The Chopping Block

For the most part, all of the jobs that come through my station are 96-piece jobs. Each job takes between 10 and 16 man-hours to complete. After putting in all of that work, it really sucks to watch the foreman toss all 96 pieces in the dumpster.

It wasn't our fault.

When we assemble barsets, the blades and spacers are offset by a specific angle. That angle turns rectangles into parallelograms and corresponds with the angle of the fixtures the barsets have to fit into. The angle is marked on the print we work from, and at the clamping station we have dozens of angle templates so we can arrange the blades properly.

Chuck and I had finished our part of the job and moved onto the next job when Melvin started cutting sets and trying to fit them into the fixture. They... didn't fit. The angle was wrong. "This is bad," said Melvin. "This is really bad." He grabbed the print, hunted through the angle templates for the one that matched the print, set up the clamping station for that angle, and checked a finished set. The angle was correct. The number on the print matched the number on the template, which matched the angle of the sets we'd made.

The good news: it really wasn't our fault. *whew*

The bad news: if it wasn't us, it must have been the print. Prints are prepared by Miss Priss, who refused to believe that the error was hers. She visited us, as did Paul, Joe, and Luc. I think in the end they decided it was the angle template that was wrong, so they scrapped the one we'd used and cut a new one. Then we had to re-do the job. A day (and a lot of material) wasted.

Word in the shop is that Miss Priss's job is in the paper already.

Coming next: Short-Staffed