01/09/2003 - 10:36 p.m. | divine intervention

See, yesterday I had "pride" which is a "sin." Therefore, to put me back in my place, God sent me one of His children to fuck with my day, namely Tom the Doughboy Pothanger critic. To understand this rant, however, you are gonna need to know some stuff about pothangers (yeah, fucking sucks - welcome to my world)... Therefore, may I present...

So it was my job to do those 4 steps (over and over), making pieces of wire with the pothangers on them (they are called "first bend pothangers" - clever, no?) and then it was Tom's job to take my first bends and turn them into the hook things shown holding the flower pot ("second bends").

Everybody at the factory is pretty laid back with the quality of the products we make at the factory. See, when the pothanger machine reaches the last step, it is supposed to "close" the wire completely (as in figure A). Sometimes, though, the machine will mess up and there will be a gap (figure C). Then I have to use pliars to pinch the pothanger shut. As you can imagine, this adds several seconds to each pothanger, slowing me down quite a bit in the long run. Anyway, the machine has been running all right all week, so the lower boss (Don) told me I didn't need to use the pliars (and in fact, that he thinks using pliars makes them look like shit). So I didn't.

Most people would be cool with this. Unfortunately, Tom is insane. 10 minutes after he started doing second bends, he came over and pointed out that there was the tiniest gap in the most recent batch of pothangers (figure B). Now, I'm trying not to be flippant, but I point out that the gap is about the thickness of a dime, and thus, is it really negligible? As I mentioned, Tom crazy, so he said yes, it does because there is a chance the big boss (Harve) might come and inspect and then it's fucking curtains for all of us if he finds a God damned one millimeter space in the fucking things, even though you have to pull them further open than that when you stick in a pot anwyay!! (I paraphrase)

So, with no one to go to for backup (everyone's out sick), I start using the pliars again. And then, as if that wasn't a big enough waste of time, I have to go through the pile of ones I did previously and look for more dime gaps and fix 'em! And it's all slow and the wire gets tangled a lot and I'm losing money and RAR - stupid! I was actually glad to move onto the dirty, shitty welder. And I'll be even glader if tomorrow is my last day there for a while, although Mom has yet to come to any conclusion about whether or not I can go back to school with Kyle and Spritz on Sunday or not. We'll see.

The rest of the night was pretty boring. I crashed on the couch (and skipped the IMSA alum thing) and woke up dazed a little while ago. And soon I'll be sleeping again. What a life.