I have not accumulated a wealth of professional resources, but I know this one is a keeper. Evil HR Lady is the only professional blog I have read for hours at a time, and wished I was clearheaded enough to keep reading. She has one of those blogs that you are sure can explain the entire universe if you can just read everything that’s on there.

Evil HR Lady could be a boring blog written by a malcontent about how odious it is to make triplicate copies of everything. But it is not. It’s about what brings smiles and what brings frowns to the people who hire and fire–the HR people, but also the managers who work with the HR people to accomplish their objectives.

It’s like eavesdropping on the closed-door meetings that you normally hear about through rumor and speculation. All the identifying personal and corporate details are redacted, but you can still see how the process works. You can understand.

Take this autopsy of a botched firing. I can completely sympathize with the enquirer and yet, as the Evil HR Lady deconstructs, I can clearly see how things suddenly and unexpectedly turned out ugly.

I feel like this is the HR mentoring I have never received, and I’m trying to make up for lost time by archive-diving.

The original plan was for me to fly out of state to my boss’ headquarters and spend as much time as I needed learning the ins and outs of how his home-based department operated so that I can work in tandem with them in my remote location. One of the key items on the agenda was for me to show the team some of the things I was doing in Access to get more and better data.

About the same time our plant financial manager declared that the site he used to work at did not have the same difficulty with the shipping software that we were having, and someone should go see why. The shipping manager nominated me. My boss said that site was not far from his location so I could go ahead and include it in my trip.

It turned out that the Access expert of the main group would be on long-overdue vacation while I was in the area. I thought I could probably get what I needed from spending half a day in the factory the financial manager came from, a day with my boss’ team, and half a day in the central warehouse nearby. But my boss’ team leader, G.J., suggested I needed at least four days, so I left Tuesday morning.

The idea that the exemplary factory is “close” to the headquarters is indisputable when contemplating the interstate miles I had to fly in any case, but as it was over two hours of driving and travelling by air is only efficiently fast while actually in the air, it took me nearly the entire day of Tuesday to get to my first destination. Upon arriving I found my boss and several people I have worked with remotely all engaged in a project at the factory that I was conscripted into without preamble.

Since I was asked by my boss to stay involved for the entire day of Wednesday, the original plan of driving up to the management headquarters mid-Wednesday went out the window. So I began the trip of three hours or so at about 7 pm, having awoken at 5 am and not slept well the night before (due to general excitement; the hotel was blameless). I was making this trip utterly dependent on the navigational computer in the rental car and the address of the hotel printed on my itinerary. This navigational computer had not been able to properly locate the factory I went to first, but it got me within site of the place and I had a phone call on the way that gave me all the further help I needed.

Well, you have probably already guessed that my reliance on the navigator betrayed me. I pulled off an exit, drove past a cluster of hotels and shops, and continued on into abruptly empty countryside. I drove through an intersection that was marked off on one side, “Road Closed, Bridge Out.” And then, in the middle of nowhere, the navigator cheerfully announced, “You have arrived at your destination.”

That’s when I realized I forgot to bring a tent.

Now what shall I do? Everyone I might call is in bed. I could put an address into the navigator, but the only address anywhere in the reasonably near vicinity I had any interest in reaching was the hotel, and that hadn’t turned out too well.

I figured it was a quirk of the navigator and I had passed my hotel earlier, so I turned around and headed back. I thought I knew how to retrace my steps (although the navigator did not provide me with this option, at least as far as I know). But when I thought I needed to go straight through an intersection I saw the orange signs glowing at me saying “Bridge Out” and “Road Closed.”

Well, crap. I must have remembered wrong. I turned off the other way and drove on a bit, hoping I would suddenly realize my earlier mistake. But no. It looked worse and worse. I stopped again, panned the navigator around until I got an idea of where the highway was, and headed back. But the navigator showed only a small bit of map at a time and turned when I turned, making it hard for me to follow my own ad-hoc directions. Again, the orange signs, and no clear alternate route.

After wandering back and forth through the area a bit I finally realized that the signs I was seeing were slightly off to the side of where I need to proceed “straight” through the intersection. In other words, my initial sense of direction was okay, it was my night vision that was misleading.

I had discovered, when reviewing my itinerary, that the name of my hotel was not shown. It had an illegible logo and an address, but no name. This presented a great consternation because I had hoped the navigator would more accurately identify the hotel by its name than by its street address, but I could not even attempt it.

