That'll Put Some Marzipan In Your Pie Plate, Bingo!

What was I ever worried about? A new job, any new job, will fall before my might. Why? Because I am a total badass. That's why. I'm not saying I'm perfect, not yet, but I'm picking this stuff up and I'm getting pretty good at it. I haven't been there a month yet, and I'm already getting comfortable and starting to flex my muscles. With my new outlook on things (see earlier posts) the sky is the limit on what I can accomplish now. And I will dominate in time.

I seem to have moved on from gas-blocking to slide-fitting, although when need be I can slip over there and do both. Jason is on gas-blocking right now, and he's having a hard time of it. Meanwhile, I'm attacking the slide-fitting thing like a rabid animal. Right now, I have my sights on Jason as the weakest link. That's where I start. I'll pass him first, and then work my way up from there. The blood is in the water, and I'm the shark. It's what I do. I might never pass Fred, Jim, or Brad, but I will become their equal. Eventually.

Yesterday we were videotaped. It seems that just our cell was. They want us to get up to 300 guns a day, and right now we're nowhere near that. In all fairness, the company only recently instituted a Lean system into the workings, and when that was put into effect in LSI some years back it was quite a chaotic tangle for a long while. And half the time I never followed it anyway. Some of the guys who have been there a while are very resistant to the changes, and it's making for some friction. I believe the tapings were to help Mike and the rest to try and streamline things as much as possible. I really don't enjoy being taped, and the girl with the camera made me some nervous, but you better believe I was cranking shit out.

Today a guy named Bob came by our cell to take Tact times. For us to get to 300 it's been calculated how many things must pass through our hands in such and such time. He started with Christy and Amanda over in trigger housing, and they're pretty fast, so no problems there. Then he went to Jason in gas-block, and huge huge huge problems there. It was a mess. I waited all through that, knowing I was next. It was not unlike sitting in Ms. Morgan's 8th grade English class waiting to give an oral report on some stupid book. That anticipation was a killer.

This guy Bob was pretty nice, though, and his wicked midwestern accent made him even more personable. He said there was no pressure, he was just there to observe, and he was going to time me on getting the slides ready. I was mostly worried that I wouldn't be able to explain myself very well, being so new, but I think I handled the whole thing rather well. I was relaxed and somewhat comfortable in what I was doing, and that helped. While I was a screener I used to get yokels from engineering out at my press all the time to observe, so I'm used to this kind of thing.

As usual, I had four or five slides ready to go while waiting for Jason, so when he handed me a gun I just slapped a slide on it and passed it to Jim to do bolt-fitting. Then Bob stopped me. He wanted to see the whole thing and time it. So he had me set my prepared slides aside and do it up from scratch. I should have figured. So Jason handed me a gun, and he said go. I grabbed a slide out of the bucket and file, file, file, hit the 45 angle, hit the other 45 angle, and then straighten it. There's a fixture for that, with three directions I have to meet, and I just have to bend and tweak the slide to get it to fit. Sometimes they're pretty close out of the bucket, sometimes they are out in Timbucktoo. The first one I did was somewhere in the middle. I came in at 96 seconds. My second one was 98 seconds. Then for the third one I hit 66 seconds. And I explained to Bob the difference in some of the slides, which can account for that time differential. Also, sometimes a slide won't fit the receiver, but a different slide will, and that first slide will fit a different receiver. They're all different. So that came into play, too.

He timed me on 10 slides, and there was still a few problematic ones that put me in the 90 second range, but I also had a 56 second slide, and several in the 60 and 70 range, then a few in the 80's. About halfway through he told me the Tact time was 87 seconds. By that time I was running an average time that was underneath that. When he was all done with me I asked if I could find out my average across all 10 slides.

79.5 seconds. I was well under the Tact time. Sweet. He was pretty impressed, too. And he wasn't the only one. A couple of the others mentioned my fast times afterwords. I downplayed it, but I did really feel good.

You haven't seen anything yet.