Yes, Another Hilarious Tale Of Manglement
It seems to Your Humble Scribe, whom has read hundreds of these stories on Youtube and Quora, that there are two kinds of Manglement: in the first, the Bottomhole Manager(s) (hereafter BHM) is promoted upwards until they reach a position completely beyond their abilities and talents - poison from the inside, if you will. In the second, a company or business can be so successful that it gets bought out, and the new owners, operating with utterly unfounded self-confidence and ignorance of what the business does and how it functions, make immediate and disastrous changes. Art!
Because managers in an office is boring.
This case is one of the former. Original Poster was careful not to say exactly what his company produced, merely that it ran production lines that performed in thousands of pounds (mass not currency) per hour. OP's line lead informed both him and management that he was leaving, at which point OP rubbed his hands gleefully, assuming he'd get a crack at the vacant position.
He did, but - hubris, matey, hubris.
BHM #1 and BHM #2 offered him the post, to which he countered with a demand for a $1 per hour raise after three months probation. They hemmed and hawed but got back to him and said the Plant Manager (spelled 'BOTTOMHOLE") had agreed. Hmmmmmm did they put that in writing? No. OP is far too trusting. Art!
Possibly what he line lead about
Three months later OP is one of the most productive line leads in the factory, and he asks about his raise. Both BHM #1 and #2 put him off repeatedly. When he had a meeting with the PM, he was told his numbers weren't good enough and he had to up his game before any raise would be considered.
What did I say about getting it in writing? Conrad is cynical yet also correct.
ANYWAY this did not go down well with OP. He informed management that, if he wasn't getting paid as a line lead, he wasn't going to do the job and would revert to his old job title. Art!
Three days later he did just that, setting up his own portion of the production line and ignoring the rest. Predictably BHM #1 and #2 came to investigate why the line wasn't running, and left with facepalms. Then the PM turned up, purple-faced with rage, ranting about how OP was not a line lead. OP just agreed with him and listened to the ranting for another fifteen minutes, explaining if he wasn't being paid as a line lead, then he wasn't doing the job.
Rather than back down, or admit they were in the wrong, manglement promoted another line worker at random to be the line lead, with a princely raise of $0.25 per hour. Production over the next 3 months nosedived, dropping from 15,000 lb output daily (that's a whole flock of chickens!) to 7,000 lbs, a drop of 54%.
Ooops.
That's not the only metric that suffered. Art!
Liquid chicken?
One measurement of efficiency in a production plant is how long the lines run for without mishap, because if the system is down, you're not making money, which is the bottom line. Whilst OP was doing the line lead job, runtime was at 85%. Under Captain Rando, it plummeted to 50%. BHM #2 admitted to OP that they had lsuffered at least $500,000 in lost production thanks to him not being line lead. This is quite beside the cost of repairs to equipment, spare parts, down time for this maintenance, labour costs for repair engineers (who could afford to gouge the plant thanks to the need to get back up and running again immediately). OP couldn't put a value on this but I would guess at least another $100,000.
Two inevitable consequences resulted, the first being that OP quit.
Second result was that PM was fired. If your business goes from making a tidy profit to a $600,000 loss, the accountants and owners are going to want to know why. I'll bet the next job he got was the very bottom rung of management.
A third result stemmed from the second: OP came back, and this time they gave him the raise immediately.
Chicken nuggets!
Let us raise a glass to tinpot tyrants everywhere! Bad for business but great Info fodder for BOOJUM!
More Of Saw
Further to our previous item on Sawstop - and no, we get no commission from them - I came across another page about it that I'd bookmarked. It mentioned a case from 2006 when a plaintiff, Carlos Osorio, sued the maker of a Ryobi saw for not having Sawstop technology and won, to the tune of $1,500,000, when he was only after $250,000.
I dug a bit deeper and found that the jury felt Osorio was 35% responsible for the accident, whilst the saw-makers were 65% responsible. Art!
Osorio hadn't been trained on table saws and thus had no experience with them, which seems a touch manglement-y to Conrad. The court documents stated that the saw's blade guard and splitter had been removed, and he wasn't using a 'rip fence', whatever that is. Art!
A rip fence
This is a guide and protector that allows for precise positioning of the wood being cut, preventing the carpenter from wobbling out of alignment and providing a solid guide that obviates the need to hold the wood steady by hand. There, now we all know more than we did five minutes ago.
Let us end with a statistic that "Homefixated" quoted:between 1990 and 2007, there were 565,670 accidents involving table saws, that were serious enough to be treated in A & E ('Emergency rooms' for our South Canadian readers), 10% of which involved amputation. Erk.
"City In The Sky"
I assure you, gentle reader, that I didn't get any commission from Sir Richard, either.
Sir Richard had
promoted Virgin Galactic heavily, as the fledgling space-tourist industry
remained small and fragile – the big recession had bitten heavily into budgets
and thrown timing and launch dates off.
His planned fleet of five spaceplanes able to take tourists to the edge
of space was instead restricted to only two, with a third looking only possible
at best and more likely never to happen.
‘Your access to
and control of lifting vehicles able to put components in orbit is crucial,’
explained Mark. ‘If you say “go” they
go, and there’s no worrying about costs or budgets or deadlines or elections.’
‘I take it you
have plans in that briefcase – well, leave them with me, let me look them over,
talk to some of my experts and I’ll get back to you.’
Two days later
Mark got a call in the evening, from a number he didn’t recognise.
‘Hello?’ he began,
uncertainly.
‘Mark? This is Richard Branson here. Count me in!’
Mark Harris and Martin McCarthy weren’t alone in trying to recruit
willing backers for an orbital repository or other forms of
refuge-cum-repository. A lot of the
staff who worked on the Bonetti Report took it upon themselves to lobby for the
Human Salvation Project, but Harris and McCarthy were the first team to obtain
concrete results and the first non-terrestrial alternative. After that initial decision, Sir Richard
shrewdly made several recommended alterations in administration and the design
of the giant Bernal Sphere, then left the project very much alone.
Art! Bernal Sphere, on the double!
O Goody
I think I understand Donna's comment on Facebook now. Apparently Manchester In The City (made up of The Jam fans?) won the Ship Of Champion yesteryon, although Conrad is a little puzzled that the original Wonder Horse needed a ship. To cross the Atlantic? Or th
ANYWAY the BBC allowed Comments on the results of this ballfoot game, which will probably contain as much invective as congratulations.
Here you see someone determined to hate hate hate, and they predictably got a spanking in the replies.
O my, that last one had teeth in it!
O The Irony
'Twould appear that The Only Fat Man In North Korea is getting even fatter, thanks to a diet of drink, more drink, still more drink and Western snack foods. He's now ballooned to 310 pounds (mass not currency) and, according to expert North Korea watchers, has all the ills and ailments of a 70-year old. Art!
He's only 39. At this rate he won't see 40. This in a country perpetually on the brink of famine. Tacky tinpot tyrant.
O and they STILL haven't developed a functional fusion warhead.
Finally -
Still too hot to walk Edna so I shall take my constitutional stroll into Lesser Sodom shortly.