Finally I arrived at the hotel I had passed when getting off of the highway. I went in and said, “I am really not sure I am in the right hotel, but do you have a reservation for me?”

The answer was no. So I asked if they could help me figure out which hotel I did have a reservation for. Fortunately the attendant was willing to help–although actually the phone number was printed on my itinerary, though I had not noticed it in my urgency–and called, got directions, and sent me on my way.

Of course after the long day and disorienting experiences I was no longer sure I was following my new directions even when I was, but fortunately the hotel was clearly visible as I took the exit and when I went into this hotel and asked if there were reservations in my name the answer was yes. If there hadn’t been I might have asked for any vacancy anyway, to heck with the itinerary; I could not take much more wandering around in the night.

Normally I have been avoiding clear identifiers on this site, but for anyone who may be risking a similar commitment I will inform you that I was using the Hertz Neverlost on a Magellan navigator. I have heard of similar misdirections from a Garmin system as well. So my advice, for those who are considering a navigator: don’t rely on it. It can be helpful, but it is not reliable, and you should have a more proven back-up option available to you. Also, do plan to take the time to review the system, because they (or at least mine) are not quite intuitive enough to just jump in and start driving without mistaking the directions given a few times.

There’s an interesting metaphor in the whole experience, if I am not simply gratifying myself making it up. The main purpose of my trip was to complete my training for my new role in Acme at our site. The main attraction, for me, was the sense of importance and connectedness I get in unreasonable amounts from making long trips to work with people. In that vein, it only inflated my ego that I was diverted from my original purpose in the financial manager’s star site to participate in a project for my boss. I was treated in some measure as an expert, out of proportion with my actual knowledge or effectiveness, I fear, but all the same quite titillating. So there was a certain sense in this trip that I had arrived as a notable figure and a resource across sites within Acme, two years from being temp with no background in anything related to Acme or its business processes except some trifling experience with Access.

But all that takes a hollow tone in light of the conversation I had with my boss shortly before leaving on Friday. I am now to set aside the definition of my role that has just been fully delivered and give my utmost attention to supporting the local plant, because it stands in real danger due to poor performance. Should things come to the point where my services are no longer needed in this plant, I do not see where Acme can make me an offer I would accept, due to my geographic preferences–even if they chose to make an offer, as I flatter myself there’s a good chance they would.

Yes, it is rather like arriving at nowhere.

This latest job realignment is the most predictable thing that has happened in my short career, all prior changes coming to me from hitherto unguessed sources, so I don’t take the boundaries of my perceived probabilities as any fair judge of the future.

One of the overlaps between my old job duties and my new duties is monitoring an effort to improve our service to a key customer. As with a similar initiative about a year ago, I am frustrated with merely noting the problems we are having. I don’t think using extraordinary focus to compensate for systemic issues qualifies as a solution, and I don’t think making note of problems qualifies as fixing them. Without any administrative authority, there is nothing else I can do except try to improve the detail of my information and hone it to suggest solutions to those who do have authority.

The difficulty in obtaining detailed information comes from lack of time and access. The most revealing information is not available by simply querying the factory database (which I am good at). The real story occurs outside the awkward confines of the inappropriate computer system, and requires communicating with actors in other departments. The people in positions to actively manage these problems don’t provide any information helpful in understanding the cause of these problem by way of e-mail; by habit, or convenience, they will only give brief information on when the problem will be overcome (or worked around), not what caused it and what might cure it permanently.

When my new manager and his assistant for strategic accounts were planning to come up to our factory in the first full week of May, I began scheduling meetings with all these key players so that the locals were fully aware of the urgency and so my manager knew the personalities and difficulties I faced. All that went out the window when high-level corporate management decided to visit the factory in the same week. But just before that announcement came through, I got a brusque dismissal from the purchasing manager who could not understand why I wanted to bother him with yet another meeting.

Initially he declined my electronic invitation with a note asking what on earth I wanted. I went to see him in person and was told he was too busy for a meeting and that my manager’s assistant (i.e. someone more important than me) should just phone him. His terseness was not going over well with me and I was trying to choose my words carefully so as not to simply back-talk with something inflammatory and escalating, but in the end I walked out. I sent him a long e-mail to explain thoroughly and, I hoped, clearly why it was important that he meet, as this very important customer has gotten quite impatient and is asking very pressing questions, for which I must supply answers on behalf of our site.

