Production Line Shenanigans And Metrics

As months passed The Beard lost sight of what our production line was supposed to do, make money for Bill and Dave’s by producing as many instruments as possible. For example one Thursday afternoon after my meeting I took a cruise around the line to see what’s up and help wherever I could be of service. A few examples of what I saw from the dayshift crew were: a tech watching an engineer troubleshoot an easy problem for her, a tester and assembler working on their development plan (which The Beard was big on but made no effort to help anyone with), another tech working on one of Beard's frivolous side jobs, and the piece de resistance was a tech searching for a job in another state. I thought that last one was really strange. I thought this could be grounds for termination, I mean searching for employment while you are on the job during business hours when there is a boat-load of work to be done.

So I approach this guy, lets call him Spoon Man, and I say to him, “Spoon Man what are you doing? Aren't you worried Beard will see what you're doing and be upset?”
Spoon Man replied, “No I put it on my development plan to look for a new job and The Beard said it was okay.”
“WTF? There is a lot of work to be done.”
This really aggravated me because the swing shift crew and I had been busting our asses off to get out not only production, but also factory returns, which at the time Shoelaces and I were the only ones doing due to the expertise required, and The Beard gives the okie-dokie to these shenanigans.

The stupidest of all the frivolous jobs was the one The Beard assigned to Shoelaces and I when we were to be in charge of the production line's metrics. We got this job because The Beard had a line meeting one day and Shoelaces and I could not be there so he gave us about 5 or 6 each of these metrics to us as punishment. Metrics I thought sounded business related to me and I am just a techno geek so why should I have to do this? I asked The Beard about it and he told me, “Because you didn't come to my meeting and this will teach you.” So I figured out the line metrics were just what I thought. Make graphs of things such as productivity, line cost, line costs per person, and the such, it was all stuff that I was unfamiliar with on how to determine.

So it took me a couple days just to learn how to do this and where to get information from. A colossal waste of my time. I had to do this once a month and turn it into The Beard. After doing this a few times I started asking around other production lines if their people had to do this too, and the general answer I got was that they had heard of business metrics, but their supervisor was taking care of it because it was the boss' responsibility to get the data into the department head once a month. So me being me and already somewhat fed up I just stopped doing them. The Beard never said a word about it. I guess he figured it would be easier to do them himself rather than fight me and end up getting the paperwork handed in late to his boss.