Widget Wars

I briefly mentioned in my April 30, 2014 post (The Tom Tom Thumper) that I worked at Olsen Tool Company, a Richfield tool and die shop, for two summers during my college years.  (I also worked there during my two-week Christmas break sophomore year.)  Having been either a student or a teacher for many years, I had a plethora of summer jobs, but none was more physically demanding than my esteemed position as a plastic injection molding press operator at Olsen.  It also was the scene of a cautionary tale about cutting corners.

Olsen was located in the 7400 block of Logan Avenue, a few blocks north of what is now the Best Buy corporate campus on Penn & I-494.  I worked the second shift, which meant reporting for duty at 3:00 in the afternoon and clocking out at 11:00 p.m.  Olsen Tool was a manufacturing enterprise whose main business was the production of small plastic parts which were used in a variety of medical devices and other equipment of various sizes and functions.  We employees referred to those parts as "widgets," because one could not tell by simply looking at the finished product what possible purpose it would serve or what kind of apparatus it would someday be incorporated into.  Business was so good that Kenny Olsen, the owner, employed three shifts of workers, and nary a beat was skipped as one shift ended and another began.  It was almost like the passing of the baton between relay race teammates for each machine at shift change time.
 

The usual process was that the engineers would determine the requirements of the job, based on the specifications of the customer.  This included designing the mold which would be inserted into the press and into which the molten plastic would be injected.  The temperatures of the presses would typically be set at somewhere around 740 degrees, enough to make the sweat drop off of the worker bees like me even if we were merely sitting on the adjacent bench.  (As I will elaborate below, we were never merely sitting.)
 

Olsen Tool used two types of injection molding machines.  The larger ones were about the size of a small bus. They appeared extremely dangerous because the huge metal plates inside the press closed against each other automatically when the operator removed his arm (after inserting the mold) from the machine's interior and slid the protective front glass door closed.  What if those plates didn't wait for the glass door to close? The operator's arm would be obliterated by the crashing red hot steel.  Thankfully, that never happened, and equally thankfully, my job was to operate the smaller, manual machines.

The smaller injection molders resembled a heavy metal rectangular box, approximately 30 inches long, six inches wide and four inches high.  The right half of the box slid on a metal track, which in turn was affixed to a table three feet off the ground.  The left half of the box was stationary at the end of the track  The operator sat sideways at a bench next to the table, with his left elbow facing it.  For eight straight hours he went through the routine of attaching a plastic insert (the mold) through the box's top aperture onto the back (left-hand) wall of the box's interior, then closing the aperture by tugging on a long rubber-coated handle which slid the right side of the box backwards (toward the operator) several inches until it collided with the left side.  When the left and right walls came together, an extra stiff yank on the handle clicked the box into a locked position.  This routine was very similar to using both hands to pull the port side oar of a row boat.

There were two devices, besides the press itself, which the press operator manually controlled.  One was a timer, the other a counter.  At the beginning of each shift, the foreman would advise the press operators exactly how long the press needed to stay in the locked position for each widget.  This amount of time varied anywhere from thirty seconds to, say, sixty seconds, depending on the widget being created inside the press.  The necessity of precision timing was drilled into our little noggins, even if we had been making the same product all week.  If you had to leave your machine for any reason, you never left it in the locked position.  Once the designated time elapsed, the operator would pop open the press from its locked position by delivering an open-handed hard punch to the handle.  This unlocking method did not come easily.  Even with a thick work glove, the heal of my right hand would be bruised half-way through most shifts.
 

Once the press was unlocked, we would slide the right half of the box back on the track to its original position, extract the finished product from the interior of the left side, toss the product into a basket near our feet, click the counter once to record completion of the part, and then start all over again.  It is hard to say which was the toughest part of the job, the mental fatigue from the monotony of the work, the physical drain of sitting next to a machine set at an extraordinarily hot temperature in a small non-air-conditioned factory, or the straining to lock and unlock the box time after time throughout the shift.  One benefit, besides the pay which was very good, is that I could eat and drink like a horse all summer long.  I could get away with doing so because I lost anywhere from six to nine pounds almost every day on the job.
 

