A customer has contacted my company for a status update on an order that was placed a month ago.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it looks like the materials to make your part were delayed, so the part is on backorder. The logistics group has told me that it’s going to be another six weeks minimum for us to get it shipped out from the factory, provided there are no additional delays. I am so sorry.”

Customer: “I understand. So, the earliest it might arrive is in six weeks. What’s the absolute latest it could arrive?”

Me: “Uh… Never?”

Many years ago, I was doing an internship at a foundry — the same one from this story. Basically, my college required me to work as a line worker in some kind of industrial plant, and I wound up at a foundry for six to eight months. It was an education; I learned a lot of things about the real world that I really hadn’t known before, which was the point.

At this point, I was “tending furnace”: feeding metal into the furnace that melted it down for the molders to ladle out and pour into the molds.

On this particular day, I started work at about 14:30 and went straight into working steadily. I noticed that the night plant manager was around much more than was normal, but I didn’t really think about it.

Then, a couple of hours into the shift, I had everything set up for the rest of the shift. If I did any more preparation, I would have too much stuff laid out to finish before the end of the shift. So, I went to working two minutes out of five, as was my normal practice.

If I tried to do something else, I would be away from the furnaces too long, which would allow the temperature of the pool — the reservoir of molten metal — to cool excessively, which would cause cold shuts and porosities, which would result in unusable castings. It doesn’t matter how much product you make if it isn’t usable — a concept that too many managers never grasp.

So, I was set up for the evening and waiting for the next moment I needed to do something. Later in the shift, there would be other things to do, but at this time, everything was ready.

And here came [Night Plant Manager], who promptly jumped on me about not being VISIBLY busy. I was puzzled because this was not at all his usual style.

One of the early things he came up with was ordering me to charge the heap of fines (sawdust, floor sweepings, small trimmings, etc.) and flux into furnace #4.

Me: “Well, okay, but…”

I opened the door on furnace #4, and he gasped.

Night Plant Manager: “That’s going to overflow!”

Me: “No. It will handle that okay, but if I put much more in, it will overflow — and I don’t know exactly how much more.”

For the last week or so, I’d been using furnace #4 to “cook down” fines mixed with flux, so I knew quite well how to extract all of the possible metal from the fines.  

Night Plant Manager: “Well, clean up all these barrels of… Where’d all the barrels go?”

He started looking around for the barrels of fines and small castings that had been shoved in every corner.

Me: “I emptied them and sent them to the yard. That’s part of the tail end of the fines in that pile.” *Points to the pile of fines mixed with flux behind furnace #4* “I can run that through tonight and have it all melted by the end of shift.”

Night Plant Manager: “Well… then… flux the furnaces!”

Me: “Okay…” *turns away and then turns back* “…but I thought couldn’t do that until after dark.”

Night Plant Manager: “Um, well, yeah…”

For everything else he came up with, I’d say, “Okay, but I thought…” and he’d have to agree with why I wasn’t doing it at that time.

He spent approaching two hours trying to find something I could do without adversely affecting my primary job of providing the molders with metal at precisely the right temperature… and he couldn’t. (I kept interrupting to put metal in the furnaces, walking down the row tossing this amount of metal into this furnace and other amounts into other furnaces; I knew what each furnace needed to keep it balanced and running properly.)

I also explained part of the bargains I’d made with the day shift to divide the work up. One of them was that the day shift would run all the coarse scrap they could, and I would run the fines and small castings and make weight off ingot.

At my dinnertime break, I commented to a coworker how irritable [Night Plant Manager] had been.

Coworker: “Oh, he’s sober today. Don’t worry about it; it won’t happen again for several years.”

[Night Plant Manager] was known to be a functional alcoholic. When he was drinking he was a good manager. (Among other things, one night, he sent me home — on the clock — because I’d had three close calls that night due to someone else screwing up and he wanted me out of his plant BEFORE someone got hurt.)

When I gave notice, I got a week to instruct my replacement on how to do the job the way I was doing it; they wanted that to continue. Normal practice was to wait until the previous furnace tender had left and then have the foreman — who wasn’t all that good at furnace — spend a few minutes instructing the newbie. (Granted, many times they got no notice at all; somebody just didn’t show up for work.)

I found out later that the man who bought our slag for reprocessing into aluminum had told the owner that they had someone new running furnaces in permanent mold.

Buyer: “Two of your furnace tenders give me lots of metal, but this new guy doesn’t give me a d*** thing — and I think he’s reprocessing part of the other shifts’ slag if they leave too much metal!”