That confrontation was completely sidelined with the visit of the corporate brass. After my new boss had explained my job to me during that week, I realized that I would need to give more time to following through on the questions I had for different departments, and I could not afford to indulge other people’s impatience or busyness if I were to do my job well. Late in this week I found I could put off talking to the purchasing manager no longer, and sent him another invitation, stating that if he could not meet at the indicated time to please suggest another time.

He sent it back refused without comment.

Now I had the choice of going to see him in person, again, and likely have him more riled up than the first time, or simply turning the matter over to my manager who outranks him. I did not want to run off tattling that Johnny doesn’t play nice if I could get through the problem myself, but I also very much doubted that I was going to get anywhere on my own. I also wanted to leave a little time for any follow-up messages from the purchasing manager that would suggest a new meeting time.

While weighing my options, the assistant for special accounts called me to get his daily update and I asked his opinion. He said to elevate it; take it to my supervisor and ask his advice. That fit with my general inclination and I was prepared to do it as soon as I got off the phone.

Before I finished discussing other matters with the assistant, though, the purchasing manager showed up at my desk. I was preparing myself for another tirade as I got off the phone, but instead my questions were answered thoroughly and without snarky remarks. I still detected impatience, but not liking something you must do is no crime if you nevertheless do it.

So I was spared needlessly aggravating a strained relationship. As soon as I try to start pushing the boundaries my job seems to become a series of well-meaning missteps, and this one, at least, was prevented. It was an appreciated blessing.

Some of my despair in anticipation of this past week proved unfounded. I had adequate time to talk with my new boss and get a clear understanding of what he expects from me. Various anecdotes from the four days he was in the plant also suggest that he has the influence and inclination to support me in the work he wants me to do, politically and materially. This should not be taken as settled fact until demonstrated, but the early indications are good. And a few of my key concerns were happily met, such as moving out of my current work area so I don’t cover functions of my old role by default.

I won’t be moving until I catch up on the backlog of claims. My boss said, and I agree, that the responsibility for the claims should not be passed off with as a big mess. But this presents a challenge since I have to get up to speed in my new role, which will include a trip near the end of the month. I will probably put in a lot of overtime.

My new role is to monitor the sales orders and report on all kinds of problems, including the number and age of past-due orders. Reducing the number of past due orders is my responsibility. Except I can’t actually do anything about it. As my boss said, neither he nor I have any authority over anybody (aside from his authority over me and his team); all we can do is present information on the problems and hope that the people in charge of the actual work take the cue to make the actual improvements. When I asked what would measure my job performance that I could actually control, my boss again said there wasn’t any good way to measure it and he himself was also in the same boat.

So I still have a job that wouldn’t exist if other people were doing their jobs, and my job is still fundamentally to point out how other people are not doing their jobs or could be doing it better. This is my third post-college job and every position so far has had this aspect of intangibility. Clearly I am being groomed for an out-of-touch management position.

Meanwhile, the Mean Scary Guy was back in town, the plant manager’s boss’ boss. He made it quite clear that our branch of Acme is not performing satisfactorily. Everyone is thoroughly scared, but I don’t think anyone actually understands what ought to be done. There is a chance, then, that whatever I present or suggest will be seized upon as a chance for redemption, but it is really more likely that anything I offer will be ignored because everyone is already trying to save themselves using whatever they regard as the best means.

Of course, as Mean Scary Guy put it, whatever they are currently doing is wrong because it isn’t working. But this is not sufficient to teach them what they ought to do. I think they will approach the same problems the same way, and just try harder and point fingers more desperately. I think you would need to change the composition of the management before you expect the method of execution to change.

I spent a considerable portion of the week angry, and in fact woke up angry Monday morning after dreaming about workplace injustices. I don’t care to revisit the details, but, like Western pioneers marking bad water, I will give a brief notice on these ill fortunes. Perhaps when some history has accumulated around these events there will be something useful to learn from them.

Since I found out that I have a new job I have been waiting to be taught what it is. At last I heard when my new boss would arrive to explain my new job: next week, present Monday afternoon and Tuesday. This was the gleaming light in the distance signalling a change of routine, a relief from boredom and an escape from the some of the daggers of role uncertainty being thrown my way. Positioned as I am within a department with inadequate (and recently reduced) manpower, I play a part in many roles but none with excellence, and so I am liable for criticism on whatever part of my job the critic things I should have done completely.

