Taking grenades in the trenches...

"I hope you flip your bike over and knock your two front teeth out! You selfish son of a bitch! You leave me in the trenches taking grenades, John!"

Vince Vaughn from Wedding Crashers

Damn it was another day of Hell in the trenches of work. I ended up the day yesterday having to drive to Raleigh, and later re-routing my trip back to Chapel Hill to drop off a FedEx package that absolutely had to be in Missouri this morning. I thought the best place to do that would be at the airport, luckily on the way to Raleigh the boss calls and tells me that there is an express drop off location on Franklin Street, Kinko’s. So instead of rolling over to Raleigh, I get to go there, which in the grand scheme of things is not a bad deal since I live about 1 minute away from Kinko’s on Franklin Street. By the time I get there, it’s almost 6:30, the sun is going down, and the pimple faced counter personat Kinko’s looks at me like I want a freakin’ miracle to drop off this package. He takes it, and I make sure he puts it into the express pile, meaning overnight to Missouri and my customer. He first drops it into the ground pile, I have to correct him on this, which he doesn’t look pleased about, but I have one irate customer here, and this shit has to be there in the morning or the boss is going to have my ass. Of course I committed the most grievous error ever in the fact that I corrected a Kinko’s employee, because if you’ve ever been into one, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, for some reason these folks seem to think that they are the end all be all of consumer service people. In other words, they look at you like you are a complete idiot if you can’t figure out how to run a damn copy machine. Luckily, they’ve never done this to me, because I am smart enough to figure out how to use a damn copy machine, but the rest of the general non-office dwelling population in the United States isn’t. So they tend to frown upon actually having to help someone make a copy or 2. This was the case with the package of last night, except when I corrected him, he at first looked at me like I had 2 heads, and then looked at the signage above the bins, and realized his mistake, and shuffled my envelope over to the other bin where it was supposed to be in the first place. Haha motherfucker! Told you so. Tom 1, Kinko’s employee goose-egg. Needless to say, the stuff got out of here, and was where it was supposed to be this morning at like 7AM, and the customer was relieved, but that’s just the start of the doom of gloom of this Friday.

