This is a rather large manufacturer of travel trailiers in Elkhart Indiana.
This company had a plant super-intendent named John Christianson, that worked with Duke Wedge and the two were good friends and obviously had a working knowledge of me and my abilities.
When I first started working at Damon Trailiers I worked building end walls for the units. I told the supervisor I was a millwright and preferred to work in the wood shop. He said there was not any openings int he woodshop but would notifiy human resources of my desire to change to that department.
Sue Brown was the cabinet shop supervisor, and she also headed up the mill room.
After two days Sue Brown came over to my department with my foreman and asked if I was still interested in transferring to the millroom. The current table saw operator was working 80+ per week and was still falling behind. I said yes I would transfer. My foreman said I'll fill this position and me and Sue Brown walked over to the millroom and I immediately knew why they could not get any production out of this department, which I might add, is where production starts, in the millroom, where you cut the wood to manufacture the trailers.
I told Sue the first thing I would need to do is clean the mess up, there was paneling and wood 12 inches deep on most of the floor. Very dangerous to attempt to work in this kind of environment.
Sue told me to meet her in the break area and I knew she was going to fire the current saw operator.
When she came to meet me in the break room she had the plant super-intendent, John Christianson with her.
John stated if I had ever work in the area and I told him that I had and whom I had worked for and Duke Wedges name came up and he said that is why your name "rang-a-bell", he said Duke had talked about me numerous times. I wonder about what, my bad attitude.
John told Sue Brown to let me get started int he millroom and informed me that production was the main goal, but I could do as I needed to get the job done, obviously he was aware of my abilities.
I told John I would have the millroom up to a functional level of performance in a couple days and production would not suffer.
This company had some huge problems that were quite easy for me to fix:
THIS IS A "PRODUCTION" SHOP, WITH THE CAPACILTY FOR HIGH VOLUME IF THERE WAS SOME ORDER AND SOME COMMUNICATION...PAY ATTENTION HERE.
When I took over the millroom the first order of business was cleaning, which took about 4 hours.
While cleaning I noticed the employees from the cabinet shop coming back and getting their parts that were stacked on carts, all mixed up and falling off onto the floor as they navigated the carts through the chaos onroute to their assembly tables. The panels were getting scratched up and damaged from the disorder in the production areas.
After I cleaned the millroom up I notified Sue Brown that I was going to build a new saw table around the table saw. The table that they currently had was uneven and had nothing under the massive space under it but saw dust and scraps of wood and paneling. After I built the new saw table ALL of the parts to build All of the cabinets, for any/all the trailers, were under the saw table in neat bins that were all labeled with the size.
Made it real easy for the cabinet builder to pull all their own material, when they needed it, not when I cut it, and thus eliminated the carts full of parts sitting all over the millroom. Plus nothing was getting damaged.
The company was at a current production of 26 trailiers a day, which meant I had to keep at least a two day suppy of parts in each bin to cover ANY production order. Also thinking about what you were cutting out of a 4' x 8' sheet of paneling was much less wasteful. This kept the scrap down, the millroom was spotless and production was flowing smoothly, at least from the millroom.
The next day, after I had the entire millroom cleaned and straightened up and the inventory racks sorted and filled with the desired lumber products I found that their was alot of installers of cabinets from the production line coming back and getting the cabinets reordered because the ones that we had built DID NOT FIT in the trailers. After about the 8th cabinet I told Sue brown to get me a set of blueprints for the trailers that they were running that day. She stated she didn't have time and demanded I recut the parts. I called John Christianson back to my department and demanded he get the prints or i would walk out. A problem existed and we time to fix all 26 of them, remember the daily production, but we don't have time to find the "cause" and prevent it from "ever" happening...THAT IS FUCKING STUPID.
John Christianson got the prints, brought them back to me and said, "What are you going to do with them."
I said, "Fix this problem."
I went to were the problem started, in the welding shop, where they made the frames.
I told everyone to stop working and someone get me a tape measure. Some of the guys looked at me as if to say...Who in the fuck is that?
Some didn't stop working and John Christianson told them to stop working and to get me a tape measure.
LET ME SAY THIS....THERE WAS AND STILL IS RAMPANT "SPEED", METH, USE IN ELKHART, BUT THEY USE IT TO GET THROUGH A 14 TO 16 WORK DAY.
AND THE REASON THEY DON'T GET FIRED IS BECAUSE THEY DON'T "OVER-AMP" AND THEY DON'T FUCK UP THEIR JOBS...BECAUSE THEY MAKE "PIECE-RATE", ABOUT $300.00 PER DAY, IF THEY MAKE THE PRODUCTION RATE...REGARDLESS HOW MANY HOURS IT TAKES THEM.