The inadequacies of this situation have been building up over time, especially since I stopped trying to cover the gaps with liberal overtime months ago. In recent weeks it has become more acute and I have been weathering the storm by telling myself a measure of clarity will be brought when my boss arrives and tells those various critics just how far my responsibilities extend. During this last week the attacks have gotten worse, more directly against my ally P.B. than against myself. But I have been hoping for a double advantage from my new role; one, in concentrating my duties to allow me to point to the actual source of the problems (which is not P.B.), and two, in cutting away some of the duties I have been partly fulfilling, prompt the hiring of a replacement that would relieve some of the strain on P.B.’s department.

I spent about four hours of overtime one night lining up meetings and preparing presentations to set the stage for my boss’ visit, planning to get him thoroughly acquainted with the personalties inclined to redefine my job and resist my execution of assigned duties. One of the key meetings on this agenda was with the plant manager, and I hoped that he and my new boss could reach a solid understanding of my role that would not be shaken by the blustering of lesser players. But I found out on Friday that the whole visit had been sidelined by visits in the same week by much higher-ranking personalities to discuss much more momentous subjects. Most of the people on the schedule of meetings would be preoccupied with these dignitaries and their strategy sessions, including my own boss; rather than being a principle focus of these two days, the question of my responsibilities is now a trifling matter to be taken care of in free time, as it is found. Undoubtedly many of the people in the factory who are most likely to cause me trouble will be unable to find any time at all to have their hands tied by some visiting manager whose importance is vastly overshadowed by the other royalty they could be courting.

So now instead of anticipating a few days to hammer out the finer details of my job, I am looking forward to a hectic week in which I receive more instructions that are not clearly defined in priority, and no clear obsolescence of existing duties; and when the week is over dealing with the same cast of characters who have their own notions of what I ought to do safely intact, so that I will spend half my energy convincing people that I have the right and responsibility to ask and to attempt what I do.

Incidentally, the big meeting is to discuss a mammoth backward step that some unenlightened potentate of the sales force has proposed to our order fulfillment strategy. So that’s the uranium lining to that dark cloud.

Two of the most notable changes made by the A-Team were imposing a strict separation of duties between assemblers and material handlers and the sharp increase in the number of material handlers. They felt we would gain more efficiency by not letting the assemblers more so much as an inch away from their posts to get their materials, and they felt we could reduce inventory by storing it in more places as long as we stored as little as possible at the point of use. Neither of those ideas made much sense, but plant management made it quite clear that these corporate illuminati were not to be questioned on any grounds.

The same plant management has just required the reversal of both of these improvements, melding some material handling functions back into assembly and eliminating a handful of positions altogether. All of the positions eliminated were under P.B., the manager of material handling, and all of the positions moved into assembly belonged to P.B. M.B., the manager of assembly, gained people while P.B. lost people. But M.B. argued with P.B., wanting to choose which of P.B.’s employees he could subsume into his department.

M.B. also chose this Friday morning, just before the daily production meeting, to page P.B. to tell him one of the assembly lines was down for lack of material. It wasn’t, but while P.B. was busy checking on that M.B. gave one of P.B.’s employee’s a thorough questioning about P.B.’s departments–more than this employee had any responsibility for. I have not been so furious in a good long while. Along with S.B., M.B. seems to be paying very close attention to anything that may be an oversight or error in the operation of P.B.’s departments. Now, as far as it concerns S.B., I have never seen anything much in his theory or practice that I could commend; but, although M.B. has rubbed me the wrong way on several previous occasions, his basic philosophies have not struck me heretofore as gravely wrong. If he is engaged in a calculated take-down of P.B., as he seems at this moment to be, then he has a low character indeed.

That would be somewhat ironic. Not in any concrete way, but in realizations of both good conduct and bad conduct. One of the things I have observed most often in M.B. is his ability to keep laughing; when things are going very badly, such as a critical machine breaking down, he shows signs of being upset and tense. But he quickly bounces back and is shortly cracking jokes. This is a crucial survival mechanism. To keep laughing, to keep yourself at a comfortable distance from a situation that is not, in the big scheme of things, really all that bad, will prolong your days and make them more pleasant.

I just get a sneaky feeling he also uses joviality to disguise his more pointed machinations.

At a meeting on Friday afternoon, P.B. introduced to some of the supervisors a template for creating work instructions. I regret that I once again demonstrated my talent for being an obnoxious questioner. I questioned whether there was really the political will to accomplish the arduous work of creating and maintaining a comprehensive set of documents, pointing out that none of the staff (except the brand new personnel manager) were present and that similar “mandatory” audit programs had been waved around ineffectually in the past.

