Gravity Attack
Sources' assembly area is very busy on swing shift. There's a full crew of people working on a half dozen different instrument product lines. The majority of these boxes are new models. They're compact and lightweight compared to the one hundred pound vintage monster Signal Generators we're pumping out of Area 51. I'm guessing that most if not all of the work they do here is really fast and simple. Usually I'm fairly busy so I don't have much time to bug folks about their work asking questions but I have done a little peeking over people's shoulders as they crank out unit after unit. From what I've seen so far the latest boxes to emerge from our R&D labs are cookie-cutter snap-tight models with little to no wiring or hardware required.
On the main aisleway running through the middle of our floor there's an area where employees from the warehouse drop off supplies and parts for Sources' assembly army. The warehouse guys get to drive small orange electric trucks with a yellow blinking light on the roof which makes them look like Cal-Trans golf carts on steroids. Behind each truck they usually haul four or five trailers loaded with black boxes. The black boxes contain parts that were ordered by assemblers during the previous shifts. Every other hour or so, another orange truck with a caravan of trailers will unload a bunch more stuff for us. When parts arrive either myself or Okie Carol will pick through the boxes looking for Area 51's supplies and put them away in our part bins. Then we dump the empty black boxes back out in the hallway for removal. It's a simple, straightforward part distribution system that's almost foolproof. That is, it's foolproof until you add a fool like Super Shopper into the mix.
Nobody in the Sources assembly area wants to put away parts when they arrive from the warehouse. Mountains of black boxes pile up in the hall. Dingbats like Super Shopper complain that they've run out of parts in their bins so they can't do any more work even though the supplies they need are just a few feet away. Because none of their assemblers volunteer for parts duty, someone came up with a daily rotating schedule. Each day of the week a certain person is assigned to put all of their parts supplies away for everyone else. However, if a new person is hired onto the line, the rest of the group will dump on the new person and make them put all their crap away every day for a while. Their excuse is it's helping the new person to become familiar with the assembly area but I think they're just being lazy by treating new employees like servants.
One of the new people they just got is a nice lady from Micro. She's probably in her early 60s and she dyes her hair bright fire engine red. To me she looks a little silly with a vibrant hair color like that, but whatever. Slipping into old age must be difficult for some people to handle. Her name is Shelley and she's got some of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. They're a bright sky blue color. Almost white-blue actually, and her eyes are so gorgeous that at first I thought they had to be fake, like maybe she was wearing a kind of colored contact lenses. Shelley said she didn't wear contacts and that her eye color was the real deal.
We got to talking about what she did before ending up here in Sources. Shelley told me she's been working in the Microcircuit department for years but using microscopes has taken a toll on her eyesight and she can't see very well anymore. She can't work in Micro because of it so they moved her out here to work on instrument lines instead. Man, I can understand what she's talking about. I worked with microscopes for just over two years at TDS and I noticed my eyesight was much worse after that. I had to get a stronger prescription for my glasses. Part of the problem is scopes use extremely bright light sources and most of that light is reflected off of metalized surfaces up the eyepieces right into your skull. It can strain your eyes in no time and over a period of years working like that can definitely degrade your eyesight.
Shelley is being used every evening by the rest of the assembly team as a parts gopher. She spends much of swing shift grabbing assembly supplies and carting them into the area to be put away. The other night she was doing okay with parts duty until she grabbed a long, flat box filled with hardware. I think she misjudged how heavy the box was because when she lifted it off the rollaway table it slipped out of her hands. The box flipped upsidedown throwing the lid off. Thousands of tiny screws, nuts, and bolts rained down onto the concrete floor and scattered all over the place. I heard the commotion and walked over to find Shelley standing in the middle of a hardware catastrophe. "Oh dear." She said. I felt bad for her. Since her eyesight isn't so hot it was going to take her quite a while to round up all those loose parts. Being scattered across a dull gray floor, tiny silver screws would be perfectly camouflaged. Shelley would probably never find most of them.
I stopped what I was doing and volunteered to help clean the mess up. I joked with Shelley and told her she had just suffered from a gravity attack. "You never know when gravity will just jump up out of nowhere and snatch stuff out of your mitts." I smiled and she tried to laugh it off. She was visibly embarrassed. I fetched a broom and dust pan. Both of us cleaned up the rogue hardware fairly quickly. The worst part was spending the time to sort out the different parts from each other. It took a while, but we got it done and I went back to slaving in Area 51.
During the next couple of evenings at work, Shelley managed to dump at least one full box of hardware per night. After the third accident it wasn't amusing anymore and I got tired of coming to her rescue. Her fourth mishap was the worst. She spilled an entire box of 10,000 screws. I heard her softly say "Oops" as a waterfall of metric hardware belched out onto the floor. That pissed me off. I decided I wasn't going to assist in the cleanup and that Shelley needed to learn a lesson.
I waited for a half hour until she had picked up every last screw from the concrete. I pretended to walk by searching for a pair of pliers or something and I said to her, "Oh look Shelley. You missed a couple of screws down there under that workbench. See 'em?" I pointed at a vague spot on the floor. She crouched down on her hands and knees looking for a couple of loose screws that weren't there. I walked away. Ten minutes later I came back and she was still trying to find the nonexistant last screws. Snickering to myself I said, "Damn Shelley. You can't see those screws? They're right in front of you!" Again, I walked out of the assembly area. I have no idea how long she crawled around on the floor searching for them before finally giving up.
I know, I'm a bastard.
