Flaming bags of poo
Work today was a nightmare. Everything was fine (busy, but fine) up until lunch, when I decided to go check on our facility in the next town up. I’m in charge of the area this week since BossMan is out of town and they literally would have produced better results yesterday if they had sent flaming bags of poo to all their customers, it was that bad. I’m up there, checking up on things, and it seems to be running smoothly today. Their head hourly mentioned some of the problems from the day before and said he was scheduled to come in at 0900 and they got off to a bad start but they ended strong. I asked him where his salaried supervisor was (their version of me) and he told me he never knew when she was going to be there, and he thought maybe he should be scheduled in earlier if she was off or something. Well, duh, that’s actually in the manual, and it would go a long way towards explaining why that location has been a complete dumpster fire since they opened.
Anyway, I remotely check on my own people and it looks like things got really busy really quickly so I dash back down to help out even though they normally don’t need me that much, and I’m glad I did. I turns out they have gone from being four hours ahead on orders to not quite an hour ahead. One person decided since I wasn’t there she was going to take a long lunch, which put three more breaks behind, and since she was in charge of the first wave of organization and quality control before things went over to final staging and QC her area got backed up far more than it should have. My hourly counterpart was half-covering/half doing her own job, which is normally easy to do but then the orders blew up and this person was twenty minutes late from lunch. I’m going to have a talk with the person who was late from lunch, but I’m also going to let my hourly manager know if she’d sent those other breaks out on time instead of making them wait then yes, we’d have still been a little backed up but we’d have been backed up further upstream in the process and the first QC station wouldn’t look like a complete disaster and it wouldn’t have taken ninety minutes to recover. To top it off the person who was late from lunch put earbuds in after she came back and as a result missed a page that made my hourly manager go looking for her, pulling her off her own job again. Then after getting told she can’t wear earbuds at her station she’s caught not five minutes later on her phone instead of working. Somewhere in all this action she also managed to lose her RFID access card to our section of the facility, which results in termination if not found by the end of the shift (either mine or hers, and I’m not going down for that wanker). Technically I could have fired her when she reported it, but we don’t inventory the key cards until end of day so I had some time to play with. Fortunately we managed to find it before it got handed out to a customer. Y’all know what’s coming right?
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
While all this is going on, one of my customers asks my final QC/customer contact person a question that she doesn’t know the answer to, so of course she calls me on the company cellphone given to her for that exact purpose and I give her the answer and all is right with the world she just tells the customer “I don’t know” and moves on to the next customer. This causes a now very angry customer to put in a very bad rating for us. Then the rating system crashes. As of COB I had a 50% positive rating today, maybe they’ll get the system back up and maybe my happy customers will keep trying but somehow I doubt both things are going to happen before midnight. In case I haven’t mentioned it before anything below 95% positive requires me to call the customer, and also send an e-mail to my district manager (BossMan) and my regional manager. Just yay.
Another phase of my writing project for school was due today and it was also a giant flaming bag of poo, but at least I got it in before the deadline. I’ll try to be happier in my next entry, I swear.