Changes...

Things they are a changin' at work this week. First, we have a new plant manager coming in. This guy is what we like to call, high strung and all. In other words, he walks around with a chocolate bar in one hand, a Mountain Dew in another, and basically is set loose onto the world, or in this case, my workplace. Word on the street is that he tends to work about 70 hours per week, or more, and walks around like a maniac. And for a tier 1 automotive supplier, he has no customer knowledge or has had no tier 1 customer contacts. He is completely inexperienced, as far as it comes to customer relations. This can be learned, so I'm not too worried about him, except for the fact that he might say something wrong at some point in time, and doom the plant, but hey, they hired him, not me. In his current capacity (he works at one of our closely located sister plants) we've already had some run ins with one another. Me saying that his parts are bad, and that his process stinks, and him arguing with me that indeed, even though the parts measured bad, they really weren't "that bad" and that we should be able to use them as is. Someone doesn't understand the concepts of quality I think, and how we actually assemble things together. It will be interesting, especially since as far as I know, the man has never set foot in this facility before. Methinks that he has a lot to learn. Luckily for me, I have a machining background, so I know what happens on his end of things, whereas he's not so sure what goes on here. He'll learn fast I think. I hope. Ah hell, we're probably going to be closed in a few years anyway so no big deal.

The other thing that is changing is that my boss has been re-assigned to our sister plant down the road from us, and she is being replaced by someone who used to work in our department just a couple of years ago. Now, I know this guy coming in to replace our boss now, and let's just say, I'm less than enthused about him coming back into this facility to "lord" over the department he once worked in, and was the junior member of. Oh, and when he interviewed for a different job within our company, when he originally left our department, he basically threw everyone under the bus during his interview. Saying that our manager didn't do her job, that another member of our team wasn't assigned much work because she was a friend of our boss, and that essentially he was the ONLY person in the department who did anything. Funny, 2 years after he left our department, we're still cleaning up the shit he left behind. Going through his records, we quickly found out that indeed, he didn't do much of anything, and with the new position that he took after being a quality engineer, he didn't do much in that posting either. It just goes to show that if you kiss the right asses around here, you can indeed go far within this company, whether or not you know what you're doing, and this guy, I'm convinced, does NOT know what he's doing. Again, I'm very scared that during a meeting with a customer, or something like that, he's going to say the wrong thing, and doom us. It will happen. He LOVES to throw people under the bus, whether or not he works for them or not. I don't see this happening any differently in the near future. He will say or do something stupid in front of the customer, and we will all pay for it. Not to mention, either myself, or my co-workers will probably get blamed for it.

To sum up. New plant manager, might be good. New quality manager, he's going to suck. And that's all I really have to say about that.

This past weekend though was the Hell of the North. Yes, Paris-Roubaix. The Queen of the Classics, and every other title that it is beholden to. I've got to say, we got some coverage of the race, video coverage, but it was not good. OLN, now known as VS, only had one hour of coverage for a 6 hour race. This is just silly. They used to show Paris-Roubaix live as it happened, and now, we've been stunted down to a measly hour long piece of coverage, which included about 20 minutes of fluff (tech talk about bikes, interviews with the main protagonists and crap like that that most Americans enjoy). Although, I did still have a party to celebrate the race. Pomme frites, beers, and well, more pomme frites. Somewhere along the way, some funnel cake got thrown into the mix, a request from one of the party attendees. It was fun to have folks over, now if only the race coverage were just a little better. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not asking for the entire race to be shown, actually, 2 hours is more than enough for me. But an hour? That's just silly. I might have to subscribe to cycling.tv as they showed the entire thing, and I could transfer it over to the TV as well, so that might be something to look at in the future.

As for the race itself, it was a good edition. While in North Carolina we were enjoying what should have been Northern France weather (rain, high winds, and more rain), the guys over riding the race were enjoying sunshine, and temperatures in the mid to upper 70's. Of course, this doesn't make the race any easier. Oh no. It might actually make it harder. It's dustier, and the speeds, much higher. It was a good battle. Although I am happy with the man that came out on top, Stuey O'Grady from Australia, I really wanted Juan Antonio Flecha to win it, and he rolled across the velodrome line 2nd on the day. So close, and yet, so far. I won't really go into detail about what went down in the race, as there have been enough write ups on that thing already (check Cyclingnews.com, or Velonews.com, or Pezcyclingnews.com, or any other cycling website for that matter), and I don't need to re-hash it. Stuey won in a grand fashion though. He rode away with one of the first breakaway groups of the day, and then attacked at a very opportune time, and then went solo to the victory in Roubaix. O'Grady, a very deserving winner, who is turning himself into a good classics or one day rider. He used to be somewhat of a decent sprinter, but he's lost his jump somewhere along the line, and now, he is one for the breakaway, and or the solo bid for glory, which is what he did this past weekend, and he is the first Australian to win this race as well. Good on him. Always good to see a well deserving winner.

OK, that is all for now. As I am actually writing this at work and posting it later on during the day when I get home, time to wrap it up, and get something done for the day. Actually, this has been written in bits and pieces, and I actually HAVE been getting things done today. No, really, I have. Honestly.