They called it "rabbit chasing”, and it was a genuinely momentous event. One of the scouts from my company had gone up north to Canada and came back all excited with all sorts of fairy tales about the absolute latest thing in assembly line structure. What it meant was, rather than standing in a line doing one single job and then passing the parts on down the line to someone else, one single person had to do the entire job from start to finish. Such a concept would have the inventor of the assembly line, Henry Ford, flipping in his grave.
Our old assembly line was set up in a straight line, like most traditional assembly lines are. At one end were the starting processes, and at the opposite end sat the tester and a pallet of disassembled boxes. The way the structure was set up, the part started at one end and was shoved down the line from person to person, and of course, along the way, bottlenecks would form, due to the fact that some jobs were simply easier and faster to perform than others. However, despite its minor flaws, it still worked splendidly on most occasions, which was the reason that our quota kept going up.
Naturally we all are familiar with the concept of quotas, and many of us are also familiar with the concept of raising the quota each time it is met. If we met our quota of two hundred parts one day, we were expected to do two hundred and fifty the next. Before long, our quotas had been raised to impossible levels, and the “freaks from upper management land” decided that a change was needed in our process with the apparent desire to enable us to meet our “simple” quota. Hence, the introduction of the greatest industrial prank ever perpetrated on the United States by Canada.
It began with a meeting, where every worker in my department were called away from their jobs to remain awake during an hour long, really uninspiring meeting describing the process of rabbit chasing. In case you are wondering, we workers were the rabbits in question and we were supposed to “chase” each other down the assembly line, which would be re-modified into a double horseshoe grouping. At the start of the line you would grab your part, build it, then move to the next job, build that, then move on, all the way down the the end of the line where you would have to test your own part.
We gave it a shot. By the time the next hour was over we were all ready for a shot in the head. The muddled masterminds of management had somehow (undoubtedly using “new” math) managed to determine that each job in the assembly process only required approximately six seconds to perform. At that time I wondered who it was they had timed in order to set these requirements but now I realize that they did not time anyone at all, but had simply slept on the idea, had a bad dream, and went with it.
We began the process. I grabbed my alternator frame and began to build its inside components, all the while being timed by an old goat with a stop-watch and a perpetual frown. I basically threw those components in there, screwed them all down with the air gun, hoping they were actually in the frame in their proper locations, and then ran to the next station, which was occupied by another body. I looked at the old goat and shrugged my shoulders, wondering what to do. She motioned to me to return to station number one again and build another part. Station number one was occupied.
I bullied my way in and built another part, having to share the air guns by essentially ripping them out of the hands of the person who was supposed to be using them, and then made my way back to station number two again. It was empty, but now I had two parts to build instead of just one. My six seconds extended to twelve, and then beyond because my alternator frame was stripped and the bolts would not tighten. Now I had to tear down one of my two alternators, screw in a special part that was designed to narrow the holes so the bolts would fit, and rebuild it again, all without getting in the way of the other “rabbits”. The old goat was frowning very deeply by this point.
I got all the way down to the tester with my two parts and had to try to hustle my way through the testing process. I was not very experienced at the testing process, so it usually caused me considerable stress, resulting in me absolutely hating that job with a passion. Now, even when operated correctly, the tester required at least a minute's worth of time while it fiddled around and failed my part. I took that part off the tester, and sat it on a secondary line for someone (???) to tear down eventually. Then I tested the second part and this time it passed but the computer's printer ran out of paper. I did not know how to re-load it.
