3° This Morning. Burrrrrrrrrr!

Thursday, January 3, 2008

3° This Morning. Burrrrrrrrrr!


Yesterday I called Tennessee Tech @ Nashville and spoke with Gary Warren to check on my status in starting the January class. It is pretty much decided that I won’t make it for this class. They have selected the students from the waiting list and it didn’t get to me. I was instructed to call next week to check on my status for the next class starting February 25th. He was confident that I would make that class but said that admissions would have to confirm it. I still have things to get done to my house before I go on the road so I am not concerned about the wait but I do want to get started. If I can’t get into that class then I will go to plan B (go to a different school). I don’t really want to do that. This school will work best for me. I go for 7 weeks instead of the 3 weeks of other schools and I go for 6 hours a day instead of the 10 hour days of a boot camp school and I don’t have to leave home to do it.

My current job. In our production meeting yesterday the owner was reviewing 2007 and what we needed to change to improve in 2008. We had a very bad year. One of the items was to set up a quality assurance program. Last year we had scraped over $150,000.00 in bad parts. These were only the major scraps that were obvious since we have nothing to track anything. It didn’t include all the smaller rejected parts that could have been avoided that probable added another $25-$50.000. That is extremely large considering that we only did 1 ½ million in sales for 2007. We also lost a million dollar job because we didn’t have a Q.A. program in place. I had set up a program that was going to start at the beginning of 2007 (one of the first things that I did when I started here) but it was overruled because it was too expensive to hire a quality assurance person. It also required the training of someone to enter data into a database program (it would track time and quality) that I had written that controlled the system. I was told that there wasn’t enough for them to do and that the operators controlled their own quality while they ran the parts. We are talking Mexicans that don’t speak English and some cannot read or write even in Spanish. I stated that we could not afford not to have one even if they sit half the time they would more than pay for themselves.

Then the company was trying to sell their services to an ice machine manufacture and they used the paper work that I had produced to show them our quality assurance program. They accepted the programs documentation saying that it looked very good but then wanted to see it in operation in the plant. Our company went as far as placing the paper work on each job and trying to make it appear that we were using it but they didn’t fall for it. They flat out told us that we had good plans but we weren’t where we needed to be in our quality program for them to use us for a supplier. They were being diplomatic.

Instead of going ahead at that time and implementing the program they waited and we had another $50,000.00 scrape job that also cost us potential future business. It would not have happened with the program in place. The problem would have been caught on the first piece approval inspection. They still didn’t learn. Now we have Batesville Casket and Hennessey (they manufacture tire balancing equipment) that are requiring the same Q.A program. In our production meeting the owner stated that we could no longer afford to be without a Q.A. program. I couldn’t resist saying that I told you so. That went over like (well you get the picture). Telling your boss that he is a dumb ass in a meeting is not How to Win Friends and Influence People. Not a good career move as if I give a shit. I hate being hired to do a job and then having it undermined by that person because he can’t understand the importance of it. If you don’t want me to do a job then don’t hire me and waste my time.

If you haven’t figured it out, I have a bad attitude. I hate working for nasty rude dumb asses. I can’t wait to remove myself (if they don’t remove me first) from this place.