If it looks like you’ll be job-hunting no matter what, will you go for broke, stand up, and tell the bigwigs exactly what’s wrong and why? Could get very interesting.
Not ISO certified then. That would fix that .
Which means that the company will be losing more and more business even without idiot president screwing things up.
Good question. When I was young, hung and full of come, I definately would have said something were that to arise. Now, my attitude is more like, “Eh, fuck it.” So if it comes to pass, we’ll see.
The meeting today could best be described, to quote my supervisor, “Same shit, different meeting.” They announced when our annual ISO audit would be, that several of our customers would be doing their annual inspections, and a few other things. One of which was some new programs that sound good, but to quote my supervisor again, “They’ll just fuck it up!” Another thing was that they just got a machine up and running that will take care of our cosmetic issues (but we’re still supposed to make sure the parts are perfect before they leave the department). El Presidente also said, “This company isn’t going anywhere! We’ll be here forever and ever and ever.” Which I don’t find the least bit reassuring, since he was a bit too vocal in that statement. I have a feeling that they might not be shutting us down, but looking to spin us off or similar.
El Presidente also showed how little he knows to several people today. A former employee (with decades of experience working for the company) stopped by and said hello to a few people. The department head saw him and asked for help on a problem that they were having with taps wearing rapidly on some parts. The guy looks at the set up and says that there’s probably some work hardening going on when the parts are being drilled and that having the parts reamed out before they get tapped would fix the problem. The department head says, “Come on, let’s go tell that to El Presidente.” So after introductions are made, the guy explains things to El Presidente. El Presidente responds, “No, that can’t be it, since there’s no zinc in the alloy, so it can’t work harden.” Uh, zinc is not necessary to work harden a metal!
Oh yeah, they complained about a large batch of parts being rejected by one of our customers. Now based on the defects they mentioned, there’s only one person responsible for those parts being wrong and that individual has supposedly been on a final warning for some months now. So you’d think that person would now be gone.
Makes you long for the days when you only had to deal with Pete Puma, eh Tucker?
Actually, no. I’m pretty much able to be by myself at this job, whereas when I worked with Pete, he was always nosing around trying to screw me up.
Get this, we’re behind on shipping orders to the tune of $1 million+, so what do they do tonight? Instead of having us work 10 hours, like we have been all month, they send us home after 8! Does this make sense to anyone? 
Building a backlog? Making the “new owners” (potential buyers) look like they have more business than they can handle?
It would if they just got a stop work order from one of the customers.
Declan
Yeah, but we’re running parts for many different companies, including a certain aircraft company that is considerably behind on orders for it’s new “superplane” and thus can’t afford any delays. Know what I mean?
All to well Tuck.
Declan
Oh the flashbacks, I feel your pain. We had a new General Manager come in our CNC shop from plastic injection molding. Injection molded parts come out identical for hours on end. He expected the same results. Sorry the real world and physics are different.
I’ve had most of the same problems with impractil demands from managers that don’t have real experience on the shop floor. The needless paperwork and making old machines run tighter than they are supposed to.
One problem I don’t agree with. I know that the champher for the thread isn’t going to matter if it’s .050 or .060 but if it’s on the print at .050 then it’s out of tolerance if it’s .0505.
This makes me really appreciate working for my dad. Although there was the time I’d just finshed a batch of parts, he picked one up and said, “This is no good! It’s completely backward! You’re going to have to start over!” I took the part out of his hand, turned it around, and handed it back to him. He looked at it again, then said, “Right. Let’s break for lunch.”
Oh, I agree, but our customers are willing to take the parts if the countersink is as much as .020 oversize. We don’t normally run them oversize, and very rarely more than .010 oversize, but having that extra bit of padding is nice. With some of the machines, you can’t aim for a specific point in the specs, you just count yourself lucky if you can get it in spec.
Or, like what happens to me frequently, instead of running three machines close together, your machines are spread out over half the department. Tonight I had two machines that were about 10 feet apart and the third machine was 50 feet away from the other two. This means that if I’m digging around in the bowels of one machine, there’s no easy way for me to glance at the others to see how they’re doing. In that situation, I adjust the tooling so that the features which will shrink as the tooling wears are at the upper end of the tolerances, and the ones that will grow are at the bottom. That way, if I get tied up trying to fix one machine (as usually happens, I’ve spent entire shifts trying to get them to spit out parts in spec) and don’t make it over to check the others as often as I should, there’s less of a chance that the machines will be spewing out bad parts. It doesn’t always work out that way, and there’s been times when I’ve shut my other machines down while I worked on one, since I couldn’t be certain that they’d run good parts.
Oh, and get this, we’re out of raw stock! That’s right, somebody forgot to order material, so the reason that they’ve sent us home early is because we don’t have the metal to run. (Actually, we do in some cases, but they haven’t gotten the work orders printed up yet, so we can’t run the jobs.) Naturally, the backlog is still somehow our fault, even though we don’t have any control over the ordering process.
Ah, a real machinist (not a button-pusher).
::salutes::