Conspiracy Against Abu

Five or six months have come and gone since Abu was dumped on us here in Area 51. The Adjust Two station has become a terrible choke point for production due to a large increase in orders and a total lack of effort from Abu. On dayshift BP has been working in overdrive. I think the strain has wore her down some. TC has been jumping from troubleshooting broken units to running Adjust Two when he can. It isn't enough though. Boxes keep stacking up at the Adjust Two rack.

We knew almost as soon as we got Abu that this was going to happen, but we had to give him a fair shake before passing judgement on him. He has a reputation for wandering around the buildings doing nothing for hours at a time and for sleeping on the job. When he starts his shift the only things I see him do is put his feet up on BP's workbench, grab the phone, and start yapping with his family and friends. The rest of the time he's nowhere to be found or he's sound asleep in his chair. A few times the boss has gone out on patrol and walked right by Abu without noticing he was slumped over asleep. Idiot. All of us have been giving Abu shit for it but it hasn't had any effect on him. He doesn't care. So, the next step was to work through management for a solution.

Our lead technicians brought up the issue of Abu's shoddy performance privately with a supervisor. He listened but took no action. Weeks went by and more of the swing shift techs went one by one to this manager and complained. Still nothing happened. At one point I even brought it up to this guy. I got no reaction from him. Amongst ourselves we talked about the situation trying to decide what to do next. Someone suggested we go to BP's husband JP who is a lead technician on another product family in our department and ask for his help. JP was painfully aware of what was going on already no doubt due to his wife complaining about being overloaded with instruments to test. JP did go to bat for us. We wanted Abu's work habits corrected or have him thrown off the line.

JP collected daily throughput data from the Adjust Two station over a period of a couple of months. He paid particular attention to dayshift vs. swingshift and put it all together into a spreadsheet. What he found was 90% of instruments tested were completed on dayshift and the remaining 10% were finished at night. Big difference. JP then approached our boss with his findings and explained once again that Abu was a serious problem in Area 51. The boss told JP he felt there was a conspiracy in Area 51 against Abu. In his opinion our group is a clique that won't accept anyone from another line. This is partially true, we didn't want anybody else from the department because we feared getting nothing but deadbeats on our line. Abu is without question a deadbeat. None of the data JP collected was valid, and the boss went on to say that JP was only involved because he was covering for his wife. That really burned JP up. Somehow JP managed to keep his composure and not lose his temper.

We're still stuck with Abu.

This is a prime example of a manager who happens to be completely out of touch with reality. Unfortunately there is alot of that going on around here these days. Supervisors like this can't see a blatant problem even when it's sitting right in front of their nose. It's like if a coworker is suddenly on fire and I go to the boss and say, "Hey boss that guy over there is on fire. You see him?" The boss will look at his shoes, look at the ceiling and reply, "I don't see a problem here. I don't know what you're talking about." End result? The problem at hand grows worse. Because of Abu failing to perform the most basic functions of his job everyone around him has to work much harder to pick up his dead weight. This directly impacts our ability to complete instruments on time, which affects customer shipments. It also causes morale in the area to suffer.