Factory Laughs

Here is a funny video. Unless you want to gripe about the lax safety, injuries etc. (Scrooges)
I like the look and the sounds. You even here the forklift backup tone. Dead on capture of what a lot of factories are like.



As one of the commenters said:
Boss: Why aren`t you working!
Limbless employee:Dropped my starburst Chief
Boss: sighs *rolls up sleeves* Ugh if you want something done right...

Server Rooms are the "in" Place

Yesterday we heard about the alternate entrance to the server room. Now come "Server Huggers"

Server huggers relish spending time in air-conditioned data centers, sitting on raised floors under florescent lighting with a laptop connected to a console port of a server (or, if they are lucky, standing against a server rack using a dedicated terminal and a slide-out keyboard tray). They spend hours staring at command-line on a terminal and at notebooks of commands, passwords and IP addresses…

Remind you of the people who hang out in the measurement lab?

How Did This Happen?

We have heard blame placed at the feet of Democrats, Republicans, poor people, greedy home flippers.... Brad Delong has an extended excerpt of Michael Lewis's article "The End" in Portfolio magazine.

Michael Lewis believes that the seeds of our financial crisis were sown when Wall Street investment banks transformed themselves from partnerships to public corporations--that that destabilized their internal risk controls and incentives and made them go for variance

It continues to be enraging to me that the economy and the manufacturing base suffers because of the flippant risk accepted and the huge rewards as happily accepted by those in power.

From Michael Lewis:

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

How often does this happen in our plants?

Creative Access

Here is a good example of using creativity to solve a problem. It seems to be a common occurrence to find that a machine needs to be moved, but there is no space in the new area, or access is limited. There are lots of alternatives and solutions, you just have to be open to new ideas.
Here is a good example.

The access to the server room is now via the women’s bathroom.

The photo is a killer.

CEO Gluttony

It used to be a sin. At the New Century Financial Corp "Loan volume was down and defaults were up, the earnings report showed, and in recent weeks at least five stock analysts had downgraded the company's shares."

Moreover, four executives had sold nearly $20 million in stock in the last four months, six times as much as they had sold over the previous 12 months.

The LA Times goes on to state:

Those executive stock sales, however, have emerged as a central element in
the Justice Department's criminal investigation of New Century, according to a
person familiar with the inquiry who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Do manufacturing business CEOs have the same avarice?

Interview Tip

Here is a nice piece on an interesting aspect of the job hunt. What happens if a position is filed too quickly?

I went into their conference room, and was a bit startled by the fifteen people sitting around the table. This was known as "The Gauntlet." This group of people only asked a few, fairly non-technical questions. Most seemed bored, and some occasionally looked at their watches and yawned! Now, I am not the most exciting person in the world, but I am certainly not that boring. I finished the interview and left feeling quite confused. What the hell just happened?

The Lighter Side of an Assembly Line

Time for some comic relief. Does the Supervisor remind you of anyone that you know?