On the main aisleway running through the middle of our floor there's an area where employees from the warehouse drop off supplies and parts for Sources' assembly army. The warehouse guys get to drive small orange electric trucks with a yellow blinking light on the roof which makes them look like Cal-Trans golf carts on steroids. Behind each truck they usually haul four or five trailers loaded with black boxes. The black boxes contain parts that were ordered by assemblers during the previous shifts. Every other hour or so, another orange truck with a caravan of trailers will unload a bunch more stuff for us. When parts arrive either myself or Okie Carol will pick through the boxes looking for Area 51's supplies and put them away in our part bins. Then we dump the empty black boxes back out in the hallway for removal. It's a simple, straightforward part distribution system that's almost foolproof. That is, it's foolproof until you add a fool like Super Shopper into the mix.
Nobody in the Sources assembly area wants to put away parts when they arrive from the warehouse. Mountains of black boxes pile up in the hall. Dingbats like Super Shopper complain that they've run out of parts in their bins so they can't do any more work even though the supplies they need are just a few feet away. Because none of their assemblers volunteer for parts duty, someone came up with a daily rotating schedule. Each day of the week a certain person is assigned to put all of their parts supplies away for everyone else. However, if a new person is hired onto the line, the rest of the group will dump on the new person and make them put all their crap away every day for a while. Their excuse is it's helping the new person to become familiar with the assembly area but I think they're just being lazy by treating new employees like servants.
One of the new people they just got is a nice lady from Micro. She's probably in her early 60s and she dyes her hair bright fire engine red. To me she looks a little silly with a vibrant hair color like that, but whatever. Slipping into old age must be difficult for some people to handle. Her name is Shelley and she's got some of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. They're a bright sky blue color. Almost white-blue actually, and her eyes are so gorgeous that at first I thought they had to be fake, like maybe she was wearing a kind of colored contact lenses. Shelley said she didn't wear contacts and that her eye color was the real deal.
We got to talking about what she did before ending up here in Sources. Shelley told me she's been working in the Microcircuit department for years but using microscopes has taken a toll on her eyesight and she can't see very well anymore. She can't work in Micro because of it so they moved her out here to work on instrument lines instead. Man, I can understand what she's talking about. I worked with microscopes for just over two years at TDS and I noticed my eyesight was much worse after that. I had to get a stronger prescription for my glasses. Part of the problem is scopes use extremely bright light sources and most of that light is reflected off of metalized surfaces up the eyepieces right into your skull. It can strain your eyes in no time and over a period of years working like that can definitely degrade your eyesight.
Shelley is being used every evening by the rest of the assembly team as a parts gopher. She spends much of swing shift grabbing assembly supplies and carting them into the area to be put away. The other night she was doing okay with parts duty until she grabbed a long, flat box filled with hardware. I think she misjudged how heavy the box was because when she lifted it off the rollaway table it slipped out of her hands. The box flipped upsidedown throwing the lid off. Thousands of tiny screws, nuts, and bolts rained down onto the concrete floor and scattered all over the place. I heard the commotion and walked over to find Shelley standing in the middle of a hardware catastrophe. "Oh dear." She said. I felt bad for her. Since her eyesight isn't so hot it was going to take her quite a while to round up all those loose parts. Being scattered across a dull gray floor, tiny silver screws would be perfectly camouflaged. Shelley would probably never find most of them.
I stopped what I was doing and volunteered to help clean the mess up. I joked with Shelley and told her she had just suffered from a gravity attack. "You never know when gravity will just jump up out of nowhere and snatch stuff out of your mitts." I smiled and she tried to laugh it off. She was visibly embarrassed. I fetched a broom and dust pan. Both of us cleaned up the rogue hardware fairly quickly. The worst part was spending the time to sort out the different parts from each other. It took a while, but we got it done and I went back to slaving in Area 51.
During the next couple of evenings at work, Shelley managed to dump at least one full box of hardware per night. After the third accident it wasn't amusing anymore and I got tired of coming to her rescue. Her fourth mishap was the worst. She spilled an entire box of 10,000 screws. I heard her softly say "Oops" as a waterfall of metric hardware belched out onto the floor. That pissed me off. I decided I wasn't going to assist in the cleanup and that Shelley needed to learn a lesson.
I waited for a half hour until she had picked up every last screw from the concrete. I pretended to walk by searching for a pair of pliers or something and I said to her, "Oh look Shelley. You missed a couple of screws down there under that workbench. See 'em?" I pointed at a vague spot on the floor. She crouched down on her hands and knees looking for a couple of loose screws that weren't there. I walked away. Ten minutes later I came back and she was still trying to find the nonexistant last screws. Snickering to myself I said, "Damn Shelley. You can't see those screws? They're right in front of you!" Again, I walked out of the assembly area. I have no idea how long she crawled around on the floor searching for them before finally giving up.
I know, I'm a bastard.
posted by factory_peasant at 10:16 AM
2 Comments:
there are quite a few good systems that use high magnification video cameras with the operator viewing a television screen instead of using a microscope. i think those are some of the most comfortable setups to work with in micro applications over long durations of time, but in some cases due to the nature of the job you can't get away with using anything less than a scope.
eventually i expect more and more of this kind of work will be automated anyway by CNC machines so people won't have to perform those jobs manually.
yeah. but in the meantime before automation takes over it's cheaper to employ overseas workforces in countries where you don't have to help pay for their medical care. so if their eyesight happens to go south on them because of the jobs they perform for you... oh well.
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