The intent of my questioning was to provoke a show of force, as it were; to secure a credible guarantee that benign or callous negligence would not be permitted to stop such a program once begun. But the effect of my questions was more to heap scorn on the idea that such a program, once conceived, could ever by carried through by Acme.

My skepticism has warrant, and if P.B. had been presenting to an audience inclined to be sympathetic toward him or to his idea, then my broadside might have rallied the troops. One or two present did react to my questions, with some annoyance, but these were not in a position to affect the adoption of this program in the most critical area, the “shop floor” (production area of the factory). The three mid-level managers present mostly kept quiet, and if I am permitted to guess their thoughts, they had no animosity towards P.B.’s proposal but felt that my insinuation that it would all come to naught was much more on track. Thus my fearless questioning likely provided a means for them to confirm themselves in their belief that it was a pointless charade, and harden them against any further progress.

The senior management at Acme has demonstrated repeatedly that they have not the fortitude to stand by a principle of good management that does not produce immediate results. Many proven useful management concepts have been introduced at Acme, and floundered when some competing interest intervened. For instance, the idea of preventive maintenance, of inspecting and repairing equipment on a schedule so that the equipment does not fail and become unavailable at a critical unplanned time, has been bandied about, but it always disappears when some customer starts screaming for an expedite and we have to run the machines non-stop. Most often, concepts which have some benefits and some drawbacks are introduced incoherently, and compete with each other for attention until they are all supplanted by a new wave of initiatives. General extinction is the more likely outcome of uncontrolled natural competition, after all.

But let us leave aside the unhappy ecology of Acme for a moment. Should anyone in any place expect to reap positive results from disciplined use of a work documentation program? P.B. certainly believes so, from his past experience at a different manufacturing facility that was bought out and reformed to much more contemporary manufacturing processes. He says that in this factory the work instructions are available with a few keystrokes on computer terminals throughout the plant, and all employees must audit one work instruction each month, with the result, after initial start-up, that the ongoing changes are minor, since the process has not evolved much since the last revision.

I think that, once established, the maintenance of such a program is feasible, although not so painless or simple as P.B.’s recounting might suggest. The challenge is the discipline to impose the requirement on a resistant body of employees, and maintain a high level of active enforcement through the first three to five waves of revisions, as major discrepancies between theoretical and actual job practices are sorted out. Relevant to this, where P.B. saw such a program implemented, a temporary workforce was brought in to take care of the documentation, and their employment was extended indefinitely to maintain the resultant documentation. Acme is currently looking to cut manpower, and cut deeply.

The question then must be, is there any value in such documentation to justify the expense of maintaining it? Is not the best work done by craftsmen who have years of accumulated lore that cannot be translated usefully to sheets of paper?

I concur that a craftsman cannot be replaced by a book, and years of experience will always add to an employee’s ability to perform the job. But looking off so far in that direction ignores what is happening now. The generation who worked for life in an industry is retiring from factories across America, not just our local Acme. Craftsmen are increasingly unavailable. Temporary workers, the answer of the day to the problem of fluctuating workforce needs, know nothing whatever of their jobs. White-collar office workers across Acme are entering their jobs ignorant of who they need to work with and what those people do; a recent warehouse consolidation has increased the volume of e-mail I get that is misdirected or inconsistent with business practices. Some of these have told me that they are inventing their jobs one step at a time, which I was doing myself about 15 months ago.

A substantially incomplete or obsolete set of documentation is worth far less than documentation that is detailed and up to date, so much less that it is not worth any half-hearted efforts to maintain. If the resources won’t be available to maintain the documentation, the question of creating it is moot. But the cost of doing without complete documentation should be weighed as well. Foremost is lost productivity, and along with that increased defects and (depending on the nature of the work) injuries. There are basically two ways to pass along knowledge on how to perform a task, apprenticeship or documentation; in the modern American employment system an employee leaves a position abruptly, with only a short time to train a replacement at best, and the effort to minimize labor costs means there is also minimal redundancy. This means that whenever an employee finds a new job or has unexpected health problems, or retires or even takes vacation, their job must be performed ad hoc by whoever is their sudden replacement.

Documentation could never capture all the complexities of my job or any other job, and can never reach that touted ideal of enabling anyone to come off the street and immediately perform my job as well as I did. But it might enable them to complete all the critical functions on their very first day, and it could well reduce their learning time in half, or less. And constantly-reviewed documentation provides a mechanism of critique to improve my job even while I am doing it.