He was right. I WAS re-cooking slag that had too much metal — sometimes two-thirds of the slag weight was metallic aluminum.

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I sacked someone for blowing his nose. To this day I still feel a bit bad about this, though to some extent it was accidental.

I was the manager of the Assembly division of a small business that produced something very seasonal. I don’t want to say what because it was very niche, so let’s just say it was deckchairs.

For most of the year, most of the staff would make the parts for the “deckchairs”. Come the busy season, almost all the staff would be reassigned to my division to assemble deckchairs at high speed. I would supervise and do tons of paperwork.

One person assigned to me was assisting with the paperwork, so he sat at my bank of desks. Once or twice an hour, he would whip his hankie out and blow his nose. This was not normal nose-blowing but very loud and very prolonged blasts. I was quite startled the first time but didn’t say anything. After a few more times, I lightheartedly said to him, smiling as I did, “Must be some dust in the air.” He just looked at me blankly as if he had no idea why I’d said that.

After another day of this, I was starting to get very annoyed. You see, it would completely put me off my stride, and I would be unable to function for a few minutes. I would forget where I was in my paperwork, and I’d take a few minutes to recover. It used to totally drive me up the wall, and I’d be quite stressed at the end of the day. I recognise now that I have misophonia (hypersensitivity to certain sounds), but in those days (the 1970s and 1980s), one was not meant to admit to such things.

I tried various things: privately asking him if he had a medical condition, asking him if he could go to the toilets if he needed to blow his nose, etc., but he seemed to be baffled about my enquiries, apparently unaware it could be a problem.

However, I had noticed that a female staff member sometimes made a face when the noise machine started up, so I asked her if the blasts were getting on her nerves, and she said yes. I went to management and told them I no longer wanted the nose-blaster in Assembly because he was disrupting our work. He was reassigned back to Engineering, but a few weeks later, I discovered he’d been let go. I was told they couldn’t find work for him to do in Engineering.

I then realised that I had the de facto power to sack someone by simply having someone reassigned back to Engineering. However, after this, I only once more sacked someone in this way, though rather more justified, but that’s another story.

I’m a volunteer firefighter and first responder. When I receive an alert, I HAVE to respond if at all possible, no matter where I am or what I am doing. My state has laws that generally protect emergency services volunteers from facing punishment from their employers if they miss work due to an emergency, as long as proper procedures are followed.

I have a regular job as a custodian at a factory. The factory gets new managers after being bought out by a larger company, and while things seem to go relatively smoothly at first, it becomes more and more apparent that the new managers are mostly concerned with the factory’s profit margin at the expense of employee well-being.

One day, I receive an alert while at work. I clean up my equipment as quickly as possible, tell a coworker who knows that I’m a firefighter, clock out, and leave for the emergency.

I’m gone from work for about two hours, and I return after the emergency is taken care of to resume my shift. When I get to the office to clock in, my new manager is waiting for me.

Manager: “Where were you?”

Me: “I had to respond to an emergency. I’m a volunteer firefighter and first responder with [Department], and we had a call. Everything is clear now, so I’m back to finish out my shift.”

Manager: “You can’t be taking off without permission. I’m going to have to issue a written warning.”

Me: “You realize that’s against [State] law, right?”

Manager: “Don’t play games with me. You left work without permission. That’s not allowed, and it warrants a written warning.”

Me: “I’m not going to sign it, but I will be going to Human Resources about this.”

Manager: *Scoffing* “You do that. See what they say. Meanwhile, I’m filing that you refused to sign a written warning for leaving work without permission.”

I did go to Human Resources, who very quickly recognized the potential blowback from my manager’s threats. The HR representative assured me that everything would be taken care of, so I went back to work. While I was gathering my equipment, I heard my manager being called to HR over the factory’s loudspeaker system. HR chewed him out REALLY thoroughly about it and threatened him with a few state labor violations if he carried through with any form of punishment against me.

The new manager and I both still work at the factory, but he no longer speaks to me. He also doesn’t try to interfere if I get called out due to an emergency alert, so it seems like he at least learned that lesson.

We do metal fabrication, public art pieces, and such. Every now and then, we get a new client who thinks they’re hot s*** but has no idea what goes into these projects.

At the end of last year, we quoted a job, and the client revealed that his entire budget was considerably less than what it would take to order materials alone. He demanded that we take the massive financial hit because “it would be great exposure.”

I guess he didn’t know we have pieces on five continents — including one for the Tokyo Olympics.

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