that, to the drill presses we already have. Now, compare it to the mill which died. Anybody see a problem with this? 'Cause Braaaad sure didn’t. (“IT WAS THE BIGGEST ONE THEY HAD.”)
After Braaaad and Clayd’oh get it assembled, they leave and the Mold Maker jokes that we ought to take the drill press and put it on the table of his, now decapitated, mill. I need to point out that Pete’s out of the shop when the Mold Maker says this. Why do I need to point this out? Because an hour later, Pete does exactly that. Why does he do this? So that he can set it up to do part of the Honda job, that’s currently being done on one of the drill presses. What does he set up on that drill press? Nothing.
Now, whenever Pete’s out of the shop, the Mold Maker keeps going on and on about how we need to figure out how to get Pete fired. Everyone here knows my affection (or lack thereof) for Pete, but the Mold Maker literally gets a chubby at the thought of Pete being fired. One day the Mold Maker was telling me that I needed to write another rant about Pete. While he’s saying this, he’s grabbing his crotch and has this “Who’s yer daddy?” look on his face. Color me disturbed.
I’m really tired of this, because he just keeps going on and on about it, so finally, I point out that the only way the Owner’s going to fire Pete is if Pete mouths off to him. That shuts the Mold Maker up. For awhile.
The rest of the day’s in a bit of a haze for me. I know other goofy things happened, but I’ve got two people “pestering” me in IM windows (one of whom is a Doper and he wants me to update the rant, MonkeyMule, I’m looking in your direction), so I’ll just write what I remember about the end of the day, before skipping ahead to today. As Ilm leaving, Pete and the New Guy are outside having a cigarette. I mention to the New Guy that they’ve just posted the schedule for this weekend and that he’s working from Noon till 6 PM. His response is, “That ain’t gonna fucking work.” Aaaah, I think. He’s not going to last very long.
Give me a bit, and I’ll post the gory details of today.
Okay, MonkeyMule has been nagging me about different shit, so I haven’t been able to complete my saga of today’s events, and now I’ve got to go to bed, so I’ll post what I’ve got and try to pick up the rest tomorrow if I can. (I’ve got to work, and we’ve got that Dopefest that I need to try and make it to.)
Wanna guess what my job was when I walked in this morning? Bolting down the baby drill press on the Mold Maker’s machine. And unlike Pete, I didn’t use toe clamps. Just a standard stud and nut. I also made up a sign for the mill which read “Frankenmill ½ mill ½ drill all terror” Everybody got a good laugh out of it.
One person I haven’t mentioned yet is Mr. Ed. He’s a sponge the Owner hired about a year or so ago to help organize the business. Mr. Ed is a minister who got fired from the church he was pastor of because money kept disappearing from the till. Mr. Ed has spent his time at Amalgamated Moron Manufacturing Co. doing goofy things like create incentive programs wherein if we hit certain productivity levels we’d get a really big bonus. Funny thing is, we never hear any more about it.
Mr. Ed also prints up slogans and posts them on the wall. Slogans like
This is hysterical, because Sammy, the maintence man, likes to point out that he can’t get the Owner to shell out money for parts to repair the equipment, muchless buy the new equipment we desperately need. “Lean,” “High Five,” “Way of the Squirrel,” “Way of the Beaver,” and “Gift of the Goose” are all things which are tied to the various incentive programs he’s created. What any of them have to do with us, I’ve never been able to figure out, but I have started coming up with my own versions of his slogans. Samples of which can be found below:
Going lean means having to pawn your VCR because you haven’t had a raise in years.
High Five means being ferociously fucked for the foreseeable future.
Going lean is using machines which should have been scrapped twenty years ago.
The way of the squirrel means eating your own nuts to survive.
The gift of the goose is management shitting on you again.
The way of the beaver is being able to only afford a house made out of mud and sticks.
I’m high five or more days a week because it’s the only way I can put up with you stupid fucks.
I’m sorely tempted to print those up and post them, just to see how long it takes for folks to notice them. The problem with that, of course, is that they’d instantly know who did it.
I like how its all MY fault you didn’t get to post everything. Apoligize before I tell everyone about teh cheesecake from hell, and the gas it created!
I guess the other one was a doper too. 
MonkeyMule, why should I apologize for being honest? I told you what I was doing, and you kept popping in to tell me how I should spend money I don’t have on hookers. All the while bugging me to update this thing.
hillbilly queen, my dear, a beautiful woman is utterly incapable of pestering me. 
