ASCO

Turkey Eating Season Began Today

Working at ASCO still has a few perks and one of which is once every quarter they feed us a meal. In essence, at the Valve Store, there is such a thing as a free lunch. The fourth quarter calendar year meal is always in November and is always a traditional Thanksgiving style meal. That meal was today.

For as long as I can remember the meal has been catered by the same folks who fill the vending machines in our “cafeteria.” By some quirk in our vending contract with them, we were stuck with them supplying all the quarterly meals, and it was not always very good. The last couple of years Donna and I discussed maybe just going out to lunch on the day to avoid it, but never did. This year that company ceased its catering business. So, so far this year we’ve had a couple other vendors for the previous meals and this was to be no exception. A local chicken finger mini-chain place was tapped to do it and for the first time in a while the turkey dinner was pretty darn tasty.

This was just the beginning of the season. The real Thanksgiving is 8 days away where I will once more over-stuff myself at my sister’s neighborhood pot luck turkey day meal.

A little over two weeks later is the Miata Club’s Holiday party where we are having it catered in the manner of a full fledged Thanksgiving feast.

Then 6 days later the Fabrication Department holds their holiday meal which is, you guessed it, a turkey and ham led potluck meal with all that entails.

And the company’s salaried group usually has one of these too, so depending on the date, I’ll get one more crack at turkey, taters, stuffing, green beans, mac & cheese, deviled eggs and enough desserts to kill a couple dozen diabetics before never eating turkey again until November 2018.

Fox, Ed Fox

After last year’s living embodiment of the company’s safety mascot for the ASCO Halloween Costume Contest, I decided to return to a Wintercroft paper mask. Previously I’ve been a large skull head and a pumpkin head, but this time I wanted to make one of his animal masks. I chose the fox because that is ASCO’s Director of Operations actual last name.

Ed is a pretty chill guy, but sometimes you never know how someone might take something and there was a tiny part of me that was worried he was thinking I was making fun of him, but he was fine with it, actually told me it was the best costume ever.

Because I bike road into work today there would have been no way to carry the mask in this morning, so I brought it in yesterday in one of those large reusable grocery bags. A few years ago they added an extra step in the front entrance security process. Now the guard has to look inside your lunch box (or any bag other you are carrying) to look for weapons. When I got to the door on Monday I unzipped the lunch box and said, “Here’s my lunch.” Then I spread the handles of the grocery bag and said, “Severed animal head.”

The guard took a beat…and…then…he smiled.

Afternoon Update:
They take a photo of everyone in costume in the cafeteria in the morning and then when that’s done, the costumed parade through the plant, zig-zagging around the aisles in all the department and office areas so the non-participants can see everyone who has dressed up. Even though I put my company name badge mid chest and had changed it to read Edd Foxx, I had a few people afterwards asked me who I was supposed to be. One wondered if I was supposed to be the Carfax fox and another wondered if I was Star Fox from the old Nintendo video game. You have to admit, the mask would have worked for either one.

Thursday Update:

Here is the group picture. Everyone’s individual picture is posted on the bulletin board and all employees get to one vote for their favorite. I have no idea how many votes I got, but I bet is was zero as I didn’t even vote for myself. First place went to Ike & Tina Turner, second place went to One Night Stand and third was Scary Clown. For the record the clown is not standing on anything, unlike the fellow in the middle, he is about 6’6″ tall and weighs in around 300 pounds and has a naturally gravely voice.

Zero Crappy Pallets


Remember last Friday’s photo of all those broken damaged pallets? Yesterday morning Waste Management showed up and collected the second of the two dumpsters full of the damaged pallets. Yesterday afternoon the usual used pallet truck showed up and collected the rest of the damaged ones that were still on the ground in the back parking lot.

I say back parking lot only because in the 70’s when the building was originally put up the original inhabitants actually used it as such, but ASCO has never let us use it as a parking area. From the three different companies that drop off bar stock and tubing, to pallet delivery and removal trucks, to the metal recycling trucks and not to forget the garbage dumpster people, there is just too much truck traffic back here, that even if they did allow parking, I wouldn’t risk it.

55,000 Crappy Pallets


Like any manufacturing facility, the Valve Store brings in a lot of stuff to accomplish its mission and most of the large quantities of an item come on pallets of wood and occasionally plastic. Sometimes these pallets get damaged in some way shape or form and are no longer usable to ship our product back out the door.

That chain link fencing with the maroon slats behind that big ol’ pile is where on one side the broken ones are supposed to go and on the other the fresh new pallets get stored until needed. Almost always the broken ones just get get unceremoniously dumped next to, not in, the fenced area to await recycling. I haven’t seen the guy who comes to pick up the junk ones recently, so the pile has grown quite large. Because we are getting a visit from the President of ASCO next week, who is a stickler for neatness, somebody needs to clean up this mess just like I had to do for my desk.

