Barley Bails Out

I talked with Barley the other day. He's one of the Precision Group technicians. I don't know him very well, but we got to yapping about all the problems we've been having on the line since Potatohead showed up. I had no idea, but this whole time Barley has been yet another one of Potatohead's victims. Like me, he's leaving the area just to get away from the asshole. I'm heading for Area 51 as soon as possible, Barley managed to score a promotion in another department. That's good for both of us but I feel bad for the few remaining people we're leaving behind to suffer and rot with that imbecile. Barley told me everything that happened to him...

When Garden Tool was our supervisor, I was the electronic technician responsible for tracking assembly errors. It had worked well and the tech/assembly teams had been doing a good job of working together to bring down the rate of preventable mistakes. Each assembler and tech had a number that was assigned to them so that the next person could identify the person who had made a mistake in the process and bring it to the attention of that particular worker so that they could correct what they may be doing wrong. Pretty simple. However there were a few assemblers that went to Potatohead to complain that they were being singled out and were having their feelings hurt.

Potatohead's solution? No more numbers assigned to anyone. There would be no more feedback and no way to track errors. Needless to say, our failure rate went through the roof. Even worse, I tried to address this issue with the assemblers. I sent out an email saying that there was a high amount of errors coming from assembly and that the assembly team needed to spend a few minutes to double check their work before sending it to the next area. The next morning I got called into Potatohead's cubicle. He told me that there were several assemblers (Super Shopper and The Squirrel) who were offended and hurt by my email and that I needed to make sure that I was more sensitive to other people's feelings and make sure I proof read my emails before sending them out.

Frustration had grown within our tech group. The kiss-asses had stretched Potatohead's given power a little too far with us. Things had been going really well previously when Garden Tool was our supervisor. We had a good working relationship with the assembly and material handling team. Meth was beaten down to his level and was kept under control. But with Potatohead in the lead, some people took their power too seriously.

We had an assembler who worked in the final button-up area. She had been pretty cool to work with until she got a power trip, thanks to Potatohead. She started bringing back instruments to our area and shoving them towards us while yelling at us to fix something. We had enough of this treatment and decided to call a meeting with Potatohead. Four or five of us technicians let Potatohead have it with both barrels. We had some pretty good documentation of the crap that was going on and called him out on it. Most of the frustration was voiced about this particular assembler and the way she thought she had power over us. In Potatohead's infinite wisdom, he decided to stop the meeting and go gather this other employee so we could hash things out with her. Bad idea. She came into the room with a defiant look on her face, I think she knew what was going on. Potatohead gave her a brief overview of what we had been talking about. He then opened the door for us to start unloading on her, and that we did. It did not take long for her to start defending herself with tears. It was pitiful. She sure didn’t have the tears flowing when she was yelling at us. But now she had to play the role of poor little victim. Guess which side of the aisle Potatohead landed on? He called an end to the meeting quickly and basically told us we were going to have to be better team players. Worthless.

I had already been offered and accepted a promotion to another line. I had enough of Potatohead's crap. He had tried to buy my loyalty with a nice pay raise. It didn't work for me. I couldn't handle the mess that the line had turned into. At the end of the shift I would make sure that my bench was cleaned up so the next technician who used it wouldn't have to face a big mess. The problem was, most of the new people and Potatohead's kiss-asses didn't necessarily follow the same rules. The pretest area had become a disaster area. There were stacks of junk, scrapped parts, schematics, newspapers, and tools piled up on the benches making it impossible to do your work.

One night I got sick of it. I threw a stack of newspapers off my bench and also told one of the temporary employee testers to clean up their area. Unknown to me, Meth was having a relationship outside of work with this girl. He took offense to me talking to her like that so he went and told Potatohead that I was throwing stuff around the area and was treating the employees bad. He made up a bunch of lies to get me in trouble. The next day I came in and Potatohead was waiting for me. He pulled me aside and asked me what happened last night. I said nothing really important. He said that he had heard I had a bad night. I said, "Well this place is a mess and there is no leadership around here." He said that I should be a leader to the techs and testers. I said "No, you took those powers away from me when you stopped my training to become the 95 level technician on the line and second of all it isn't my job, its yours." He turned very bright red and told me to pack up my stuff and go start my other job.

I was happy to get out of there, but also pissed off that it had come down to that after all of the work I had put in to being one of the expert techs on that product line.