Happy Birthday to me...

Yep, I am now officially the big 5-0.  I believe that's one of the signs pointed to in Daniel 9, but I could be wrong.

Yesterday, while Laurie was passing a stone, I attempted to work, only to realize I was going through one of my patented fatigue spells and left at one rather than wait till I messed anything else up- including the trip home.  Thereafter I was conscious from 4:15 to 4:20, 5:45 to 7:15, 8:30 to 8:40, and 10:30 to midnight.  Stupidest I ever felt without benefit of hangover.  Would you believe I put the little line on the wrong side of a Q?  Put someone else's initials on paperwork since it was on the line above, rather than using my own?  Sent one of our power cords swinging as high as I ever saw one go?  But when I cut 5 of a certain cushion only to look at the worksheet and find out I was SUPPOSED to make them out of a fabric I knew darn well we were out of, I went to the boss' office and said, "Send me home!"

Today was better, at least mentally.  At work, we had a handful of guys from the Ft. Wayne plant come in to help with trucks.  Two things I'd like to point out about this.  When we were busier than crap and we had to pull people from every department to get trucks shipped, no help was ever offered.  Now that we are a month away from unemployment and much of the plant is deep in the don't-give-a-shits, NOW they send help.  Thanks loads.

Second is the way things are being done. We cut and sew a buttload of shells for KMart retail orders.  Plant gets closure notice, shells are sent to Ft Wayne and Amarillo to finish and ship.  Suddenly the finished products all get sent back to US, and WE end up having to ship them.  Why?  I asked my boss that, and she said that KMart refused to let us change shipment origin.  Why, I ask, when Ft. Wayne to Kendallville is not a change that is going to rack up huge shipping charges?  Don't know, she said.  At that point a rumour I heard about us possibly "kicking KMart to the curb" makes a lot more sense.

Oh, and this post wouldn't be complete without a shoutout to the lovely people from Amarillo and the excellent job they did shipping us their finished product.  Among their accomplishments:

- They owed us a bag of 405s (read: small, thin bag) from another truck they fubar'd; and they sent it, along with a very similar looking product called 134s.  Problem was, they stuck the 405 in with the 134s, counted it AS a 134, but labelled it correctly (But as it was among its 134 friends, I put a 134 label on it, someone else caught it, and that's when we found out they never put a 405 on the truck's paperwork.

- Shorted us a style of 201s (a chair cushion) and sent 6 extra 560s (another chair cushion), presumably because they forgot to count them until they had 3/4s of a row in front of them on the truck and assumed that the 6 560's were actually 201s.  Of course, we can't be too sure because ODP's idea of inventorying what comes in is, "run enough stickers to cover what they SAY came in, and if we have extra or missing stickers, we know something's wrong."  (Problem with that?  Dark trailer + long strips of 4 x 4 labels + "we need this done by x time" + 25 of this in row one, another 10 bags in row three, etc. = one big cluster.)

- 65% of bags have twice as much tape on them as necessary, much of it dangling and attaching itself to other cushions, while another 10% dont have enough to prevent cushions from getting out- or dirt from getting in.

- The first 25, more or less, out of a set of about sixty-five bags of another style had signs on them warning, "Do not pull!  Product does not have POP (point-of-purchase) tags."  Which means we will have to open the dumb things up, tack on the tags, and reseal them (Yay! More tape!) before they can ship- and many of these items are going directly from one truck straight onto the KMart order.  There's smart, and then there's KMart smart.

But the day has to end, by popular demand, and Laurie treated me to a very nice steak dinner.  "The steak is perfect," I told the waitress afterwards, "when the cow goes, "MOOO! It's Hot in here!" and you serve it."