ASCO

Happy Curmudgeon Day

For the past however long1 we have worked at the Valve Store ™ we have had 9 holidays off. They were New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, the Friday after, Christmas Eve & Christmas Day.

Depending on what day Christmas & it’s Eve fell on it was mostly always turned into a 4 day weekend with the exceptions being if Christmas fell on a Wednesday or Thursday. A large group of employees would combine this with the New Year’s Day holiday and most of their 2 or 3 weeks of vacation disappear from the middle of December and not return until January 2nd.

I say we had 9 holidays, because the company decided that starting this year they were replacing Christmas Eve with a Floating Holiday of the employee’s choosing. This floater had to be scheduled like a vacation day by filling out a vacation request, but noting that it was your Floating Holiday. But it would have to used like a holiday in that you couldn’t take it in 2 half days and it was not allowed to be carried over.

Around lunch time yesterday Donna decided that maybe it would be nice to turn this into a 4 day work week by taking today off. We decided instead of wasting a vacation day we would go ahead and burn that floater. So I hearkened back to my bicycle club newsletter days and went looking for a esoteric holiday to celebrate. Found several and opted for Curmudgeon Day. So I put on the vacation request handed in to our supervisors, January 29th, Curmudgeon Day (in honor of William Claude Dukenfield’s birthday.)

When my acting supervisor asked me who William Claude Dunkenfield was I told him it was W.C. Fields. Ever the smart-ass he said, “Oh, I know him, he makes the cookies.” Not to be out smart-assed, I replied, “No, that’s his wife.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 136

1. cough, cough twenty-seven years, cough, cough

The Company You Keep

Company

Years of soakings of oil and fork lift traffic have really taken their toll making the main traffic areas in the Turned Parts department very rough and the whole department dark and slippery. This past week a contractor came in and is floating some sort of epoxy / concrete hybrid mix down about a 1/4 inch thick and following up with a two-step epoxy paint job in light gray. A couple years ago they did a section at a different end of the department before we added some fancy new fangled CNC machines and it looked fantastic, still does, so they are working their way north throughout the whole shop.

We moved some of our machines around and even shipped a few down to Mexico to create about 5000′ square feet of floor that is being upgraded. Trouble is the main entrance to our cube farm is smack in the middle of the area, so since Tuesday we have had to walk out a service door in the back of the plant to get into a side door of the office area. The only down side for me has been that bathroom breaks now take a bit of forethought because what used to be a 30 second walk is now about 2 minutes long.

Where we park the Emperor (or Purple Whale) is in the far corner of the parking lot from the front door and is normally vacant except for us. This week we’ve had company out there because as it turns out our corner of the parking lot is at one end of the hypotenuse of a scalene triangle with the other end being the door to our offices. In other words the shortest distance between parking lot & office chair for my department members is Donna and my normally quiet corner of the parking lot. Hence the crowd.

The final coat of paint goes on the floor on Sunday, so by Monday morning we should be back to having our corner of the lot to ourselves.

What’s The Password Kenneth?*

g78FY7PMQ0tkT5w
AnVknz6LOHXdNMn
Qn5FlG16gX1WS0D
U5Ct1SVNN5K3EAQ
jHYkj8H7MjpGvK1

The PCs around Valve Store(tm), like most in a networked business environment, are locked down pretty good so that the regular Joe users can’t screw ’em up. That’s where an administrator password comes in, and I wield one.

One of my various functions at the the plant is Back-up IT Guy and because the Regular IT Guy is pretty ill, I’ve been doing a lot of more computer type stuff recently. While most of the real issues are handled remotely by the Help Desk techs at the Home Office in beautiful downtown Florham Park, NJ., sometimes it is just easier to just call Brian.

It used to be easy, I could keep my admin password the same as my regular network password, so it was always right at my fingertips. But about a month ago the corporation that pulls ASCO’s marionette strings decreed that all Administrators must use the RSA Token two-step authentication system. Now every morning I have to login to special Password Repository using a combination of my 4 digit PIN and 6 randomly generated digits, that change every 60 seconds, from my software token. This allows me to get a unique 15 character alpha-numeric admin password, good for 12 hours.

What you see above are my passwords from the past week. Feel free to copy them down for your own personal use on your favorite, or not so favorite, internet sites.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 38

*My twist on the used to be famous phrase, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

Got Any Questions

Every month the Director of Operations has a Communications Meeting with each of the two “classes” of employees, Hourly & Salary, to field questions, concerns or suggestions. Each month there is some sort of randomized drawing to select 8 or 10 employees to act as representatives, who then solicit and/or receive questions for asking. This representative affords a slight sense of anonymity to the questioner, in cases of calling out perceived bone-headed decisions by the management team or whining about fellow employees.

This month is my turn as representative. I have gathered a few questions and with the meeting coming up tomorrow I sent out an email to my group this afternoon to remind them if they had anything, please get it to me.

From: Brian
To: Fab Eng Grp
Subj: Only 24 Hours Left to…

…get your questions to me for the Salaried Communications Meeting tomorrow. Got a question that only the Big Kahuna can answer, get it to me.

