Stupid Management Tricks

[Trekker4747]

So I come into work Monday morning to find my 4 AM guy there standing next to an empty self-serve meat case. He was supposed to come in and clean a small section -hence his early shift- but the entire thing is empty.

I ask what is up. The refrigeration went down on it sometime late the night before. Sigh.

So the bulk of the rest of the day is spent counting everything we lost in it, waiting for it to get fixed, cleaning it (as it was empty, might as well clean the whole thing) and then restocking it. Long. Assed. Day.

Turns out at somepoint between 9PM (when my closers left and it was fine) and 4AM when my opener came in it went down. The Evening manager says he didn't walk the cases and check them before he left at 10PM -as he's suppoded to- and no one on night stock, somehow, noticed it being down all night long despite likely walking by it often between areas of the store.

The result is multifold.

Inventory cost of the product lost: About $5000
Overtime for the guy who had to stay late to help restock it: About $100
Cost to get a special truck to drop off replacement product the next day? $8000.
Paying the maintenance guy to fix it: Who knows?
Cost to repair the system: Who knows?
Cost to recharge the system with freon? Who knows?

All told I'd say it could've cost them close to $20,000 due to a hole in a refrigeration line.

The stupid parts?

The refrigeration systems in the store are alarmed. Well, they're supposed to be. The meat case -the most expensive case in the store in terms of product- isn't on the alarm.

The store doesn't have insurance on this.

God, it was fucking-long day Monday.

 

[Plecostomus]

Injection molding company I worked at years ago switched from a manual batch-weigh system to a complex automated mixing and loading system.

The original system works like this: mix a batch of resin from raw materials, recorded the weights and loaded it into the machine, then record any additions to the load to make up for scrap or record any excess returned to storage due to "process improvements."

Roughly a quarter of our most profitable business came from an automotive customer. We had six machines dedicated to just making widgets for transmissions for this one customer.

This customer loved documentation. The more paperwork you generated proving "improvements" and "quality" the more they loved you.

The new system could generate reports at the press of a button, and with macros and a bit of program-fu you could go into insane levels of detail about every aspect of the raw material handling aspect of the operation.

...yet they didn't hook those six machines into the system where it would have done the most good. The automation only extended to the other 3/4 of the plant where we made commodity goods like plastic spools, jewel cases, and stuff like that.

The automation would prompt you to load material into a mixer, it would even go so far as to tell you where the bags were on which rack via barcodes. It was great for preventing material mixups.

Sadly we lost the automotive customer that was making most of our money due to... a material mixup. Zytel and Polynil look the same but have totally different properties in regards to chemical resistance at operating conditions in a transmission.

When managment wanted to know why those six machines were never hooked into the system SOMEONE spoke up and SOMEONE showed them documentation that SOMEONE had collected showing managment's reluctance to stop the presses for the required day and a half to install the automation. That SOMEONE got "laid off" within two weeks of the meeting and that SOMEONE gave up on working in plastics after that and went back to school to become a machinist.

 

[Trekker4747]

Is this the same "SOMEONE" who tried to prevent a little industrial espionage?

 

[Plecostomus]

Is this the same "SOMEONE" who tried to prevent a little industrial espionage?

Indeed it is. SOMEONE has managed to put himself in some rather craptastic situations over the years through a combination of hard-work, desire to please, a keen eye for process improvement, a sincere desire to see things change for the better and a near total inability to realize that one drop of water cannot change the direction of the tides.

This SOMEONE is kind of fed up with managers making stupid choices then taking it out on the peons such as himself. SOMEONE has changed careers twice now only to find the same situation exists no matter where you work. Same SOMEONE is currently unemployed and looking for work at this very moment.

You'd think he'd learn but yet it's almost assured that he'll end up in the same situation again.

 

[propita]

I know people say that one must carefully select which windmills one should tilt at--but ideally, ALL windmills should be tilted at.

Most "Pessimists" are actually "Disappointed Idealists." They recognize that things "ought" to be right.

 

[John Picard]

My first programming job was with a small insurance company that was incorporating a new system from the ground up. This product was going to be tailored for Variable-Life policies and I was the first of two programmers hired to install the system, along with an experienced consultant, and get it running. The company also incorporated a Model Office, which would test any and all enhancements of the system as well as writing modification specifications. After acceptance testing, the modifications were moved to production.

After a couple of years, we hired some additional senior programmers. One had come from a job working for the State, and he had a bit of a chip in his shoulder. He seemed to think it was his job to question everything I did and to criticize every program I modified. Never mind that all of the JCL (Job Control Language) and other processes were written by me. We had three environments: Test, QA, and Production. QA was treated like production in that it had to cycle every night and produce reports. Sometimes, if there were problems, the on-call programmer could be in for a long night of logging in to wrestle with closing the system and then getting the jobstreams to run. Part of the problem was that the jobstreams were interspersed with different reports. After we'd assembled the core group of five programmers, one of the other programmers, who'd been with the company for many years and was new to this environment, commented in a meeting that it would be nice if the jobstreams were modified so that all of the critical business were handled first (file backups, merges, etc) and then the reports were generated later, since the reporting steps were an uncessary dely.

Remember the other guy I told you about who liked to give me a hard time? Well, I stated that I could easily rewrite the jobstream in Test and test it for a few days, then migrate the changes to QA for a week and we could decide from there where to go. Mr Trouble made a snide remark that we could "wait until later when we have time". I stated that, 1) it would be quick and easy, 2) it would make the on-call person's life easier, and 3) we're always so busy that how would we actually know when we'd get to it? "*NEVER MIND! WE'RE TOO BUSY.*" So I made the changes behind his back anyway (he wasn't the lead so I could have given a shit what he thought even though he thought he was in charge). After two weeks, I reviewed everything with the lead as well as the programmer who had mentioned how nice the change would be.

BLAMMO! We got the changes moved to production. Mr Trouble got really pissed with me and I basically told him I didn't care what he thought. I aimed to make life easier for everyone, because, "If you don't take the time to do it right the first time, when will there be time to do it right?"

I quit that job about two months later. Interestingly enough, when I chatted with the programmer who mentioned those JCL changes, he stated that it had made their lives so much nicer for on-call situations.