I checked the overall length of the frame and checked the blueprint and the frame that was being built was 2 1/2" too long. We found out why nothing was fitting, and it was becasue of some drug use and a LACK OF COMMUNICATION.
The individuals cutting the steel tubing for the frames were cutting them a little on the long side 1/4" here, 1/4" there, 1/8" here, 1/8" there...it all adds up to a frame that is WRONG.!!!!!!!!!!!
The "tweekers", because of production demands and their lack of communication with each other,
were beating the over-sized parts into the gigs and they had become loose and the frames were too big.
The reason they weren't talking is because of disorder and a lack of communication and maybe there bad attitudes came from all the above and some sleep deprevation.
I BUILT A NEW GIG TO BUILD THE FRAMES ON WITH EXTRA HOLDS FOR THE METAL AND THEN MADE SURE EVERYONE HAD THE CORRECT DIMENSIONS, NOT THE ONE THAT THEY HAD BEEN USING, THE ONES DIRECTLY OFF THE BLUEPRINT....NOW "MY" CABINET PART S "WILL" FIT.
I told the lead man that the dimensions on the gigs were "critical" and the gigs that were used in a day must be checked for ddamage and repaired "before" the run of production.
I made that one of his main jobs, and "promised" him a raise. When he did his job, I demanded the company give him a raise, and they did....TEAMWORK or EXTORTION, who fucking cares.
That is all we needed to do to make this plant extremely productive, production was rolling with no flaws, thus no mistakes.
When these two problems got solved and I had implemented my production of the millroom, production had never been better and the plant super, John, had came back to tell me so.
In the millroom was a huge vertical "HOLZHER" Panel Saw. It was not being used and I asked why, it looked fairly new.
John Christianson said it would not cut square and he had representatives from the HOLZHER company coming in to look at it, since it was still under warranty.
I looked at the saw and noticed that the base of it was mounted to the concrete floor and the vertical back was mounted to the wall of the building.
When the technicians came in to look at the saw the adjusted it and ran it for about 6 hours and still could not get it to cut square.
When John came back I asked if they had fixed ot and he said no they might bring in a new saw, since they can't get that one fixed.
I walked over to the technicians and stated that the concrete slab the base was mounted to is solid, but the back of the saw is mounted to an outside wall and along the foundation is a crack, and I believed the wall had shifted and cocked the saw out of square. The one tech said you may be right.
We unbolted the saw had moved it out away from the wall by 3 feet and made bracing for the back that would bolt to the floor, instead of the wall.
GUESS WHAT IT TOOK US ONE DAY TO MOVE IT AND RE-MOUNT IT AND IT WORKED LIKE NEW....THAT SAW COULD INCREASE OUR PRODUCTION OF PARTS BY, NOT 10%, BUT 10 fold.
I made $22.00 for every trailer that went out the door, so at a production rate of 26 trailers a day and $22.00 for each one, I made a whopping $572.00 per day.
You may ask, "what fucking moron would give up a job like that?"
A fucking moron that doesn't let people lie, steal or disreapect him.
THIS IS HOW IT ALL ENDED:
After I got the areas of production that directly effected me up and running "right", the way they should run. I found someone in that are to take responsibility for their job. Promised them a raise "IF" they did their job. I was done.
All I had to do was my job and "I Know What I'm Working With", it was easy, lol.
We made "piece rate", so when your job was done you could leave and get a full days pay.
I had made my job so easy that I went to work at 6 a.m. Check the production schedule for the day.
Checked my inventory of parts and cut what I needed to meet the production schedule, remember my inventory was for 2 days.
I was done and ready to leave at 8:45 a.m.
The employees on the line got mad because I was the new employee (I had only worked there for 1 month), and I got paid over $500.00 per day and my work was done by 8 a.m. so I waited till break at 8:45, had coffee in the break room and left when everyone else was going back to work....I was headed to the bar.
Sue Brown told me that it didn't look good and asked me to stay till at least 12 noon, which I agreed.
The only reason I agreed was because the earliest a bar opened on the area was 11 a.m. and I didn't want to go home.
No one to go home to...oh, yea, the girlfriend thing.
I asked Sue what she wanted me to do till noon and she said you can help the cabinet builders. I asked her if I got their pay for the cabinets I built and she said "no". I got pissed off and said if I help that builder, the first hting I am going to help him with is some advice, and tell him to...
QUIT FUCKING OFF, AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.
When I was done working and after first break I would lay down on the picnic tables in the break room and take a nap. When Sue Brown heard about this and told John Christianson, he said I couldn't do that either.
I told John what I can do is QUIT, and I left the company.
This company had a plant super-intendent named John Christianson, that worked with Duke Wedge and the two were good friends and obviously had a working knowledge of me and my abilities.