For total anonymity, snip out the letters to form the words from the ads in today’s paper, then glue them to a pristine piece of copy paper (using latex gloves of course) and place it in my mailbox up front. Or you could always just send me an email from a co-workers desk when they aren’t in their cubicle and have left without locking their screen. An easier option would be to print it in notepad, fold in half and drop it on my desk when no one is looking.

Best option would be to walk up to me and tell me what it is. Don’t worry your personal information is safe with me, unlike all those poor cheating souls who used AshleyMadison.com.

48,000 Valves

I don’t know who the heck is buying all these solenoid valves but we ship out a crap load every day. The PIC (Production & Inventory Control) Manager sends me a PowerPoint presentation chart to print out at 18 x 24 on my plotter that shows Daily Goal, Daily Ship, Monthly Goal and Monthly Ship dollars. The daily goal number for September was 480k.

If each valve was $10 the would mean 48,000 valves went out our back door every work day, but I’m betting it is a lot fewer than that though. If you work in the process industry you’d know that an ASCO valve is premium product, sort of the Mercedes Benz of solenoid valves, so I think that $10 price is at the very bottom of our price chart.

As I backed into the parking spot in the North 40 of the Valve Store(TM) parking lot (our usual place) on Friday, I noticed that the odometer of the Purple Whale read 48000.

DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA Batman

Egghead

Most of this week the big bosses of the Valve Store(tm) have been/will be off-site attempting to dazzle the even bigger bosses from Valve HQ by recounting the tales of past triumphs from FY2014 and presenting ideas for a more profitable FY2015. On Tuesday when I noticed that our manager wasn’t in his office at his usual time, I questioned over the cubicle wall to Mark and Tom, “Is Boy Wonder going to be out too?” (A reference to our new supervisor who is all of 30ish.) This led to maybe we should make up signs for their empty offices, one for “Robin” and another for the manager with Batman on it.

This sounded like just the thing for the then unsupervised Arts & Crafts Engineer to do after lunch. So I went to the web and downloaded some photos of the Dynamic Duo for the manager and our supervisor. I then did the same for 5 of the villains from the 60’s TV for us peons. I measured our cubicle nameplates, 2 x 10 for us and 3 x 12 for the big guys and made up some new themed ones. I then used some of my low tack spray adhesive and covered up everyone’s existing signs with the new ones.

They stayed up for all of an hour and a half. Batman called and told The Penguin to tell the second shift supervisor to make sure they folks in the shop weren’t playing poker or anything later because the President of the company was going to want to take a tour of the plant after they all had dinner. We may put them up tomorrow afternoon, because the big guns will have gone back to Jersey by then and leave them up until Batman and Robin get back to work on Friday.

Happy Quasquicentennial

Yesterday at The Valve Store(TM) we got a small piece of cake and had free coffee from the vending machine in the cafeteria.

125 years ago, on September 5, 1888, Automatic Switch Company was founded in Baltimore, Maryland; it was privately owned by the Darrin family. At that time, its products were automatic controls for elevators & generators, and pressure controls for pumps & compressors.

In 1904, Automatic Switch Company moved to Grand Street in New York City and sold its patents on elevator controls to the Otis Elevator Company. The Company then focused on the development of solenoid valves and switches under the ASCO brand name, and was the first company to successfully market an internally operated solenoid valve. ASCO introduced the first Automatic Transfer Switch in 1928.

In 1947, with 65 employees in tow, Automatic Switch made a major move to its first company-owned plant at Lakeside Avenue in Orange, New Jersey. Within 10 years, Automatic Switch grew to 575 employees with a variety of products and customers. In 1957, the Company moved to a brand new building in Florham Park, New Jersey, where it is still located today.

Starting in 1959, Automatic Switch started its overseas expansion, primarily setting up its own businesses in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, Japan, UK & Germany. By 1966 ASCO US employment exceeded 1,000 people and required a substantial addition to the Florham Park facility.
On May 17, 1985, Automatic Switch was acquired by the Emerson Electric Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after July 1988 Joucomatic, a French company also involved in the solenoid valve industry & Fluid Power, was acquired. In 1990 Joucomatic was integrated into ASCO. Subsequently, in 1996 General Controls was acquired for our Valve business.

On October 1, 1998, the Company split into ASCO Valve and ASCO Switch, Sirai an Italian Company, was acquired by ASCO Valve and Firetrol, a US Company was acquired by ASCO Switch. Over the following 15 years, ASCO Fluid Automation (part of Emerson Industrial Automation) and ASCO Power Technologies (part of Emerson Network Power) made several acquisitions – – Nurnatics in 2005 for Fluid Automation; ENP Surge in 2011 and AVTRON in 2012 for Power Technologies.

Both ASCO’s have enjoyed continued growth & development; they are leaders in their respective markets. We recognize that our employees make ASCO a great Company that has evolved and stood the test of time. Thank you all for making our Company successful and a great place to work.

ASCO is getting ready to celebrate its 125th Anniversary and to commemorate this milestone; ASCO Fluid Automation & ASCO Power Technologies will host a series of events to celebrate this important date. Details will be announced shortly.