The weekend my mind forgot

So I can't say this weekend was a real great one, but if I dish enough of the week going into it into my story it might be good for a chuckle.  The last couple weeks at work are getting a bit less stressful, as some of the  kinks involved in moving the machines I work on to the other side of the plant have been resolved.  However, a new one popped up last week.  You see, my machine is basically a table with a conveyor belt that moves the fabric along as it cuts.  On each corner of the "table" is a gouard with a yellow "pause" button and a red "stop damn you" button (usually known as an e-stop).  Well, late last week, the one I hit the most- on my immediate left if I'm at the control panel and my right when I'm in "usual working position" decided to freeze.  I was stuck on pause for an hour as our maintenance guy tried to get it working again.  The thing is, these massive machines costing thousands of dollars connect this vital piece of equipment to tiny wires with connectors that couldn't keep two mating nematodes together.  I ask you, WHY NOT put a more robust connector on the thing?  Anyway after several rounds of pull the wire out, look at it, re-insert it, tape it up, fail to work, repeat, it finally worked- until he tried to put the guards back on (we were checking both sides to get it to work) and it stopped again.  We finally got it going as the Plant manager walked up, deriving amusement from me and the maintenance guy as we managed to each kick one of the e-stops (which were on the guards, which were off and at ground level) within about six seconds of each other.


Next day, it happened again.  I paged for help and, having nothing to lose, smacked the guard a couple of times.

Of course, that got it going.  I exclaimed, "This machine didn't come from Missouri, it came from Hooterville!"

And thus, the machine's new name is the Hooterville Express.

Moments later, even after telling myself not to, I hit the button again and froze it.  Back comes the Maintenance guy and a half-hour later, he had it working, whereupon I IMMEDIATELY (before he could even move) hit the damn button again.  There is now a sheet of yellow paper with a skull and crossbones and "KEEP AWAY"  written in red sharpie covering the button until new connectors come in.

Which brings us to Friday night, when I couldn't sleep.  It started when we went to our room at 11 PM and the neighbor guy decided he HAD to talk LOUDLY on the phone to a buddy.  After about 20 minutes of his having gotten 10 hours of sleep that day, his rotten parole officer, his looking himself up on Google to see what a douchebag he was ("I can't believe all the charges on me"), and blaming his douchebaggery on the city and the state rather than the idiot who accrued the charges, and how he got yelled at at work for doing something the same way he'd been doing it for the last 2 years because someone else told him to do it that way (see a thread here?), I finally said out the window, "I don't think I need to be listening in to this conversation..."

Him:  "You have a window, close it."
Me:  "I would like some air.  You got your ten hours sleep, let me get mine."

While that didn't shut him up immediately, it did convince him to talk quieter- so that people in neighboring parking lots couldn't hear him- and after a couple more minutes, he went inside.

Could I sleep now?  No.  I got close a couple times, but actual RESTFUL sleep never did show up.  Saturday was a work nooner, so I infused myself with more Pepsi than my health situation should normally allow, danced joyfully through my heavily caffeinated six hours, and went home to take a brief nap before I had to go get Laurie from Wal-Mart.  The nap was likewise useless, and much of the rest of the day was a blurry mish-mash of thought processes that would take off hot like a fighter jet and drizzle into half completed fragments of, "I should do this or that" that never got done.

Of course, then KC invites us over for a cookout that night.  Sorry, busy holding the sofa in place, dude.  I rallied enough by 7:30 to watch Thor: The Dark World for the first time, with peaks at the NASCAR race during commercials (which I managed to hit or just miss EVERY caution flag).

Sunday was a bit better.  I could walk again...

It's getting greener and prettier around here.  I think I have a posing chipmunk around here somewhere...

Yeah, there he is.  And it was a peaceful walk- the previous weekend, when it rained all the Friday before and sprinkled on and off all saturday morning, they just HAD to make a bunch of little kids play soccer, and now most of the fields are chewed up muddy messes...

...which I find endlessly amusing.


In closing, we are trying to teach the lead guy on my new side of the building to run our department- since the gal on the other side is, well, on the other side.  Today he got a lesson about the pace at which things move.  He gave us a whiteboard with which to keep our hourly score with "Cutting schedule" above it, divided into "today" and "tomorrow".  He listed four sets of orders for me to cut under "today".  I placed my finger just above the bottom of the first line and said, "You realize I won't get any farther today than, say, here?"

In his defence, he IS trying.