I told myself NOT to post these...

...but as I haven't posted anything else this week, why not?

STORY #1:

I come home from work Monday, and the following hijinks occurred.

At approximately point A on the handy map above, a white SUV began slowing to a crawl in front of me, as if lost.  Not unusual around here... yet.  He continued creeping with me on his ass until I finally pulled over to park in front of the mighty Martin domicile ("HOME").  He proceeded to pull in our parking lot at the far entrance (B), did a circle, and proceeded out the other end and straight down into the next lot area (C).  Yep, lost, I said, and came in to get Scrappy for a walk ( a walk that would end up yanking my already sore back and making me miss work on Tuesday).  Our usual path involves us crossing the street and heading towards the plex.  As we went, I noticed the SUV was now PARKED at point D, with a dude wearing shades and smoking a cigarette inside.  I looked over as we passed on foot, and as soon as we were clear, he backed out of the spot.  Thing was, it took me a second to put two and two together, and by the time I did, I looked back to see that he had went back out onto the street, turned into yet another lot (E), turned around, and headed back the way he came.


I called Laurie and told her, "Just for fun, keep an eye out..." but that was evidently the end of his little adventure here.  When we returned from an appointment Tuesday, we had on the door a letter from the complex stating to keep alert as there had been car catalytic converters being stolen.  Wonder if this douche was an advance scout for the thieves... but it was a pretty new SUV.  My first thought was, perhaps I should have changed my walk course to be up the street a ways when the school buses came through, but parents here are pretty ace at taking care of that themselves.


STORY#2:  Here I need to lead off with some definitions:

Furniture covers:  My job is cutting fabric for boat industry covers, and one of the biggest wastes-of-time per amount of effort expended to get right are the covers for the helms, benches, seats, etc., on the big boats.  Why do I say a waste?  Stay tuned.

Marker:  This is the item to be cut as it shows on the screen that runs my machine.

Parent/child:  Furniture covers might have different set ups for the same or similar seats for each boat.  As our customer has a near-infinite capacity to move the slightest item the slightest distance, and call it a different model, each of their near infinite models that we make has a near-infinite capacity to be moved around.  Thus, my markers can come two different ways.  The whole set for one boat with maybe five different covers in it, is called a parent.  The individual covers are also on my system as "children", with different item #s so as to find them quickly in a pinch.


Now, the story.

When I came in after my unintended day off, there was a set of paperwork for a "prototype" (first time cutting) furniture cover.  My sub explained that he was about to cut it, but got stopped because the engineer in charge had to modify one of the "children".  A little later, I enquired about its status of the Production Mgr., who said he'd get with the engineer.  Moments later, the engineer sent me an instant message saying he had done the modifications to the child.  I sent back does that mean the parent is fixed (because I really didn't want to dig the child out, delete it, cut the rest, then cut the new child).  He said, "Not yet."  So I waited, and he soon got back and said all was well.   Just then, my floor boss came over and asked if he had fixed BOTH parts that they were "arguing about yesterday".  Said I didn't know, he only mentioned one thing, so she went charging up to see if everything was indeed all right.  Moments later, she came back and confirmed all was well.

An hour later, the prototyper who was sewing it said she was missing a panel.  We searched the scrap to see if I might have missed it coming off (it does happen), and came up empty.  So when I finished what I was in the middle of (which gave me a chance to search the scrap three times), I brought up the parent marker, and sure enough, he had forgotten to put it in.  I called the prototyper over to show her.  She had the child number ( a different one than the one he "fixed"), but when I tried to bring it up- he didn't have it on my system.  She charged up to the engineer's desk, and after a moment of "there it is" on the wrong screen, and another of "How'd that happen?" on the right one, he got the right thing on both the right markers, and both the right markers on my system.  I cut the panel, and you'd think THAT would be the end of the tale.

Not quite.  See, as she was looking for the missing part, she tore open the nice bundles into which I had originally had nicely separated them, and inserted the BIGGEST panel of the whole thing into the bundle which the missing panel was supposed to be in.  And somehow, after running us through all that rigamarole, decided to sew THAT bundle rather than the one which had the missing piece first.  So it was, ten minutes later, she asked me why she didn't have the big panel.  I told her, she HAD to have the big panel, we certainly wouldn't have missed it in the half-dozen times we went through the scrap.  She looked again (everywhere but where she put it) and pronounced it missing.  So switch my fabric racks, bring up the right color fabric.  Call up the proper child, isolate the proper piece.  Set things in motion, and the second the machine put blade to fabric and started cutting:

"CHRIS!!"


I told her, "This boat is destined to sink."
My floor boss says, "Good!  It's not my boat..."