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.

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.

End of the month is traditionally a day when we try to ship everything that we possibly can so as to post the highest possible dollar value of shipments for the month. It can be quite hectic. But there is an even stronger tradition in these parts of hunting deer after Thanksgiving–and that’s not limited to men. C.M., the shipping supervisor, is out in those hills, too.

Last week I was asked to help out in shipping today due to C.M.’s absence and I was expecting a horrible day. But it was pretty uneventful. Tomorrow will probably be horrible. Sorry, but it will. The first of the month I have to cram out as many reports as I can, and one of the harder ones to put together requires some input from the people who are off hunting to do properly. Also, something I did today wasn’t documented as desired so they want me to go back and document it tomorrow.

But, today really wasn’t bad, and I am glad for that. There is this one shipment which is not going to be ready to ship until late today which we have instructions to ignore the usual, picky process for this customer and give the shipment to a special pickup late tonight. The trucker who picks up tonight is going to bring the freight to our usual truckers tomorrow. We are doing this hocus-pocus so that we can say we shipped more stuff in November. It’s dumb and it is going to cause us more work. But, today, it was pretty harmless for me.

The recession is over. This is how I know:

1. Certain product lines that died when things got bad are picking up. Now that we finally have our sales forecast adjusted to a realistic level, it’s too low. Customers are getting exceptionally long lead times for items they waited until the last minute to order. No plan, no components; no components, no tools.
2. After spending about nine months on the ground, as far as work is concerned, I have flown twice within two months’ time. Not for any particularly good reason either time, and especially this last time. The travel restrictions are easing (unofficially).
3. We are hiring. Temporary workers. Just for November and December.

While I don’t seriously beleive that all the world’s troubles are behind us–and might even suggest that nothing is more dangerous than a bomb that hasn’t gone off yet–if you a reporter you may feel free to report this a conclusive absolute proof that we have had a total recovery.