When I walked in this morning, a heated conversation was going on in the nearby manager’s office. It was not an argument since both parties agreed; but it was heated. I stopped in because I had something else to ask the manager and I got to be included in the discourse.

“Right now,” S. B. said to me, “if I had one nuke, just one nuke, and the choice to fire it at Iraq, Afghanistan, or corporate headquarters, do you know where it would go?”

“I have a hunch,” I said.

“It would go right there to the headquarters. Get rid of them all.”

“I would appreciate you waiting until I get back,” I said. This was not a particularly wise thing to say, but nobody has ever accused me of wisdom. S.B. looked at me.

“You’re going there? I can get rid of all my problems at once.” He mimed holding a trembling finger over a button. “Is he there yet? Is he there yet?”

Today I was going to write about the Changes We Are Making, the business going on that we are supposed to believe is for our betterment. I think too much. When they tell me we can save money by making consolidated shipments of product from all factories out of our warehouse, I wonder if we lose all the money by shipping everything down to the warehouse in the first place. I wonder if they are paying any attention to the stuff that is already supposed to be shipping out of the warehouse, but we are shipping direct to the customer because they need it so bad.

When they tell us that we are going to make our vendors deliver smaller quantities more frequently so that we can save on our inventory costs, I wonder if they consider that we will pay for it in our piece costs. When they say that we are going to make infrequent shipments from our plant to our distribution warehouse, I wonder how they can be so two-faced without stammering some kind of rationalization. We, as a plant, are going to do wonderful things by getting more frequent deliveries and giving less frequent deliveries! This will solve all our problems! And help the whole company! And our customers!

Stupid political promises. Like Lower Taxes! And More Federal Assistance!

Well, that’s what I was going to write about. But then a water line broke and sprayed water all over an electrical transformer. And they shut the power off to my office and to shipping. And they said it wasn’t going to come back on at all the whole day, while they waited for the transformer to dry out.

That seemed like a way cooler thing to write about. Only, they turned shipping back on within minutes, and I found a different desk to park my laptop on. And then they turned all the power back on sometime around two o’clock. So nevermind.

I got my last report for the first of the month done today, three minutes after quitting time.

Today I got to work on time. I have been, lately, but recently I was missing by five minutes often. Big picture, no big deal, I often leave 10 minutes late… but.

Today at 7:00 am promptly the plant manager called me. And I was at my desk.

That little problem yesterday with orders? No orders dropped to ship from 12:30 yesterday until the same time today. We were experiencing a major problem with our main database and nobody thought to tell us. So the first call today was from the plant manager asking me who he should call to fix this problem.

The second call today was the plant manager telling me to start dropping orders automatically. This was one of those requests where your life starts flashing before your eyes. It’s easy for me to identify all the sales orders we have on us; it’s hard to pick out of that mountain the ones that are actually eligible to ship. I imagined myself frantically trying to drop hundreds of orders and getting duds.

A long time ago, over the course of a long time, I worked to get myself an Access application that would tell me the ship eligibility of every order on the system. Hardly daring to hope, I tried it out again. Yes, reader, it failed me. It came up blank right where I needed to see the status. Something had failed.

But, the orders from last night had been researched (to find the shipment number) without ever being reset or redropped. I helped get those taken care of, then checked on the problem with my order status queries and was able to quickly resolve the issue and drop more orders.

Then I got the third call of the day. Well, it was an instant-message. My boss’ boss told me to keep track of every single line that I dropped because when IT fixed the problem they might all drop again.

As in, every heroic thing I did to fix the problem would ultimately make the problem worse.

It turned out that they were able to not re-drop our orders so none of the work was in vain. It was hard for the day to get worse from there, so it got better instead. But somehow I still didn’t get done that last first-of-the-month report that, in one giddy moment of optimism, I thought I was going to get done on Tuesday.

On to Friday!

Today at the end of the day I was just finishing up what I thought I was going to finish at the same time yesterday when I got a call from down in shipping. They were wondering about their lack of work, so someone had run a report (one of my reports, actually) and found that we had more shipments waiting to go than anyone knew. The system thought a number of orders had dropped for pick that nobody had ever seen.

It is possible, once in a while, for the central database to process a batch drop of orders to pick without the papers actually making it out of the printers. In this case the batch of shipments is left as a file on the main database which I know how to re-trigger. It is not a difficult task but it is esoteric, which is why I was called.

But nobody knew which batch had gone missing. I did not know which batch to re-trigger. I made a guess but nothing happened; it was a batch run with no results. So then A.D. down in shipping started looking through the papers he did have to see which batches had run. He found something from all of the earlier batches so I started trying to re-run the later ones.

But then I noticed that all of the later ones had generated the exact same file size, about a tenth of the size of the batches that we knew had gone through. So then I tried to determine where exactly this missing batch was, and if it was only part of a batch of which some had printed. The shipment numbers on the orders to pick are in sequence, and we could look up these shipment numbers using a little known and little used lookup. By checking a few we found that the sequence on the shipments clearly indicated that the missing shipments were generated after the ones we found.

Thus I had a contradiction: I had shipments which existed on the system and had all the characteristics of a valid shipment on the system; but there was no batch run larger than size zero (effectively) for them to belong to. And the papers had never been seen.

I was stumped. I left it with the high-school co-op to look up each individual shipment number, delete the shipment, and retrigger them.

We hear a lot about how our country has shifted to a knowledge-based economy where manual, tactile skills are less important. This is based on an idiot’s dichotomy between intelligence and manual work. Because manufacturing inherently hints of manual work, it is never waved about as a career aspiration for our young folks who have evolved beyond manual labor.

But the process of turning material into a useful product is not too easy for a college-educated high-flyer; it is too hard. You are accountable to reality when you are working with physicality.

I got the below sentence in an e-mail today from the guy who runs our heat treat. I don’t think he has a college degree. He is not one of The Engineers. He is just the guy who constantly bails us out when we have a material integrity problem.

“I understand the attached report shows hardness’s of RC 46/47 when checked on the Knoop and converted to the Rockwell scale.”

Note his grammatical errors such as the incorrect possessive apostrophe on the word hardness. Like I said, he is not part of the intellgentsia. However, the point of his e-mail was that by converting from one measurement scale to another, we were getting an inaccurate result. Another dumb desk-jockey mistake. (Remember any stories of metric to English unit conversion?)

Also today: Did you know that by taking a casting and milling off somewhere around a quarter of an inch you will expose porosity within the casting? Did you know that if you are an engineer and you have to make a cast part lighter and you instruct the factory to mill the casting (rather than authorizing a new casting which you would have to pay for from your budget), the cost of poor quality because of the exposed porosity is now a manufacturing problem rather than an engineering problem? Did you know that the correct solution of redesigning the casting mold for a thinner part may not be possible because you might not have a realistic allowance for movement of the mold core without breaking through your thinness completely?

Of course you knew. You’re too smart to work in a factory.