Bubblegum? Check.
Duct tape? Absolutely.
A hammer? Sine qua non.
But there’s one crucial item y’all forgot:
Baling twine.
Oh, I suppose some folks would use baling wire instead, but the purist insists on baling twine. Nothing else can take its place. Gimme that old-time baling twine, it was good enough for grampa, it’s good enough for me!
Binder twine. Baling twine is all newfangled.
But way stronger, according to this site:
Around these here parts, the expression is “duct tape and baling twine,” probably because us horse folks are so used to dealing with hay bales. I like the natural fiber twine better than the plastic stuff – yeh, that’s newfangled, all right – but they both do the job.
I’ll take baling twine over baling wire any day, you need wire cutters to open a bale bound with the latter, but you can use anything from scissors to a boxcutter to a braid ripper to a shedding blade on the former. And there’s way more ways to use the twine around the barn.
Sweet, sweet naked Betsy. Tuckerfan, my advice in the last thread may not have been the best, but it was the best I had. So none of that here. 
Short of heavy doses of Valium I see this ending in one of three ways.
-
You take the earlier mentioned tack and go Scott Adams’ route. Wherein you start a new career writing comics/books about Braaaad and his ilk.
-
You sell the trailer and a car for enough money to live on for 2 months and use the last paycheck for gas money to get somewhere else.
-
We all see your picture on CNN one morning and are subpoenaed to testify about what we knew. :eek:
Dammit, I knew I missed a critical ingredient.
You don’t need anything to open a bale bound with twine. Just grab one string in the middle with both hands and bounce the bale against your knee. Or just pull it off one corner, if the bales not too tight. Then repeat the grab and knee thing on the other side, and the bale explodes (with a nice big poof if it’s a tightly compressed straw bale…hay not so much). For the record, I’ve never even seen binder twine. Before my time.
Gorsnak, who never liked fiddling with knives to open bales at -30
Given Honda’s reputation, I’m amazed that they gave this job to Amalgamated Moron Manufacturing. Didn’t Honda tour the plant?
Tuckerfan, I enjoy your stories – except for the fact of knowing that you didn’t make them up and are actually suffering through all this crap.
[aggie hijack]
Ayuh, that’s true, and I’ve done that many a time too. But if you’re planning to use the twine for something, you generally need to cut it anyway. Then too, if you’re at a barn where other people aren’t careful about putting the twine in a trash can, you’ll have loops of strong twine lying around where a horse can get its hoof caught.
Speaking of bouncing bales, I take it you’re familiar with the way to fix a bale that’s bulging out? – lay it on its side, bulge side up, and do a flying knee drop on it?
[/ah]
Yup, and the owner bullshat the hell out of them when they were there. Which, indirectly leads me to my next point. I’m going to have change how I post these things, because sooner or later the Mold Maker’s going to discover them, and then there’s going to be hell to pay. Plus, I’m having to leave out a lot of things simply because they don’t make any sense without the backstory. So, what I’m thinking is that if someone can point me to a free blog site (wherein I can do links like in vBulletin), I will, when I get the chance, start the tale from the beginning, so that you guys can see what kind of ever growing snowball from hell this job has turned out to be.
And trust me, you guys have only seen the tip of the iceberg of that place. There’s people (like Shakey and Clueless) that I haven’t even mentioned yet. Events, like the 9/11 memorial, I haven’t discussed, and exponential levels of madness beyond your wildest dreams.
One thing that I forgot to mention in my last post, that I will mention here before I take a nap, is that Braaaad had the bright idea of taking some of the Honda castings which had small voids in them, and filling them with J. B. Cold Weld. “They’ll never notice.” he said. Sure enough, they did.
Tuckerfan,
Love your posts, you’re a fine writer. Any chance you’ve read “Rivethead”, bout ten tears back, by Ben Hamper? Early Michael Moore web site usta carry his missives, not now that I see. He worked in the GM plant in Flint, MI, and was Moore’s first source of “workingman’s blues”. Had a Messageboard for a while, lots of fun.
Anyhoo, you remind me a lot of Ben, and should search out a copy of “Rivethead”. Don’t know the last printing, but you got a SoulBrother there. Make the effort.
And, please keep posting, I love it.
Another Tuckerfan fan here, as well.
So, does he say “Work smarter, not harder!” ??
Having worked with tool makers and machinists in the past (heck, I married one), I have to say that I get a kick out of these stories, having lived variations on these themes.