the nemo blog

hell of a day

So yesterday my assistant manager, Patrick, asked me if I could work an 8 hour shift for today rather than my usual 5 1/2 hour shift, because we had a lot of orders to complete. I get asked to work extra hours on a reasonably regular basis, since they know that I have a very open schedule and am willing to work as many hours as possible. Anyway I came into work today at 9:30 and began working, to be informed a few minutes later by Patrick that Jeff, the other shop worker, had quit his job on the spot with no warning. As far as I know he didn't give a reason, but remarks he made to me yesterday suggest that he was getting sick of the degree of accuracy our customers require. Over the last few weeks we've had some quality control issues in which the cutters (myself included) make careless mistakes that need to be redone, taking up time better spent working on new orders. This in turn causes our total backlog of orders to back up even more, and causes problems for our sales people when orders are a week out and they have to turn customers away for the time being. Anyway, this left us in a difficult situation, given that even with 2 men working, Patrick had deemed the workload too heavy for two 5 1/2 hour shifts; one 8 hour shift would not be sufficient.

Patrick and I worked together later in the day, cutting some 3/4"x4'x8' sheets of HDPE (high density polyethylene, sheet probably weighs 75 pounds or thereabouts), when he suffered an elusive and dreaded Workplace Accident™. He accidentally dropped the sheet onto his finger, which was coincidentally placed above a reasonably sharp metal corner, making a deep cut straight through his fingernail. Alfonso drove him to the hospital and I cleaned up the blood. He's going to be okay, but he won't be able to operate power tools with that hand for a while, which puts more of the work on me. This all comes on top of the fact that our manager, Cheryl, left for her maternity leave this week and won't be back until after I leave this job and move to Davis in September.

So I'm going to be working 8:00-4:30 8 hour shifts until further notice, which is good for me, I guess. If anyone wants to hear good news, our sales numbers for the last two weeks have been up 28.7% and 24.9% from their respective weeks last year, which represent the biggest increases I have seen in my time here. Also we got a call today from a hospital in Napa that wants to buy, from us, $100,000 worth of polycarbonate 4'x8' sheets, which I think is between 7 and 8 thousand sheets. The best part is we don't have to do a thing except collect our profit, because the sheets will be shipped straight from the warehouse. Go us, I guess.

Anyway, that was my day. In case anybody felt like reading a pseudo-rant. If not, too bad, you already read it.