Fast forward to Friday morning, 8:30. First of all, I’m supposed to be at work no later than 8:00AM, I’m late this morning. Add to that fact that one of my customers was in visiting our facility this morning arriving at 8:00AM, and my boss is freaking out. Mostly because she doesn’t know half of what I know about this program, and she can’t talk enough to keep our customer occupied. I walk in, and I’m getting the glare of death from the boss, which I deserve, because let’s face it, I’m a half hour late, when I should have been there at 7:30AM at the latest. OK, my bad. I was sleeping in, overslept, hit the alarm too many times, and aside from that, had a beautiful woman curled up next to me in bed. What would you have done? Exactly, same damn thing. Don’t even think about saying you wouldn’t have done that, because then I’d know you were lying. I get the short lecture about being on time, and then I go in and save the meeting, because this particular customer representative likes me a lot for some reason, mostly because she asks for something, and I produce it without too many questions most of the time. I take care of business there, and see the customer out the door. Meanwhile, my hip phone has been ringing off the hook all during meeting time. I finally check voicemail. 7, count them, 7 new messages I’ve got. I’ve got 3 customer issues, and people are starting to freak the fuck out because I’m not calling them back. Broken part in Canada, part labeling issues in Kansas City (still from the previous day and above paragraph), and a “loose” part in Chicago. Damn. When this many people are calling it cannot be good. I miss lunch, again, for the second day in a row, and start making calls around to the folks who have been calling me. I get yelled at by 3 different Ford guys at 3 different Ford assembly plants. For those of you out there wondering, never buy a Ford. It’s not even close to being worth the money you’re going to spend on repairs and warranty issues. They may “say” that Quality is Job 1, but really, saving money so they can line their pockets is Job 1. They nickel and dime you to death so they can make more profit, but at the same time in order for you to give them the kick backs that they want/require, you have to cut corners lots of times in production and or raw materials, and hence, you’re getting an inferior product. Does Toyota do such things? Hells no. This is why Toyota is going to take over the world of cars in the next 10 years, you watch. Toyota still wants value for their money, but if it means shoddy quality, they won’t do it. Ford, they just care about the money. Quality is a nice sound bite, but if you’ve ever owned a Ford, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, by the time I get done dealing with crying customers, and shuffling their problems around and fixing them, it’s now 5:30 in the afternoon again. Oops, forgot to eat lunch, or get a snack, or even take a shit again. Damn it all, and now, my head is ringing like freakin’ Quasimoto’s bells in France. It’s no good. I drive that tired ass home, call the SO, apologize for not feeling well, and not being able to attend Jen and Josh’s Halloween party this evening (sorry Jen and Josh I really wanted to come, but alas, I feel like h-e-double toothpicks), and eat a damn sandwich for crying out loud. Momma said there’d be days like this, except there seem to be more days like this lately, and more often than not. Ah, the world of being an automotive supplier. If there is anyone out there looking for a job path, I don’t suggest automotive. Too much stress, too much hassle. Find something more fun and amusing, like being a TV pundit, for which, if you’ve seen any of these folks lately, you won’t need much education anyway. All you have to do is to produce good sounding bits of information that makes it seem like you know something, and then pass it off as fact. For a good example of this punditry, see anything done by Ann Coulter. She’s a good one, as she essentially makes up everything that tumbles from her scraggly haired head. It’s kind of like that old song, “Momma don’t let you son’s grow up to be automotive engineers.” I actually should blame my old roommate Thomas Thibault for all of this business, because if it weren’t for him turning down the job that I eventually took, I’d still be designing machines to make tampons, I shit you not, and I wouldn’t be in the business of making car parts, instead, I’d probably be making feminine hygiene products, and I’d have an endless supply of them of which to foist them onto whomever I happened to be dating at the time. Because as we all know, those things are damn expensive for some reason. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t be working for Tampax anymore, I probably would have still ended up in automotive somewhere along the line, and suffering because of it. It’s kind of like the damn mafia. I keep trying to get out, and yet, they keep pulling me back in those bastards. When you try to explain to job recruiters and others that you’d like to step out of the automotive arena, they look at you like you’re nuts. Then again, none of those assholes have ever done this kind of work, so they have no idea about what it entails. If I could be a recruiter, I could work from home. Hell, get me a wireless connection I could work from my bed everyday. Make a ton of calls in the morning, ride for a few hours, come home, and make some follow up calls, shuffle around some e-mails, and take 10 percent when I could get someone hired. Hell yeah I could do something like that. I’d operate differently than the guys I deal with as well. No cold calls to people at work. No not telling people who the company is that I’m working for, or looking to place someone with. This is a common problem with recruiters. They call you, tell you about this immense job opportunity that they have for you, and yet fail to tell you what company it is for, or where the company is located. For example. Back in the day when I was looking to move to NC, I kept telling recruiters I’m looking for work in the triangle of NC (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill), and these damn morons kept coming back to me with things like, how about North Dakota? How about Alabama? How about Missouri? Somewhere there was some disconnect between them and I, and it was most definitely on their end of things. I did get an interview in Wisconsin once, which was super nice. The company then changed their minds about hiring someone new, and they didn’t go through with it. Lucky they didn’t, because right now I’d be living in good old Wisconsin eating cheese and watching Packers games. Instead, I’m living in Chapel Hill watching the Tarheels lose badly at football. Hey, they won the National Championship in basketball last year, what the hell else do you all want? If I was a job recruiter, I’d definitely do it different. I’d be the man at it.

My political jab for the day once again goes out to Republicans. Now that we’re faced with this huge deficit, and mounting debt because of natural disasters, the war in Iraq, and just general running of a nation expenses, now, now these jerks in Congress want to be fiscally conservative and start cutting the budget. Let me clue you assholes into something. If you hadn’t passed Bush’s tax cuts a few years back and wiped out the surplus money we had stored up, this might not be such a large issue. Since Bush is all spend and no tax though (does that ever work??) instead of tax and spend (like us liberals, which I’ll take tax and spend any day, because at least then you have the money to spend) the rest of us are left holding the bag my friends. Holding the bag. Mounting debt is getting crazy out there, and Bush, the conservative, still has not vetoed a spending bill that has come across his desk in the years that he has been President. Here’s a clue curious George. Back when you were Governor of Texas, you cut taxes to stimulate economic growth, and it didn’t work. What did work was that your rich friends got richer, and the lower and middle classes of Texas suffered. Then you became President, and did the same damn thing, and what has happened? Amazingly enough, the same damn thing. It still amazes me, to this day, that we, the American people, elected such a dumb ass to the highest office in the land, make that, the world. Amazing… OK, that’s all the political ranting I’m going to do for this day, time to head off to bed and rest my aching head.