Well, today Waste Management dropped off a 40-yard dumpster which the minions of shipping filled up in short order. It made a dent in the pile, but a couple hours later a truck showed up to drop off a second dumpster (and cart off the full one.) Those same people filled up the second one right after lunch. When I left at the end of today that second full dumpster was still sitting there. And scattered around outside the dumpster there looked like at least another dumpster full.

Yesterday when I pulled into the garage after work the CTBNL’s odometer read 50,002.

Paper Recycling Under Our 5S Rules

The President of the company is going to be visiting the Valve Store in early August and apparently he is a big proponent of 5S. So much so that he is almost militant about it. So a few months back they forwarded a PowerPoint presentation about how we can prepare our cubicles so as to look nice and neat and orderly. But very few individuals actually took it as to mean the letter of the law. My cubical neighbor to the rear was one of them1, so not to be outdone, I did too2. This morning with the visit closer on the horizon the PowerPoint presentation was re-emailed to every one. There were just 2 items I still needed to address, so I undertook them this morning.

The first was removing the white cardboard pieces I had strategically placed in the A/C vents to keep the cold air from blowing on my neck and the second was removing the boxes under my desk, one of which was my paper recycling one. With that gone I wondered how I should handling that usual gathering of no longer need paper pile. So I emailed my immediate supervisor:

Boss,

In the past I kept an old box that the reams of paper come in under my desk where I would toss waste paper for recycling. I’d empty it every month or whenever it got fairly full. On the second page (which is numbered 43) of the 5S rules you forwarded4 yesterday, bullet point #6 says “No boxes, parts, etc. stored under the desktop, drawers, etc.”, so I have tossed my recycling box in a gray recycling cart on the Assembly floor.

I figure I have three options on what to do with paper that needs to be recycled:

  1. Just toss it in the trash.
  2. Put in a pile on the desktop (space is not an issue for this) and each day on the way out the door throw it in the big blue bin.
  3. Spend $8 on a dedicated recycle “waste” basket from Staples.

What is your opinion on my best way to recycle paper under our 5S rules?

Brian

When his answer back was that he was going to check with the big boss about buying everyone a blue wastebasket, I wrote back saying that not to worry about that as my letter was sort of tongue in cheek and that I was planning on doing #2. And that actually I was going to take the whole Lean thing even further by instead of waiting until the end of the day, because the large department blue recycling can was right next to the printer, I would dump my paper to be recycled every time I went over to pick up my freshly minted future recycling.

Richard the Safety Guy

The Valve Store has always been a safe place to work. We of course have a Safety Committee made of salary and hourly employees, but it is ingrained in the culture and it shows. You can never be too safety conscious in a machining & manufacturing factory. And our parent organization, Emerson Corporation, which manufactures all kinds of gizmos worldwide, treats safety as a high priority as well.

Up until recently the company’s main safety coordinator was a dual job person, she was also our on-site Occupational Health Nurse. As our number of employees has grown, both the health portion and the safety portion became too big for one person.5 Enter, Richard. He is a nice enough guy and by all accounts a very intelligent individual. But, you knew there was something coming didn’t you? As sometimes really, really smart people are, he can be a little flaky.

The other day he came into our Fabrication offices and started to explain to our engineer that he had done a walk-thru and noticed that one of the anti-fatigue mats had a turned up corner that created a trip hazard and need to be replaced. Tom says, “Sure I’ll write up a purchase request right now.” “What size?” “It’s ahh,” he then starts to hold out his arms, moving them around in an approximation of a rectangle, “about that big.” Tom asks, “Which machine?” Richard replies, “Well, it was back there on the left side when I walked through and it is the 3rd or 4th or maybe 6 or 7 back.” The entrance to our offices are smack in the middle of the manufacturing area and seeing as there was no mention of which direction he was traveling when he came in, the offending mat could be anywhere on the shop floor. Tom sighs, and says, “I’ll take care of it.”

This is where I come in, because Tom comes over to the Arts & Crafts Department, tells me the above story and then says, “That guy has sure got some fantastic Safety Powers. Could you design me a logo for his super hero identity?” I ask playfully, knowing Tom, and knowing where he is going, “Nice SG for safety guy?” “No,” Tom says, “I was thinking more along the lines of SD.” “S for safety, combined with the first letter for a Richard nickname that is not-so common in usage anymore.”6 So I used the color green for safety, a nice round logo for center chest placement and a little extra flourish added to the letter SD to get across the point.

Richard might just try and rock a suit like that at Halloween, but I bet he’d want a cape!