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So, within the past week I transferred from the Steel Fabrication Shop at Ultradent Products Inc, to the manufacturing line as a material handler at the same company.
What does that mean? Well, that means that I have to wear a smock, a hair net, and a beard cover. I get to work with 8 different machines that range in price from 2 million dollars to 7 million dollars.

Basically, I load the PVC, plastic film, boxes, glue, foil, and a sticky goo (which I can't disclose at this time) in to the 9 different machines.

It's a $2.75 increase in pay, while being about 75% easier than what I was doing in the fab. shop...The problem is, it's too easy, and gets boring very quickly when any of the machines break down.

Also, it's a graveyard shift from 9:30 pm 'till 5:30 am. There are advantages and disadvantages to it, but the graveyard shift suits me best right now.

So that's it. I can't tell you more, since I signed a confidentiality agreement. Apparently the product we're making is being kept secret from everyone until it is 100% ready to be shipped.

But I do have a question for you all?

What do you get when you mix 4 American made machines, 3 German made machines, and 2 Italian made machines?

The answer: Total chaos!

 

Solution: remove the american made machines.

Congrats; I wish I had found a job myself, for this summer. Does this mean you are making millions now?

 

The sad thing is, they all break down. The American machines break down the most, but are the easiest to fix; the german machines break down less often, but cost a lot more to fix, and are harder to fix; and the Italian machines almost never break down, but when they do, it's extremely hard to fix them...last time one of the Italian machines broke down, it took 2 days to fix it.

As for making millions....give me a few years, I'm still deciding on how to make *one* million dollars...

 

You might look into using higher quality lubricants. Also, you might as well enjoy the increase in pay with the decrease in workload. Many would die to have a setup like that.

 

Hey, don't tell me....I'm only the material handler...not the maintainance techs. Whenever a machine breaks down, my job gets all the easier.

Like last night for example, one of the American machines broke down for an hour, while the German machine I was training to "troubleshoot" kept running out of alignment, and ended up wasting about 90% of the final product for the 2 hours it was being fussy.

I'm not a tree-hugger in any respect, but that was a lot of waste...about 5,000 seemingly good - products - had to be thrown away.

 

One of my summer student jobs was at a plastics factory, stacking the product as it came off line - exceptionally boring. It was a shifting work patten - One week mornings, one week afternoons and one week nights. Absolute killer. The most annoying was the machines putting stickers on margarine tub lids. They had to be within 2mm of centre and the machines constantly went wrong.

 

Speaks of poor quality machines when they are expected to go within 0.5 mm accuracy and 1% error margin. Not that I know that much of that kind of machines.

Also, who wastes that many 'seemingly good' products that freely? The managers could had sold them as "exceptional products" with cheaper price or something -anything is better than just throwing them to rubbish bin due of one, aesthetic error in them.

 

Actually, one of the machines takes rapid pictures of the product and analyzes them. If it sees that something isn't quite right, it spits them out in to one of three bins. Since it was designed in Europe, two of the bins are supposed to be sorted though and recycled if at all possible...apparently Europe has some serious waste problems...But here in the grand USA we bag it, then toss it into the trash compactor. But that's about all we throw away. We recycle 100% of all cardboard boxes as well as 100% of all our PVC/Polyurethane waste.

That said, I got a call from my boss this morning...apparently the morning shift had an "accident" and the machines will be down for the next week or two. I don't see what could have happened as we finished a full order last night at 4am, and cleaned every machine top to bottom until 5am and had everything back up and running by 5:30am. They must have Fu**ed something big up...

So I'm going back to the fabrication shop until they get everything fixed.

 

That's what you get for complaining.