When I first started working at Damon Trailiers I worked building end walls for the units. I told the supervisor I was a millwright and preferred to work in the wood shop. He said there was not any openings int he woodshop but would notifiy human resources of my desire to change to that department.
Sue Brown was the cabinet shop supervisor, and she also headed up the mill room.
After two days Sue Brown came over to my department with my foreman and asked if I was still interested in transferring to the millroom. The current table saw operator was working 80+ per week and was still falling behind. I said yes I would transfer. My foreman said I'll fill this position and me and Sue Brown walked over to the millroom and I immediately knew why they could not get any production out of this department, which I might add, is where production starts, in the millroom, where you cut the wood to manufacture the trailers.
I told Sue the first thing I would need to do is clean the mess up, there was paneling and wood 12 inches deep on most of the floor. Very dangerous to attempt to work in this kind of environment.
Sue told me to meet her in the break area and I knew she was going to fire the current saw operator.
When she came to meet me in the break room she had the plant super-intendent, John Christianson with her.
John stated if I had ever work in the area and I told him that I had and whom I had worked for and Duke Wedges name came up and he said that is why your name "rang-a-bell", he said Duke had talked about me numerous times. I wonder about what, my bad attitude.
John told Sue Brown to let me get started int he millroom and informed me that production was the main goal, but I could do as I needed to get the job done, obviously he was aware of my abilities.
I told John I would have the millroom up to a functional level of performance in a couple days and production would not suffer.
NO LYING HERE JASON...WHITE OR ANY OTHER FUCKING COLOR,
WE ARE TRYING TO GET SOMETHING DONE
AND WE DO NOT HAVE TIME TO DO IT TWICE,
A COMPANY AND THE LIVELIHOOD OF ITS EMPLOYEES DEPEND ON IT,
OR WE COULD SHIP ANOTHER ONE OF OUR COMPANIES TO CHINA...?
This company had some huge problems that were quite easy for me to fix:
THIS IS A "PRODUCTION" SHOP, WITH THE CAPACILTY FOR HIGH VOLUME IF THERE WAS SOME ORDER AND SOME COMMUNICATION...PAY ATTENTION HERE.
When I took over the millroom the first order of business was cleaning, which took about 4 hours.
While cleaning I noticed the employees from the cabinet shop coming back and getting their parts that were stacked on carts, all mixed up and falling off onto the floor as they navigated the carts through the chaos onroute to their assembly tables. The panels were getting scratched up and damaged from the disorder in the production areas.
After I cleaned the millroom up I notified Sue Brown that I was going to build a new saw table around the table saw. The table that they currently had was uneven and had nothing under the massive space under it but saw dust and scraps of wood and paneling. After I built the new saw table ALL of the parts to build All of the cabinets, for any/all the trailers, were under the saw table in neat bins that were all labeled with the size.
Made it real easy for the cabinet builder to pull all their own material, when they needed it, not when I cut it, and thus eliminated the carts full of parts sitting all over the millroom. Plus nothing was getting damaged.
The company was at a current production of 26 trailiers a day, which meant I had to keep at least a two day suppy of parts in each bin to cover ANY production order. Also thinking about what you were cutting out of a 4' x 8' sheet of paneling was much less wasteful. This kept the scrap down, the millroom was spotless and production was flowing smoothly, at least from the millroom.
The next day, after I had the entire millroom cleaned and straightened up and the inventory racks sorted and filled with the desired lumber products I found that their was alot of installers of cabinets from the production line coming back and getting the cabinets reordered because the ones that we had built DID NOT FIT in the trailers. After about the 8th cabinet I told Sue brown to get me a set of blueprints for the trailers that they were running that day. She stated she didn't have time and demanded I recut the parts. I called John Christianson back to my department and demanded he get the prints or i would walk out. A problem existed and we time to fix all 26 of them, remember the daily production, but we don't have time to find the "cause" and prevent it from "ever" happening...THAT IS FUCKING STUPID.
John Christianson got the prints, brought them back to me and said, "What are you going to do with them."
I said, "Fix this problem."
I went to were the problem started, in the welding shop, where they made the frames.
I told everyone to stop working and someone get me a tape measure. Some of the guys looked at me as if to say...Who in the fuck is that?
Some didn't stop working and John Christianson told them to stop working and to get me a tape measure.
LET ME SAY THIS....THERE WAS AND STILL IS RAMPANT "SPEED", METH, USE IN ELKHART, BUT THEY USE IT TO GET THROUGH A 14 TO 16 WORK DAY.
AND THE REASON THEY DON'T GET FIRED IS BECAUSE THEY DON'T "OVER-AMP" AND THEY DON'T FUCK UP THEIR JOBS...BECAUSE THEY MAKE "PIECE-RATE", ABOUT $300.00 PER DAY, IF THEY MAKE THE PRODUCTION RATE...REGARDLESS HOW MANY HOURS IT TAKES THEM.
