Boomer Meets The Beard

Right before the implementation of BSOF Bill and Dave's company went through a down-swing in business so much so that they offered VSI (early retirement/severance) to anyone who wanted to take it. After the down-sizing of people many production areas went through a small scale re-organization. One of the employees who got moved around was my current supervisor who just happened to be the most junior supervisor in the department. What they did was demote him to a high level tech and put him in charge of this new project, BSOF (Behavioral Safety Observation and Feedback). This was disappointing to me on a couple different levels. One was he is a great guy to work with. Very personable. Two was that he is the manager who interviewed me and subsequently promoted me to swing shift lead tech recently.

Together we had some good ideas about the way we would run the product line because there was a lot changing about it, we had a new product coming out from the lab and the company started sending field failure boxes back directly to the instrument line for repair instead of going through a regional service center. My supervisor was giving me full control of how the field failures would be handled and he allowed me to introduce and train up the technicians on the new product. I really liked this role being more of the technical lead versus a paper pusher. It's what I wanted and he gave it to me. So now my product line was stuck without a supervisor, but not for long. We were given someone who had spent the last several years working pretty much alone in the training department. I don't exactly know what goes on in training department because for as long as I have worked here I don't remember anything of importance or anything at all for that matter coming from their group (should have been my first clue right there). I have seen this person several times around the site he is a short portly fellow with a medium length gray mullet style hairdo, long shaggy gray beard, and he constantly wears some old aviator glasses. The beard is what really stood out to me I don't think I have seen a beard that long and shaggy since they took "Grizzly Adams" off the air hence the nickname "The Beard."

Anyway when The Beard was announced as my new supervisor something strange happened. One of the testers (an elderly woman who had been with the company many years) was gone. I didn't know what had happened, but after some asking around I discovered that she had requested and received a transfer to the sub-assembly area (should have been my second clue). As soon as The Beard was set up in his cube he arranged a meeting between his top techs and the material coordinator at his desk to go over how the line operates and how he thinks it should run. Well this meeting took place at about 12:30pm on a Thursday and I work swing (I generally get off at 11:30pm or midnight). No biggie here I figure it's a one time meeting and I could adjust to that fairly easy. My first mistake. The Beard informed me that this was going to be a weekly occurrence and my presence was mandatory. I asked him if we could push back the time a little to accommodate my late working hours to which he replied, "You will have to adjust." End of debate. As time went on these meetings became more and more meaningless and sometimes The Beard would cancel them without thinking about it and without trying to get word to me.

First strike against this nimrod.