One of the supervisors present at the meeting remarked that implementing a documentation program would require greater organization of the work areas, so that there could be a meaningful written reference to the location of necessary tools. This speaks volumes; clearly labeled organization is one of those fragmentary Good Management Practices that has been talked about as long as I have been at Acme, and was even the focus of one of the previous mandatory participation initiatives that was never really enforced by anyone more impressive than myself, at the time a temp in the office. If the management were to actually put weight behind this documentation program, it would drive people to make their work process simpler and more repeatable just for the ease of documenting it. Furthermore, it is an admitted but uncontested plague in Acme that people in all steps of the production process are using their own methods for completing their jobs; and different people filling the same job are using different methods. The engineers have specified one way for making a part, and the machinist on first shift is using a different method. The second and third shift machinists are each also using a different method, and there is no settled and enforced opinion on which method is superior. A machinist might be using a different tooling to run the job faster and think that he has outsmarted the engineers, but he may also be making more scrap parts because of the tooling’s inability to maintain the part specification.

If asked to choose between a craftsman with a lifetime of experience and a neophyte with an instruction manual, all wise people would choose experience. If your actual choice is between a craftsman you can’t keep and instruction that you might be able to buy for the neophyte you will wind up with, the instruction manual takes on a whole new appeal.

A week ago, or around then, P.B. messaged me that there was a person who needed light duty work, and he was going to utilize this person to help me catch up on claims. Technically, P.B. is not the person to do that; I report to K.K. But K.K. doesn’t care if someone else takes care of problems for him. I was on the phone, and probably doing at least one other thing, and I believe I answered P.B. “k.”

Then about a day later I got an e-mail from HR instructing me that this person was right-handed and could not use their right arm for an extended period of time. Well, what can you do if you are right-handed and you are supposed to keep your right arm at rest? The feeling I got from HR was that perhaps this person was not so seriously injured, but of course, nobody said so.

It turned out that someone else had already claimed this person’s time for their menial labor. Acme uses a constantly shifting byzantine array of paper to show visually to the ordinary plant worker the condition and direction of the factory. It is estimated that only 50% of degree-bearing Americans can understand the information conveyed by these systems after they have been trained, so the benefit to the average factory worker remains dubious; but it part of the current state religion so it cannot be questioned. So it took a few days for this chap to get the hang of what he was supposed to do in this lowest of low jobs.

One day he showed up, having something like an hour to spare before he had to go, to help with claims. Late afternoon tends to be the busiest time of day, as everyone in the country suddenly remembers those items they wanted us to ship and starts clamoring for it to happen today. But there was nothing for it; he would never be able to help without being trained. And if you ever turn away offered help, it means you do not need help. I do, so I had to take this help however it came to me.

On the first day we managed to pretty well get through the process of how to open up a claim. It did not help that I started showing him on one computer, then found it did not have adequate access, and had to switch computers and adjust the instructions. But he took notes, and seemed to retain his understanding of a concept once it was grasped (not true of everyone I have guided on computers).

It was several days before I saw him again, owing to his other assignment and various medical appointments. We were able to continue the learning from where we left off without too much refreshing, and I was able to introduce the concept of checking the count, checking the weight, and checking adjustments to the count. We even got so far as actually going out on the floor to check the count.

I’ll say one more time that this guy is not doing too bad at learning. He doesn’t get something the very first time and he is not a good intuitive guesser, but he does grasp concepts and retain them days later. I think I could train him to do the entire job of checking claims and he could do it well, given time. But if he is only going to be working odd hours when he is not needed elsewhere, until his light-duty prescription wears out, well, it will be tough to turn any kind of profit. Review the following quotes:

“I have good eyes, but they are slow.”

“I have trouble spelling words. I was real smart in high school, but I don’t read and write much any more.”

“I’m not used to switching back and forth between windows like this, it’s going to take me a while to get the hang of it.”

Yes, it does take him a bit to read through text, he makes frequent typos, and the job requires nothing if not switching back and forth between windows. But most disheartening are his exclamations of success. “Ah! I understand!” he says, of the convention for labeling the carousel locations. But there’s a completely different convention for the big stacker racks, several wild exceptions in the peripheries of the stockroom, a different convention for the assembly lines, and, because of sea-changes that are in progress, different rules for different lines, and even a whole new location naming convention with which I am not yet effectively familiar. To be able to find one part is much different than to being able to find any part. It took me months to learn what I know, and I am not an expert, and of course now things are changing.