I checked the overall length of the frame and checked the blueprint and the frame that was being built was 2 1/2" too long. We found out why nothing was fitting, and it was becasue of some drug use and a LACK OF COMMUNICATION.
The individuals cutting the steel tubing for the frames were cutting them a little on the long side 1/4" here, 1/4" there, 1/8" here, 1/8" there...it all adds up to a frame that is WRONG.!!!!!!!!!!!
The "tweekers", because of production demands and their lack of communication with each other,
were beating the over-sized parts into the gigs and they had become loose and the frames were too big.
The reason they weren't talking is because of disorder and a lack of communication and maybe there bad attitudes came from all the above and some sleep deprevation.
I BUILT A NEW GIG TO BUILD THE FRAMES ON WITH EXTRA HOLDS FOR THE METAL AND THEN MADE SURE EVERYONE HAD THE CORRECT DIMENSIONS, NOT THE ONE THAT THEY HAD BEEN USING, THE ONES DIRECTLY OFF THE BLUEPRINT....NOW "MY" CABINET PART S "WILL" FIT.
I told the lead man that the dimensions on the gigs were "critical" and the gigs that were used in a day must be checked for ddamage and repaired "before" the run of production.
I made that one of his main jobs, and "promised" him a raise. When he did his job, I demanded the company give him a raise, and they did....TEAMWORK or EXTORTION, who fucking cares.
That is all we needed to do to make this plant extremely productive, production was rolling with no flaws, thus no mistakes.
When these two problems got solved and I had implemented my production of the millroom, production had never been better and the plant super, John, had came back to tell me so.
In the millroom was a huge vertical "HOLZHER" Panel Saw. It was not being used and I asked why, it looked fairly new.
John Christianson said it would not cut square and he had representatives from the HOLZHER company coming in to look at it, since it was still under warranty.
I looked at the saw and noticed that the base of it was mounted to the concrete floor and the vertical back was mounted to the wall of the building.
When the technicians came in to look at the saw the adjusted it and ran it for about 6 hours and still could not get it to cut square.
When John came back I asked if they had fixed ot and he said no they might bring in a new saw, since they can't get that one fixed.
I walked over to the technicians and stated that the concrete slab the base was mounted to is solid, but the back of the saw is mounted to an outside wall and along the foundation is a crack, and I believed the wall had shifted and cocked the saw out of square. The one tech said you may be right.
We unbolted the saw had moved it out away from the wall by 3 feet and made bracing for the back that would bolt to the floor, instead of the wall.
GUESS WHAT IT TOOK US ONE DAY TO MOVE IT AND RE-MOUNT IT AND IT WORKED LIKE NEW....THAT SAW COULD INCREASE OUR PRODUCTION OF PARTS BY, NOT 10%, BUT 10 fold.
I made $22.00 for every trailer that went out the door, so at a production rate of 26 trailers a day and $22.00 for each one, I made a whopping $572.00 per day.
You may ask, "what fucking moron would give up a job like that?"
A fucking moron that doesn't let people lie, steal or disreapect him.
THIS IS HOW IT ALL ENDED:
After I got the areas of production that directly effected me up and running "right", the way they should run. I found someone in that are to take responsibility for their job. Promised them a raise "IF" they did their job. I was done.
All I had to do was my job and "I Know What I'm Working With", it was easy, lol.
We made "piece rate", so when your job was done you could leave and get a full days pay.
I had made my job so easy that I went to work at 6 a.m. Check the production schedule for the day.
Checked my inventory of parts and cut what I needed to meet the production schedule, remember my inventory was for 2 days.
I was done and ready to leave at 8:45 a.m.
The employees on the line got mad because I was the new employee (I had only worked there for 1 month), and I got paid over $500.00 per day and my work was done by 8 a.m. so I waited till break at 8:45, had coffee in the break room and left when everyone else was going back to work....I was headed to the bar.
Sue Brown told me that it didn't look good and asked me to stay till at least 12 noon, which I agreed.
The only reason I agreed was because the earliest a bar opened on the area was 11 a.m. and I didn't want to go home.
No one to go home to...oh, yea, the girlfriend thing.
I asked Sue what she wanted me to do till noon and she said you can help the cabinet builders. I asked her if I got their pay for the cabinets I built and she said "no". I got pissed off and said if I help that builder, the first hting I am going to help him with is some advice, and tell him to...
QUIT FUCKING OFF, AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.
When I was done working and after first break I would lay down on the picnic tables in the break room and take a nap. When Sue Brown heard about this and told John Christianson, he said I couldn't do that either.
I told John what I can do is QUIT, and I left the company.
PAY ME FOR MY EFFORTS DICKHEADS,
NO MORE "WHITE LIE" PROMISES.
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