Ever have one of those days???

You ever have one of those weeks? I’m having another one of those this week, again. It’s kind of like Groundhog Day where Bill Murray keeps repeating the same day over and over again, until he gets it right (and by getting it right, that means gettin’ with the git down with Andie McDowell). It’s been like that the last few weeks for me for the most part. I keep coming into work, and it keeps being the same for the most part. I come in, work until well past the time I should be here, get nothing done, get further behind in other things I need to be doing, and then repeat the process and rinse. It keeps repeating, and repeating, and repeating again. Ah, the frustration.

Let me tell you about launching and starting a new program here at my place of employment. It’s a joke really, and probably the worst organized disaster that I’ve seen in places that I’ve worked. I’ve seen better organized clown colleges. We were supposed to run parts for the customer last week on Thursday. All of the machinery we needed to run said parts was not in our location, until Wednesday. Now, if you’ve never worked with moving machinery around and proving it off, you wouldn’t know that when you do this you prove off the machines first at the location that they are being built at. We didn’t do this because the machinery required was late in getting built, and we didn’t have parts to run through the machines to prove them off. Second, after you move said machines from where they were built to where they are going to reside (our assembly plant in Roxboro), you have to set them up, and prove them off again. I don’t care how good the machine ran at the place it was built at, you box it up, and move it, and then bolt it back down again, it’s not going to run properly. Now for most new programs, this is going to take you anywhere from 2 weeks to a month to get the machines up and running properly and completely. We had, ½ day. So of course, this didn’t work out so well. The customer got here, and the machines weren’t working at all. We looked idiotic. Tie into this that we didn’t have enough parts to build what we were supposed to build, late design changes, people who didn’t know what they were doing (me being one of them), and ineptitude out the wazzoo, and you have the mess and the trouble we ran into last week. This was compounded this week when we tried to do the parts run again, and failed, again… Time and again, I’ve seen in this organization the innate inability to get anything organized. Could I do better? I don’t know, but I’d like to think I would have at least all of the paperwork done for the customer when they walked in the door, at the very least, but we didn’t even have that. Matter of fact, I’m still waiting to get information from one of my team members that I’ve been asking for now for oh, 2 months! I still don’t have it. And now people are looking to me to create it, or conjure it up, or pull it out of my ass and hand it on over to them, and I can’t, because I don’t have the cursory knowledge of this product that others have, and are supposed to be imparting to me. Unfortunately, the so-called “experts” that are supposed to be teaching me don’t know jack shit about what they are trying to teach me. OK, not all of them, just one person in particular, and no, it’s not the other guy I was writing about before, although he is still a gigantic pain in the ass. It’s amazing. I’m telling her what to do, when it should be the other way around. I can’t stand it. When we launch a new program, we have what we call Advanced Quality Engineers who are supposed to do everything up until start of production. This one, hasn’t done anything, and I mean, nothing… Therefore, it gets dumped into my lap if we don’t want to look like idiots, although, we’re looking like it now.

Anyway, I digress…

Hopefully, I can bail on out of here in the very near future, and pick something else up, with a company that can do something right, because I’m starting to feel like, no, make that I know that these guys can’t seem to do anything right. They’re too busy talking about football games, cows, and other such nonsense. They’re also all too busy being “buddies” when they need to be co-workers. God forbid you upset someone you work with or have them do something that they’re supposed to be doing. The workplace here, it has become too touchy feely. Yeah, you should have professionalism, and tact when dealing with others, but when did it become déclassé to tell someone they weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing without getting hauled into HR because you hurt someone’s feelings? Damn… Imagine if there were an HR department in your house growing up. You’d be hauling your parents in there every other day. Now, in the workplace, you can’t tell someone straight up whether or not you think that they’re doing what they should be doing. You might step on someone’s toes a little too much, and hence, to HR with you. Damn it. I WANT someone to tell me when they think I’m not doing what I should be doing, so I can correct said behavior before it gets to be a problem. Or if it is a problem, I fully expect my manager to come and talk to me about it. That’s what happens. That’s what is done, but oh no, not here. I think that it’s most definitely a problem of the fact that most of the people that I work with here, all grew up knowing one another. There are a lot of people in-house here that have been friends for a long time, and have known each other since they were 2. It’s kind of like inbreeding, and meeting your future wife at the family reunion if you know what I mean. Anyway, the situation is messed up to the extreme ends. It’s not going to resolve itself anytime soon. I think that I most definitely need to get the hell out of here.

I need to get back to riding, and exercising in general. I’m starting to look like a large fridge right now, but I do have a lot of time to get ready for next race season. After reading Graham’s entry about possibly racing, I’m thinking along the same lines as he is. Do some racing, not my usual 50 or 60 races per year, although it would have been hard to do that this year since there seems to be a downturn in the number of races happening. But above all, have a good time doing it. That’s why I’m doing it. I’ll give myself one more season as a cat. 2 though, just to kind of prove to myself that I can ride at that level. I know that I can actually, I’ve done it before, and done it fairly well on certain occasions, so I know that I can. I just want to prove that to myself. And if next season goes badly, well, I’ll just get the downgrade, head back to cat. 3 land, and maybe take home a few dollars every weekend instead of shelling out. We’ll see. Hopefully, I can make the comeback for next season. I need to start working on things now though. I’ll just start riding a little at a time, here and there, maybe do some running, throw some weights around. It’ll be all good come March, I’m convinced of that.