So, flat-tipped pliers were employed as the final annoying step in the forty-five step clip assemblage process. After that is finally over, you get to pop on the small top spring. This means going through the whole spring de-mating process once again, and getting them all in place firmly so they don't fall off. Of course, springs are springs, so when the spring was sprung down on the top of the rod, it would almost always spring out into space. Safety glasses did not help. There. The board of plungers were complete. Oh yeah, except for the squeezing part. Each completed part had to be squeezed to make sure the springs weren't sprung. If they did not move when you squeezed them it was back to the old drawing board. You had to tear the bad ones down and start again. Did I mention that my quota was 300 parts per hour?
That quota was the death of me. I simply could not hit it no matter how hard I tried. Every so often I would glance around the room in despair and suddenly noticed a huge, green, ugly looking machine sitting against the far wall. Nobody was using it, so I wondered what could possibly be its purpose. I asked one of the automatons sitting nearby. Without her hands skipping a beat, she turned all the way around on her stool, and looked in the direction I was pointing.
"Oh," she said. "That's just the plunger dial. It builds these things by the thousands." Suddenly hope dawned, bright and shining in my soul. There was a machine that could do this faster and easier. Yes! "Then why are we sitting here doing this if there's a machine to do the same thing?"
"It's broken," came her reply. Of course it was.
The broken plunger dial remained broken for what seem like eons of time, several years actually. But finally, long after my boss gave up on me and put me on another job, (the first easiest) the thing was fixed and....almost ran like a dream. Soon after it was started up again, teams of women were assigned to run it. Why women you might ask? Simple. Men could not build plungers as the parts were too small for their larger fingers. This was the general male excuse anyway. One of the teams included me, so I was sent over immediately for training. My early training consisted of my boss guiding me over to one particular woman who apparently had been working in the shop since Noah's day, and telling me this woman would take care of my training. Then my boss ran and hid for the next two weeks.
During that period of time, I was "in training" and was not allowed to leave that machine...ever. The machine in question, the plunger dial, was my babysitting nightmare come true. This thing was as bad as seventy two toddlers. Nothing on the machine actually worked right, nothing was truly automated. The machine had to be watched like a hawk, and only two people were allowed to run it. Every so often a part would jam up in the track, and the whole dial had to be shut down while my trainer grabbed a nearby allen wrench, (the dial was never without one) and unscrewed the part of the dial assembly that had jammed up. This was a regular occurrence and I had to watch her every single time she did it. Soon, it would be my turn.
If you were standing up top, on a raised platform above the machine, it was your job to monitor the loading of the metal rods, the loading of the metal washers, the large springs, the caps, and various other conveniences. Yeah we could build several thousand plungers per day, quite easily, but we were chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling to make sure none of the parts were missing during the machine's operation. The dial was in operation all day, even during breaks. To say we were busy was an understatement. The person on the floor, beside the machine, had control of the stop/go buttons, monitored the track to make sure it didn't jam and loaded fibers and springs onto the completed parts. This person also had to un-jam the machine whenever it threw a tizzy.
The top position was considered the envious "easy" position, while the bottom space was studiously avoided. I became, after a while, the usual suspect at the bottom position, and could easily keep up with everything on that machine. I had conquered the beast and it had only taken two weeks of non-stop training to do it. I was now the official "mom" in charge of the plunger dial, and "mom" was required to answer all questions regarding its usage, and guess who it was who was responsible whenever bad parts were discovered? Yup, "mom" again. But I had definitely conquered it. I was actually able to walk away from that machine from time to time and still manage to keep up with all of the responsibilities regarding it.
When that plant shut down and we were to be transferred to another plant nearby, my "babysitting nightmare" was the very last machine to be loaded into the truck. I really can't say I hated to see it go, but it did give us one last babysitting job after it left...we had to clean up after it. The platform that had stood for so many years beside that machine had been hiding a treasure trove of dust, old rusty parts, pennies, nails, odd bits of wire, dehydrated animal and insect remains and several dozen miscellaneous machine parts which probably explained why the machine had always been so recalcitrant to run. A few shovel loads later, the room was spic and span, and we could finally go home.
As you can probably gather, I never learned much from my actual boss. I did learn one thing from her though; lefty/loosey, righty/tighty. To this date I cannot tighten a screw or loosen one without thinking of those words. Years after my job transfer I found out that my boss was a relation of mine. It figures.
