Ok, so the night before last was a horrid night at work. I made two glaring errors, both of which caused a lot of rework and wasted time. First one was the first order of the day. We always start off checking the first few off the line, and I guess I was so ready to get going since the night before had been fairly mediocre that I just assumed that the day people had totally set up the order and just checked to make sure everything looked ok...well, it wasn't. We ran a couple of hundred piece before noticing, and each piece had to be reworked which took about 30-45 minutes. Since it was a small order, we had to reuse the title pages, which had two creases in the middle because that is what happens when you put them in a DVD case. The pages took an extreme amount of work to get to run. We are talking tech time, lots of frustration, and a good deal of cursing. Ok, so on to error nmber 2. Later on in the night, we had three identical orders back to back..well, almost identical. The order in the middle did not get a street date on the box, while the other two did. A few thousand pieces in, the other guy comes over to me and points it out. We had to get the receiving crew to go digging around for the first two skids we had sent out, then we got to rebox it all...there goes another half hour of rework. All-in-all I guess it was not that big of a deal. No pieces left the building and everything was taken care of, but it did add to the amount of downtime for the night...which sucked.
Now that is bad enough, but we have had a new addition to the crew this week. She has worked there for quite awhile apparently, like, almost a year. Sadly, you would never know it. Even with my two big mistakes I still caused less downtime than she did last night. The downtime would probably have been even longer had I not jumped in a fixed a few of the things she was doing very, very wrong. Yes, me, the rookie on the shift, was showing the year verteran how to do her job. I kept wondering how the hell she was still working there, and to be honest, I still do, but I am starting to feel better about the problems I was having. I mean, I bust my ass everynight and do generally good work (not really that difficult to do) and I just need to last until the end of the year, she is one step away from being incompetent and she has lasted a year. So, I am feeling fairly good about where I am at right now ever after messing up twice.