Or explaining the form in Microsoft Access, again the evolutionary product of a year of occasional efforts; it’s a complex form, to accommodate the complexity a claim can have (shortages on multiple items, multiple items received marked as one item, unidentified wrong parts, checking by weight, by count, by paperwork, etc.) Yes, it is quite fair to call it a complex form, hard to understand and even confusing; I have never had time to really polish the user interface. But I had to make the darn thing. It’s doing so much more now than anything did when I started; it automatically refreshes the information from the shipping software, automatically fills in a number of fields necessary for recordkeeping, assists in the calculation of correct shipping weight, and generally gives some structure to the murky process of analyzing a claim for validity. In my perspective, seeing how much is now being offered, it is dismal to think that there is still a steep learning curve and no way to get occasional help.

This chap on light duty is not best suited to helping me with the claims on short terms, but even people more familiar with computers and shipping can’t drop in and go with the claims. To get the job done properly requires someone who can dedicate time to it on a regular basis.

About a year ago P.B. instituted a policy that the truck drivers were not to load their own trucks; only Acme personnel could use the forklifts and load the trucks. I no longer remember the nominal reasons, much less whether they made sense. I think it had to do with legal liability for the truck drivers’ safety and the condition of our shipments (if the freight was damaged, was it damaged by our material handlers or by the trucking company?).

When we were bringing a new person on the second shift who had only just been trained to operate the forklift, I was present after hours on one occasion when the supervisor had already gone home, and I carried out the policy by refusing to allow the experienced truck driver to load his own truck, and making the trepidatious new forklift operator load the truck. The driver lounged sardonically on the roller racks as the operator slowly and hesitatingly went about the work.

Shortly after that time I went through the Acme certification process to operate forklifts. I have used the license on occasion, once running a pallet with a particularly tall load into a support pillar and breaking the pallet. It was not an exceptional beginner’s mistake, but I bring it up to underscore the fact that being allowed to operate a forklift does not make one proficient at doing so.

As the last day of March drew to a close, the workers had already put in their required 10 hours and were trickling out. We came to the point where only the supervisor, the manager, the second-shift worker, and one voluntary stay-over remained. The manager is not licensed to drive the forklift. The second-shift worker was running the last batch of small packages through the shipping terminal, and the volunteer was wrapping up pallets of tools that had been cleared to ship late in the day by the plant manager and were now a priority to ship. Ordinarily we use less than the entire trailer on any given truck, but circumstances at this end of month had given us so much freight that one (or two?) of our carriers had to bring two trucks. One of the carriers had just arrived.

The truck needed to be loaded and I was licensed to do it. But I didn’t want to. Steering the forklift forward or backward is no big deal for anyone who’d driven–although forklifts are steered by a single wheel in the back, and do not turn like a car at all–but remembering to do the up and down with the forks can be difficult. When you are loading a truck you typically aren’t moving up and down much: you need to get low enough to get the forks into the slots in the pallet without actually being on the floor, when the forks would hit the support slats, and without being too far up so that you clip the top of the pallet or spear the freight. Then you just need to lift the forks up enough to keep the load from dragging, and, if you are so inclined, from slamming into the bottom of the truck as you negotiate the ramp that slopes down into the back of the truck that is sloping up. The simplest way to pack the truck as tightly as possible is to let the pallet down all the way to the floor as you approach your final position so that you can push it until it touches the pallet behind it; otherwise it is too easy to have the pallet lip onto the one behind it as you try to set it down. With your forks going up and down within about one foot of space, it is not obvious if they are at the right height or not.

Then there is the matter of loading the trucks. They are, as you well know, long rectangles, not much more than two pallets wide. Given an empty trailer, it is no big deal at all to drive into it and drop the pallet. The tricky part comes when you have to get the pallet far enough to the side to leave room for the other pallet. That is still not too hard except when you put the pallet down a little too much to the middle and you need to adjust it. You might be able to do that with the lateral movement in the forks (they can slide to the left and right), but you might already be at the end of your play that way. You might have to bring the forks up against the side of the pallet and nudge it over. Remember that the entire time you are in a long rectangle. Once you get to the end of the truck, where the leveling ramp is coming down into the truck and there is the concrete of the dock along the slope of the ramp, you can very easily get yourself in spots where you don’t seem to be able to turn your forklift without smacking either the front or the rear of the forklift into something–the flimsy sides of the truck, the freight, the concrete of the dock jutting out behind you.

So I did not do a very manful job of taking initiative. I approached the supervisor and said, “So, one of us should probably start loading the trucks, huh?” And rather than volunteering herself, she said “Yep, grab a forklift and go for it.” Darn.