Before I conclude with the cautionary tale to which I alluded in the first paragraph, I must write a few sentences about our second shift foreman, John Damon.  John was in his late thirties, a big guy with dark curly hair.  I'm sure he was under a lot of pressure from the demands of the job, including order deadlines. He knew how to read the complicated designs issued by the engineers, and how to operate every piece of equipment in the shop.  He had a surprisingly good sense of humor, all things considered, but he was at his funniest when he wasn't intending to be.  John had a favorite saying whenever he was demonstrating to a newbie how to work a particular machine.  He would say, "Do you see what I mean? Do you get what I'm driving at?"  Sometimes he'd replace that with, "Do you follow my drift?"  Of course we all picked up on that, so throughout the day my fellow laborers and I would ask each other, "Do you see what I mean...?"  (I have found those expressions to be useful in parenting.  My kids can attest to that.)  Whatever glimmer of fun we had on the job, almost all of it was either directly or indirectly attributed to Big John.
 

And now to the promised cautionary tale.  Some parts orders were for a small quantity, requiring production during only a shift or two.  But most of the time we dealt with huge orders, which found us cranking out the same pieces on every shift for the better part of a week, or longer.  Since Olsen Tool ran three shifts, there was a lot of competition among the workers of those shifts as to which operator on a given press could produce the most widgets.  Most of the people working the first shift were veteran adults who set the production bar high.  The folks on my second shift were younger, so what we lacked in experience we made up with being (generally) more energetic and in better condition.  The third shifters were kind of a combination of the two groups, although as I recall there was much more turnover there than on the first two shifts.

One of the first things I would do when I arrived at the shop would be to check the production numbers on "my" machine for the guys who ran it on the first and third shifts.  That gave me an idea of how my output stacked up against my colleagues'.  Some factors beyond our control, such as maintenance, repairs and the productivity of our break time replacements, affected our numbers, but if you looked at a large enough sample size, it was clear who was pulling their weight.  Most of the time the numbers for the three shifts were fairly close.  But then, about two-thirds of the way through the summer, a new third-shifter, "Darrell," arrived, and his numbers left me and my first shift counterpart in the dust.  That's when we had Darrellgate.
 

Darrell was about my age (late teens/early 20's) who worked my press on the third shift.  He was a lanky, laid back dude who strongly resembled Peter Fonda.  The only times I'd see him would be at 11:00, when my shift ended and his began.  As mentioned above, we did not miss a beat on the hand-off of the press between shifts.  As soon as Darrell took my place on the bench, I was outta there.
 

One afternoon at the end of a week during which we'd been making the same product throughout, I reported for work shortly before 3:00, and there was a lot of commotion in the front office.  Kenny and the office manager (Sylvia?), along with John Damon, another foreman and an engineer, were huddled around several boxes of widgets.  It was clear from their agitation that there was a problem.  Of course I was not invited to participate in the discussion, but by the middle of my shift that day the scuttlebutt was all over the shop. What allegedly happened was that Darrell, presumably in a misguided effort to beef up his production tally, had intentionally been "cooking" the widgets for less than the instructed time for that particular product.  For example, if our instructions were to keep the press in the locked position for 45 seconds, he was only keeping it locked for, say, 25 seconds.  Obviously by doing this, he was able to produce significantly more finished goods in an eight hour day than the rest of us.  His methods also enabled him to take longer breaks, and when he wasn't on break, he didn't have to work as hard; he'd still end up with an acceptable (if not splendid) number of finished units.  He probably never figured that finished products would be weighed and measured with a caliper to ensure they met the customer's specifications.  The upshot for Olsen Tool was that all the product produced by Darrell that week (and maybe previous weeks) had to be scrapped.  Bye bye, Darrell.