Halfshirt's Revenge

Assembly fell behind schedule again. It's no surprise. With all the outsourcing and subcontract vendors involved we have nearly zero direct control over manufacturing our instruments anymore. Usually what happens is one or more outside companies we depend on either can't get their act together to ship us parts on time or they send us damaged goods. Something was put together with the wrong mechanical tolerances, critical hardware is missing, or maybe the stuff just shows up completely broken. While we're waiting for good replacements to arrive our entire area is effectively shut down. Slow periods might last a few days to a couple of weeks. As soon as fresh parts and supplies get here we have to work like insane animals to catch up to schedule. Overtime goes through the roof. Things are a mess here doing business this way.

Volunteering to help out the assembly folks I spent the majority of my time during the past week working in their area dropping microcircuit decks and PC boards into instrument chassis. The work is relatively straightforward and easy for me. A whole unit can be loaded and cabled up in a little over an hour or so. One of the other guys who frequently doubles as an assembler when things are slammed in assembly is EH. He's probably the most experienced instrument builder we have left but his actual full time forty hour a week job is in another aspect of our department. On Friday afternoon both of us were knocking out chassis after chassis bullshitting about random subjects when we started talking about Halfshirt. EH mentioned something that really got my attention.

"I can probably get away with telling you this now since it was months ago, but you lost your job in the last round of layoffs."
"Huh? You're shittin' me." I said.
EH explained, "Halfshirt was bitter about losing his job. Because Halfshirt was angry he made up his mind to try and wreck the department by getting rid of everyone in production. He eliminated everybody except for his personal butt snorkel, James. He was trying to protect that kiss ass by sparing him from job cuts. When other supervisors realized what Halfshirt was doing they confronted him. Instead of keeping James they threw him out and saved you. The Bossman told Halfshirt he had no say in the matter so there was nothing he could do about it."

Wow. I had no idea at all that had taken place. Nobody said anything about it to me so I was completely unaware until now. EH and I both had a good laugh over James getting the boot. That guy really was a fuckup. So is Halfshirt for that matter. I can only hope Halfshirt was extra pissed off that I survived and kept my job here despite his efforts to ditch me. What I don't understand though is why a few other key employees weren't spared. If other managers were able to override Halfshirt's decisions why wasn't B-Rad shielded from the axe? He should have been. They need him here badly. And why in the world would they allow a supervisor who himself had been thrown out to make critical staffing decisions? That didn't make much sense to me.