Rough Sailing on the Mini Pearl

Ok, so there is a plan for the Mini-14 cell in which I work. The administration wants us to get out 300 guns a day. They say that the sales department can easily sell that many. To me that seems like an astronomical number of guns. Where in the world are all those guns supposed going? Anyway, that's their plan. Getting to that goal, however, is going to be a struggle. On our best day, which was Monday, we cranked out 170. That was with the cell at full power and pushing hard. Granted, that number is an improvement over what we've done since I've been part of the mix, but it's still far away from the 300 they want.

This is running our cell at nine people. Indiana Bob and the others believe with some tweaking, and a good deal of improvement on the parts we get from the machine shop, that the goal can be accomplished. The way things are organized now it'll be done with one gas-blocker (Eric, the new kid), one slide-fitter (me), one person building bolts (Brad), two bolt-fitters (Jim and Mark), one person on bolt lock (Allen), one person building trigger housings (Amanda), one person as a float (Christie), and one builder (Fred). The people who have been there a long time don't believe this is possible, and in fact are very vocal about thinking that going back to incentive is a better idea than the system we're using now. Having never seen that system at work, I dunno. But being the sort of person I am, I'm going to try like a motherfucker to crank out as much as I can.

Today Fred and Jim were out, so we had to adjust. Mark (who usually works in repairs) worked on bolt fit along with Jordan (ditto). I built bolts so Brad could go down and build, and tried to cover slide-fit as much as I could. Eric is pretty good, so in addition to gas-blocking he did some slide-fitting as well, and so did Mark and Jordan. Sometimes we have pretty good teamwork in spots; sometimes not. It depends who's there doing what. Sometimes people will be left to drown, as I've been here and there. I try to be as much of a team utility player as I can, just because that's how I roll. Today we only did maybe 120 guns, which isn't so bad considering we were down two of our more experienced players.

And this is the curse of the Mini Pearl, which is what a few people in the group refer to our cell as, giving me a metaphor to play with that I didn't have to think up my own self, which is pretty nice of them. Our motley crew is out there sailing those rough waters, looking for Ahab's white whale, and god only knows what sort of horrors we'll have to suffer through to find that whale. And as we slowly close in on it, the whale has let us know it's name.

300 guns.