Industrial Fiction: Miracle on Ice

 
The Keystone cops action continued right up until lunch. Carlson told him to hit the restroom, grab a quick sandwich at the cafeteria and a couple of bottles of gatorade. He needed to be back at the station in 24 minutes with hands washed and gloves on.

He barely made it back in time. There was a rush to the johns and he had to wait five minutes to use a stall. All the motion had convinced his bowels it was time to unballast.

He grabbed some chips and the gatorade and rushed back to the station.

Things were under control. Ganzer had been sorting parts through lunch and hanging the good ones on the rolling Christmas tree and pitching the bad into a bin. 

Snodgrass watched as Ganzer bend the part  to see if it would snap when being assembled. By the look of it, 2/3rds of the parts were failing.

“What happens to those?” Snodgrass asked.

“We ship them back to the supplier” Ganzer answered.

“What do they do with them?” Snodgrass asked.

“I don’t know for sure but an engineer told me they grind them up and reuse the plastic to make new ones.”

Snodgrass filed that away in his head.

Carlson took no chances that his student had forgotten the job over lunch. He had him reread the written instructions. It made a lot more sense now and he understood some of the cryptic notes penciled in the margins.

Then Carlson repeated the layering of job complexity the same as when Snodgrass started although Snodgrass was able to demonstrate proficiency much more quickly. He only needed a few reminders of which pins went into the low-runner model because he had not had that many repetitions.

Then, forty-five minutes after coming back from lunch, it all clicked together in his mind and hands. As long as nothing goofy happened, he could keep up and not make mistakes.

Carlson grunted his approval.

“Tell you what I am going to do” Carlson said. "I am going to move to the job down-line so I can keep an eye on you and I am going to give that operator a break.”

As far as Snodgrass was concerned, Carlson could do anything he wanted to do. “Sure. You bet. I will holler if I get too twisted around.

The operator Carlson kicked loose took a twenty minute break. Sh opened her tote and pulled out a paperback book and read. Then she came back and relieved the operator on the opposite side of the line from Carlson.

Snodgrass didn’t say anything. He just raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question.

“Usually” Carlson responded “training people is a pain-in-the-butt. It is disruptive to the rotation. In your case it isn’t too bad because you are training on the hardest station in the team so the operators get to rotate around that station.”

“The way management squares it with the teams is the standards are a little bit generous for training and once you “got it” the other team members get extra breaks because we are running +1 in the team.”

“Just my luck. I got started on the hardest job” Snodgrass said.

“That is by design. So was starting you on the most difficult job element, the push-pins. If you started on the easy parts then a new team-member is tempted to drag his feet about learning the rest of the job” Carlson said.

“So how much time is allowed to learn a new job?” Snodgrass asked.

“Three days” Carlson said.

“So, did I set any kind of record learning it in 5 hours?”

“Yes and no. A really good operator would have picked it up in 2 hours but I would still have to keep an eye on them for two thousand jobs to ensure they were bulletproof. The shit-heads who don’t care what their teammates think of them take all three days” Carlson said.

“You said ‘yes and no’” Snodgrass said. "So what record did I set?"

“You learned it faster than any person from Headquarters ever learned it” Carlson admitted.

Mid-afternoon, Snodgrass saw the team-leader sweeping up the push-pins and other small parts. Snodgrass was gratified to see that other operators didn’t always get it right every time. The team-leader didn’t attempt to sort them out. He dumped them into the trash. Snodgrass was oblivious to the fact that the team-leader had been sweeping every two hours because small parts are a slip-trip hazard. Only now was he on auto-pilot and could attend to his surroundings.

Ten minutes before the end of shift Paula Stevens swung by. She too had been by every couple of hours to see how Snodgrass was struggling.

“Can you spare him?” she asked Carlson.

“Yep” as Carlson slid into the station and the team-leader picked up the operations Carlson had been doing.

“You survived” Paula said.

“More or less” Snodgrass agreed.

“OK. I want you to do a few things. Get your clothes out of the locker room. Buy a bottle of ibuprofen and an eight-pack of electrolyte because you will be doing the same thing in a different station tomorrow. Find some running shoes if you have them.”

“The other thing that you have to do, and it is mandatory, is to watch the movie “Miracle on Ice”.

Snodgrass gave her a look to see if she was joking. Clearly, she wasn’t.

After stuffing the cover-alls into the laundry chute and a hot shower, he changed into his street clothes and went looking for an office and a computer.

The office suite was almost deserted. One of the offices had a cleaning person in it and she was arguing with somebody on a phone. There was dust on the keyboard of the cubicle he picked out.

He logged in and pulled up the engineering drawing of the part that had caused the train-wreck while he was building.

Three hours later he had seen enough. He logged off and then wandered back onto the floor. Standing there, watching the second shift build jobs, he pulled out his phone and asked “Are you still in the plant?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. What is on your mind?” Paula asked.

“Can you meet me at the station where I was working?” Snodgrass asked.

Snodgrass gave her a very condensed brain-dump. He had the offending part on the stand-up table.

“Every other part like this has a maximum of 25% regrind. Reprocessing the material damages the material properties. The spec says these parts are allowed up to 35%. Lots of “Green” and “Sustainable” awards for that decision. The thing is that all the regrind ends up in black parts like the flubber because black hides well and this supplier is notorious for not keeping track details like how much regrind goes into each batch.” 

"This part is source to Magenta Engineering. They are a top-notch outfit and it is hard to believe what you are saying" Paula objected.

"And they sourced it at Gatineau Industries" Snodgrass informed her.

Paula winced. EVERYBODY knew about Gatineau Industries. "I thought they went out of business."

"They did and their assets were swallowed up by another supplier who promptly went out of business. That is when Magenta swooped in and bought them up. They were actually pressured to pick them up because we needed the factories to keep running" Snodgrass informed her.

"The other problem" Snodgrass said "is that the engineering notes specify that all inside-angles...the kinds that want to crack...are supposed to have a 1.0mm radius. None of these do.”

Snodgrass took the point of his ballpoint pen and ran it along the offending features.

“We keep shipping scrap parts made from degraded material back to the supplier. They keep grinding them up and adding to the parts they turn around and ship back to us. There is a difference between material that has been reground and reshot once and material that has been reground and reshot countless times. Add that to skipping the die-maker labor required to hone-down the sharp edges and we have problems.”

"I want your permission to file a Problem Reporting and Resolution case against both Gatineau Industries and Magenta. I also want to over-night deliver bad parts to both places. Sending things over-night sends a message.  Gatineau will probably blow us off but I bet Magenta won't" Snodgrass said.

"Do it. But then go home and watch Miracle on Ice" Paula said.

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