As I loaded one of the trucks and got to the end of it, I asked the voluntary stay over if he wanted to finish it off because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. He said “No, it’s easy,” so I went ahead and finished it off, but having made this pathetic request out loud I was all the more conscious of the stares of the truck drivers and their imagined criticism. The trucker had already suggested I stack some of our pallets on the pallets he already had, and I declined, since I often get the messages that come back about goods damaged in transit.

Once I had his truck finished, the next trucker offered to take over loading for me. But that, you remember, is against the rules, so I declined his offer. Again I felt more self-concious about my lack of polish, and to make up for it, and just to try to hurry an unpleasant end to a late day, I was going as quickly as I could manage. Faster than I felt comfortable, because the jolts and bangs the forklift made going up and down ramps (forklifts are made for flat surfaces and don’t manage slopes well), and as the forks hit the floor, and as I jerked the forks up and down with my indelicate touch on the control levers, all got on my nerves. The soggy cord hanging from the truck door spraying me with brown water ever time I slapped through it did not help the ambiance.

When this trucker told me, with the authority of a brusque sensei, to stack the shorter pallets of our freight, I did not argue. I paused momentarily, debating whether to refuse, but decided that I would do it because these truckers carry our freight far across the country and across many docks where the freight is moved from one truck to another, and basically, if he would stack the pallets, and some point they were going to be stacked. Having an idea of what was in the pallets, I judged it not too risky to the freight to stack them.

He told me to place the stacked pallets on the right side of the truck. Many roads are domed, so that as a truck is driving along the road it leans slightly to the right. This is to shed water off the road, but it also means that freight will generally tend to tip to the right, so it’s better to put loads prone to tipping against the right side of the truck.

This is a general rule, and the possible exceptions explain the pallets of damaged freight that sometimes come back upside down.

This truck was mostly empty, and I filled it and had begun filling the second truck when my haste caught up to me and I brought the forks in over the top of the pallet and punctured the boxes of tools on the bottom. It was one pallet out of 19 and pulling the order off for later was not an option, particularly at the very end of the month (and of the quarter). So I had to consult with the manager and decide the best way to remedy the situation, and as I was doing that someone from the receiving dock took over loading the trucks, and I was off the hook for the rest of the evening.

Even though there are some situations loading a truck that are tricky, there is nothing so difficult that it would take long to master with regular practice. But at the end of the month, with a lot of extra freight that must all go, and already being late, and having impatient and experienced truckers on hand, it’s too much to be any fun for a novice forklift operator. And I don’t do really well under pressure.

But when all is said and done, I got my license so that I could help out in that way, and I am glad I did it. Not everything I am glad to have done was fun to do at the time.

The A-Team departed our factory, having established a system–several systems, really, all different–to reduce inventory by hiring more people to handle it. I am not sure they even managed to reduce the total inventory, or just where it was stored. Little matter either way; the next day, P.B. was told to start trimming his manpower. That is, getting rid of people the infallible A-Team said we needed.

In an unrelated, and yet resonant, incident, a new position was recently posted that sounded a lot like my current job. It sounded so similar that I asked my boss if it made my position obsolete, which he assured me it did not. Then I wondered if the job was even worth applying for. When I decided to go ahead and apply, it turned out that the position had been cancelled. A decision was made to simply incorporate the new position into an existing position–mine. When this goes into effect, I will nominally report to someone off-site.

I don’t know when it will go into effect, and I don’t know how or even if my job duties will change. Nobody has made that clear to me. But an automated e-mail from the performance evaluation software notified me that someone else now had responsibility for my review.

I am irked that I lost a chance to negotiate for a higher salary, or perhaps a reduced workload, or even simply more training, but other than that it is hard to see how this makes much of a difference. Perhaps when they finally decide that in this new role I have new (additional) responsibilities, it will seem more egregious. In general, though, even when I feel overworked or stressed, it is seeming like old hat. That’s probably reflected in my posting here; there’s nothing new to say, as nothing new has happened.

When I have difficulty distinguishing good days from bad days, success from failure, and improvement from decay; when my new job is my old job; perhaps, it is time to change the scenery. One way to do this would be enroll for further education. Working and going to school is best done while holding a position that does not exhaust all one’s energy or creativity.

I have not decided to do anything different, but if I do decide to make a change, I hope it will be a change to something different, rather than the tidal change a bathtub affords. The A-Team certainly stirred the water, but one doubts that anything has gotten much cleaner.