Grumpy Old Bastard Jr.

Things at work are rolling again. Our line was down for a few weeks last month, which meant most of us were farmed out to do other things, most of which were really boring, so I'm glad to be back in Mini-14 putting guns together. As is typical for me, I've gravitated towards bolt-fit, which is the 2nd hardest job on the line, after final build, which Fred does. Bolt-fit is so technical and complicated that the whole line can bottleneck right there if we have problems. It's difficult enough that it was decided a few months ago, while I was still doing bolt-lock (which comes after bolt-fit), that there should be two bolt-fitters on the line.

Since I started there, Jim has been the primary bolt-fitter. But when you listen to him talk about Rugers it's a lot like listening to me during my last days at LSI. He's burnt out and some of the changes they've made in the company have left him somewhat bitter, which I understand very well. Towards the end of the summer I started learning bolt-fit, and at first I was slow and awkward with it, and it took me forever to get a gun through, and it was a little discouraging. But I took every opportunity to claim one of the two benches and plug away at it whenever I could, because I was determined to learn this. By the time Jim took some time off in September, I was filling in and getting decent numbers. Nothing spectacular, but I was doing all right.

I've been doing bolt-fit pretty much every day now since then. Once we got back up and running, Barney put me on one bench and Brad on the other. Jim's been doing other things, and where at LSI if somebody else got put on the overlays, as much as I hated them, I'd feel threatened, but he could care less. I think he's glad for the break. Brad is one of the older guys on the line. He's been at Rugers for 28 years, and is a grumpy old guy (and he describes himself that way) in the same kind of way that Skip was at LSI. Something will piss him off and he'll go off on a hilarious rant. Cooter, who's more or less my best friend there, pisses him off all the time, and Brad will call him an "ignorant dumb bastard" or the like, but in all fairness, Cooter tries everyone's patience, including mine.

We've been doing good numbers. I've talked before about the 300 gun goal that management has set for us, and since I'd been there the highest number I'd seen us get to was 170, which was actually the record for the line. About three weeks ago, with Brad and me cranking guns out as fast as we could ... we broke the record and got 206. That was a great day, and boy were the higher ups happy about that, but I was some exhausted after that. Bolt-fit can be rough.

It's like this. I get a gun with a slide on it. Then I find a bolt. I put the bolt in and then run four gauges and three shims with it to make sure it's going to fit right. It can't be too loose or too tight, the shims have to slide in, and so forth. And if any of that goes awry, I have to fix it and make it fit, so there's a whole level of problem solving involved. Then I have to find a firing pin to go in the bolt, make sure the driven reading is in spec., make sure the pre-fire reading passes, and make sure the whole thing works, and then finish building the bolt. And if things are going well I can do that between two and three minutes. If we have bolts already made, I can do it even faster. If you were to watch me do this across the course of a day it's *way* more impressive than anything I ever did at LSI, and I was goddam good at screening.

Today we had some good hours and some difficult hours. Most of the time we can average somewhere between 20 to 26 guns an hour between the two of us, if we have the parts, if things are going well. Today just before lunch we hit 32 guns done in one hour, which I've never seen before. While we were flying I could tell we were having a big hour, but I didn't know it was going to be that big. I was pretty happy about that. It means I did at least 16 of those, going by the average, and there were a few times that Brad was out of the cell, so I think I had an even bigger share of that 32 than that. Whew.

Cooter, meanwhile, is one of those lazy types who only wants to do what he wants to do, and doesn't follow direction terribly well. So people, including me, give him a hard time, and instead of listening to anybody, he just gets ornery and it's fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. So I don't really feel guilty giving him a hard time at all, and given the factory nature of the place, we're pretty rough, much rougher even than at LSI, and I'm comfortable enough to just let Cooter have it, and if you don't know this, you should: I can be pretty darn vicious.

A lot of times when I'm giving Cooter shit over something stupid he's done or about his shit attitude, he'll say "Ok Brad Jr." or "Whatever, Little Johnson" (which is Brad's last name), as if to say that Brad's general grumpiness is rubbing off on me or something, which maybe it is, but we all know that I can be somewhat bad tempered in my own right, don't we. I kind of wish I'd taken the opportunity to write down some of Brad's better lines, because like Skip, he'd be totally quotable for the book. I'm not sure I could do him accurate justice here right now, but he is pretty fucking hilarious. Above that, he knows just about everything about those guns there is to know, so I've picked up all kind of tricks and such while working next to him. And he's never once been grumpy at me, similar to how Christy is a hardass chick, but she's never once been anything less than nice to me. So anyway, I've kind of attached myself to Brad's wagon, as a protogee you might say.

Almost once a day Cooter will give me some shit about being like Johnson.

I smile and tell him I take that as a compliment.