It tastes like asshattery! The past two days at work have had me asking myself, “Why is it again that I don’t take up sniping?” And, yes, I am talking the crazed gunman on top of a tall building type of sniping.
I have had some of the most boring work, I have ever had in that place. We had a shipment of parts that came back from one of our customers (a defense contractor, [Narrator from Fight Club] A really big one! [/NfFC]) because the parts were out of spec. And to be fair, it wasn’t my supervisor’s (Pete Puma) fault. Nope, you see, these were castings that should never have needed machining to begin with!
All they were, were simple eye hooks. Big and weird looking eye hooks, it’s true, but ones with specifications so broad as to be the proverbial broadside of a barn. Normally the specs on military parts are that they have to match the dimensions on a blueprint to within +/- .010 an inch or less. On these, the parts had to be within +/- .120 of an inch. So, casting them should have been easy. We’re more than able to hold that kind of tolerance with a casting, all they would need is some grinding, a little sandblasting, a quick inspection, and they’re good to go. Unless, of course, the mold is wrong. Which it was. How nobody noticed this, I can only guess.
You see, before we ever do a production run on a new part, we do a test run of a handful of parts first. These parts are carefully checked over (including being measured), and then shipped to the customer for them to inspect. They look the parts over, tell us if there’s any changes needed to be made, or give us the go ahead to run the order. So, apparently, our inspectors (more about in a moment), and the customer’s inspectors all missed the problem with the parts on the test run (or, more likely, we cheated on the test parts, and figured we be able to get away with cheating :rolleyes: ). Because we got the go ahead to run the full order. Which promptly came back since the parts were too big.
So my job was to machine the excess material off (all 0.01 of an inch) while the mold maker took a hand grinder and smoothed the toolmarks out. To put it in terms a non-machinist could understand, all I was doing was drawing a circle. The same damn circle over and over again. For 16 hours. Oh sure, the mold maker and I swapped out a couple of times, but after an hour or so, the mold maker would say, “I really think that you’re better at this than I am.” and we’d swap back. (Gee, I get that a lot in every place I work at. Wonder why that is?)
The entire time, I had to listen to the mold maker whine about how it was silly for us to do this, since all that was going to be done with these parts is that they were going to get a rope around them, and Pete Puma fapping around the shop, worrying about some inconsequential matter. (He still hasn’t figured out, BTW, why the mold maker engraved a picture of Pete Puma on one of our fixtures, or why I keep writing “Puma repellant” on the “Needed Supplies” board. :wally ) I, of course, am slowly going insane from all the monotony. This is not why I became a machinist! I wanted to make things! Not correct some other boob’s fuck up, that in any place where the inspectors weren’t cross-eyed, they’d have caught and corrected from the get-go! (No joke, the bastard’s cross-eyed, mumbles, and when he talks to you, it’s like the conversation started ten minutes ago and you just showed up.)
Halfway through the job, the mold maker finds three parts which are hideously deformed. Given the way they were deformed, they had to have been cast that way. No possibility of the customer having dropped the parts and then trying to blame us for fucking them up. Nope, it’s all our fault. They’re so badly deformed that it’s not practical for us to machine them, unless, of course, someone applies 1/2 in or more of weld bead to them. Then we can machine them. I tell the mold maker (who can also weld) to go weld them up. He starts laughing at me.
“You think I’m kidding?” I ask him. “We have to have 67 parts to fill this order, they’re not going to want to cast three more. Someone’s going to have to weld these parts up, so that we can machine them.” The mold maker’s rolling in hysterics by this point.
Of course, standard proceedure in such a situation is to do exactly what I said. Weld the parts up and then machine them to spec. We do it all the time to fill the voids that some times appear in castings. It’s not always cheaper to do it this way, but it’s quite often faster than casting more parts, and with such a small number needed, their first instinct is to weld the parts, instead of recasting them.
The mold maker takes the parts and then shows them to a couple members of management, while saying that these would be great parts to demonstrate that it’s so important for us to catch mistakes as early in the process as possible. One of them agrees, and the other asks, “You’ll be able to fix those, won’t you?”
When the mold maker relates the story to me, I respond with, “I told you so.” To which the mold maker replies that he’s going to destroy the parts before we leave so that they can’t be welded up. (He forgot to do so before we left and I “forgot” to remind him.) Come Monday morning, I’m going to slip into the shop before the mold maker gets there, and forge a note from Pete Puma saying that the owner wants the parts welded up. 
It just steams my clams how hap-hazard and half assed everything there is done. Yes, I know, I know, in every job you’ve some times got to cut a few corners, but they’ve cut so many that the place resembles a bowling ball. Even more frustrating is that they’ll do it when they don’t have to! Hell, I’ve tried to show them, simplier and easier ways of doing things, and their response, almost universally has been, “But we’ve always done it this way.” Shit, how stupid do you have to be, to have someone come up to and say, “Here’s how you can do 10 times as much work, with 1/2 the effort it takes you to do the job now.” and respond with, “But I don’t wanna do it that way!”?
There’s only two possible conclusions I’ve been able to come up with to explain this: 1.) I was someone like Stalin in a previous life, and being surrounded by morons in this life is my punishment. 2.) 99.99999999999999999% of the population practices some form of DIY lobotomy and enjoys being brain dead fucktards. Gah! And people wonder why I’m on medication!
