I survived Irish Fest

Why is that such a detail?  I'll get to that.


Let's start with why it's been a little quiet around here.  Basically, we've been working 10s (with my day starting at 5 AM) for the last three weeks, playing catchup because our Missouri plant has more work than they can handle, so they started farming it out to the other plants.  So I've been on 4 10s, Friday nines, and 6 hours on Saturday for a few weeks.  (But not next week- Saturday this ol' boy turns 53!)  On top of this, we've had tons of corporate in, trying to get moving on getting us the new cutter that we thought we wouldn't need till NEXT year; One guy in particular, a nice enough guy, observing me to watch my "best practices" and trying to determine why we can't push out what we need even when the cutter runs from 5AM till 4:30 PM.    Of course the answer to that is simple:  fabric issues, sewing mistakes, an engineer who's basically been operating as the Lone Ranger since last summer (and it shows in the work), "Hey, we need this now" emergencies from (our biggest customer), and a lot of people above my pay grade who, as I told Nice Guy, "are half-assing their work."  He told me he appreciated my honesty.

"A lot of people don't like the way I phrase my honesty,"  I told him.

"I've heard worse, "  he said.

"I've SAID worse," I answered.

Because the last three weeks have netted 4 of our top 5 recut days since they made me start keeping track back in February, they decided to see how much that slows me down.  So now I have a huge honking tote board which I have to put up my hourly cuts, keep a running total, and write the numbers in red if they don't hit goal.   Needless to say, I pitched one.  "We don't have a 'how incompetent or fabric vendors are' board, or a 'how many bad BOMs the engineers send me' board, or a 'how many stupid hot orders can you bury me with' board, but by God, you can put up a 'see if Chris is lazy' board!"   Of course the cooler heads explained how it's another data collecting tool, not meant to point out failure, just to help point out what we need to do to improve, because the company president won't buy a stick of gum without data.  To which I quoted Jim Croce:  "That's not the way it feels."

So needles to say, I have been a bit tired, a bit stressed, and time blogging has had to make other things take a back seat, to wit:

"God, I'm bored.  Is he EVER getting off the computer?"

But we have managed some relaxing times- don't let Scrappy fool ya, he's been on a walk or two and to the bark park this week.  Tonight, Laurie and I had the annual birthday dinner, and this afternoon, my son KC and his crazy friend Jessica-

I warned her I still had this picture...

-picked me up at work and we went to Irish Fest- which, when we got there was a pizza truck, a hot dog stand, a Vietnamese food truck called "Vietnummies" , a beer stand with IDs being checked by two cops, a bounce house and a bagpipe band that apparently knew three whole songs.  So we walked to a downtown bar, on the way to which we found this fragment of what Fort Wayne calls "art":

KC immediately climbed inside and asked, "WTH is it?"

To which I replied, "It represents the woman's struggle against the penis."


"I'm getting out," KC said.