The Economy

Before the usual suspect starts crying about prices of things …

 

On an engine assembly line we had 34-37 seconds to get everything on. The line then moves. There are no stop buttons at 4/5ths of the stations.

You do it 660-800 times in 8 hours.

Watching a person on their first day is like Lucy on the chocolate conveyor belt. Especially if they’re putting a wire harness thst looks like a giant octopus of wires on an engine.

And the Japanese management thinks we’re incredibly lazy because their workers do it even faster.

I now have the leisurely pace of 10 minutes per hospital table. I enjoy it a whole lot more.

 

"Gung Ho" was on TMC the other night, a great clash of cultures movie.

And, not so long ago I worked in a small chocolate factory and lived that Lucy scene. There's video.

 

I'm not surprised about the first thing there. Assembly-line balancing (assigning X amount of work to each assembly line station) almost always involves some/many stations with buffer cycle time. Those stations would be unlikely to get overloaded. However, didn't those stations have some andon signaling capability? If not, that's surprising.

As to the second thing ... I bet that's a helluva show. Like tying a necktie on a rattlesnake.

 

My sister called from South Florida. She was waiting in a gas line and has to postpone her road trip up here because she's heard the same about gas stations up to North Carolina.

So easy to disrupt things in Amerikkka...

 

South Florida does not get its gas from that pipeline. If there is a gas shortage, it is because people are acting like assholes.

 

Very few lights. Only if you were next to a robot. We were on a yell basis. You had a problem, you screamed for help. You’d have someone there in seconds. And we had numerous bays where engines could be offloaded and worked on instead of stopping the line. We had an army of offline folks.

I loved doing wire harness. Once your arms got used to manipulating it, it was fun. The problem was people not paying attention and the couplers not getting engaged properly. Those people didn’t stick around very long. Nothing pisses off a person who bought a new car more than their car suddenly not starting two weeks into ownership when the engine vibration disconnects one.

 

In grade school we had a field trip to a GM plant. At dinner my father asked, "Did you see them putting the Pontiac engines in the Cadillacs?"

Good times.

 

Had a weird thought on the way to work this week. With fewer and fewer people writing checks, using checkbooks - do you still "balance your checkbook?" Is there a need to with everything being digital and you can check your account/balance daily? Just curious.

 

Depends. My own personal checking account which doesn't ever have a big balance is easy to keep straight, just by checking it online. Our joint account which has a lot more money in it, and we use constantly, I do balance because it's really easy to miss a transaction or two even with checking it online.

 

I'm very OCD when it comes to getting my spreadsheets to balance, whether that's my baseball stats or the financial accounts. I need the totals to match and if they don't, I'll go back to figure out what's wrong.

We long-distance bank with USAA and Edward Jones, and I've caught a couple of mistakes over the past five or so years where they either misread the amount or just transposed the numbers on either a deposit slip or the rare handwritten check. A quick call usually fixes the issue -- and I've done it whether it's in favor of me or not.

The worst was more than 30 years ago with First Interstate Bank. They made a glaring error which caused a bunch of checks to bounce, and not the first time it had happened where the balances were way off. I went into the branch to complain and asked to close the account, which had about $17,000 in it -- and the branch manager tried to hand me $1,700 in cash instead. The manager eventually wrote me a cashier's check but point proven.

Yeah, that's a really good way to prove your incompetence.