I look around at my place of employment and just wonder to myself how they have stayed in business for as long as they have. They try to run high quality, cutting edge product on antiquated machines, and just pile more work and responsibility upon us, the operators.  Earlier this year management did a lean event to reduce scrap in the department in which I work. But most of the ideas they came up with, while reducing scrap, also reduced production.  To my understanding, lean manufacturing is supposed to help production, while also reducing waste. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. I don’t get it. They also decided that one way to reduce scrap was to inform the operators that they could only produce so much, and then they had to get the shift supervisor.  While in concept I agree with this, they set the amount of scrap allowed so low that it is almost impossible to stay below it.  They also did nothing to fix any mechanical issues with our machines, so they didn’t work on fixing root causes at all. Management also decided to give us more paperwork, like that will help.  When I get to my workstation at the start of shift I have to write the date five times, my name three times and my clock number three times.  They have apparently decided that paperwork will keep the place running even if we don’t have time to run any product.  And then there are the people. While there are a few really good people, and some average people, it seems that overall we are saddled with either chronically stupid or chronically lazy people. I don’t say this to be mean, but it sure seem that the longer a person has worked here the less work they do, and the less thinking they do.  It is all very aggravating.

Well, my son’s 13^th birthday went very well.  We let him sleep in while the wife and I decorated, then the kids got up and we all watched him open his presents.  Then I fired up the grill and cooked steaks for dinner.  After dinner I played his favorite (currently) computer game against him and we watched some boob tube together. All in all it was a pretty good day.

In about a month it will be time to move my daughter into her dorm room for her freshman year of college.  It is pretty damn scary for me to think about.  How do I know that she has, if not everything, then most of what she needs for the first couple of months?  How do I make sure she isn’t going to freak out at being on her own?  How do I keep her mother and me from worrying ourselves sick about her?  Right now I am sitting here think about stuff that needs to still be done, like setting up her new laptop, getting her wireless router configured for the school network, making sure to install Dropbox on her iPod touch and so on, but that is the easy stuff.  I know she is smart enough to succeed, and I hope she is smart enough to not make too many wrong choices.  I am excited to see her grow into the wonderful adult that I know she can be, but I am scared that we haven’t done everything we could to raise her properly. I imagine that most parents feel something like what I am feeling, but that sure doesn’t help me worrying.

I hate hospitals.  Not that I don’t appreciate the service they provide, or the people that work in them, just being at a hospital makes my skin crawl.  So having to be in one most of the day last Thursday really sucked.  My wife, love her as I do, was having a hard night getting to sleep Wednesday night so she decided to alter her depression medications and ended up overdosing.  She says it was an accident, but it wouldn’t be the first time she had made an effort to commit suicide.  So when I got home from work Thursday morning she had only slept like 3 hours the whole night, and was drugged to the gills and sick as can be.  She didn’t want to but I made her go to the Emergency Room and they pumped her full of fluids and god only knows what else.  After she started becoming lucid, we then had to sit through counseling about suicide.  We didn’t end up getting home until about 8 pm Thursday night.  All in all it was not a great day for any of us, but at least my wife is doing ok, and with her meds under my control, hopefully we won’t have a repeat episode anytime soon.