welcome to real life

gotta say i am loving and at the same time a little nervous about the job.. certain aspects of it are certainly very scary in that these are huge machines, and safety is always an issue. then there is the responsibility too! decisions i take make huge immediate impacts.. every minute a machine goes down and stays down is 850 bottles we aren't putting out! every hour that it stays down the line efficiency goes down by 5%! i guess these are the pressures of being in a results- and goal-oriented private enterprise. luckily there is a strong supporting cast of supervisors and managers who are always on call so that these decisions are usually well-planned as much as possible.

on the night shift, i have to marshal the resources.. making sure the mechanics we have get out there and get the work done. often certain machines take precedence, and certain products do too! and it's not just repair work.. years of inefficient use mean machines are breaking down more often. so not only are we being reactive, by repairing them.. we have to be proactive, by maintaining them up to scratch so that they don't break down. and that is only part of the job. this is completely aside from the regular running problems that you will always have with machines, which we dub line calls.

another aspect to the job is to watch changeovers. this happens when we have to change the production line from one product to another, maybe a different bottle, and a different package. this often means starting right from the filling room and umpteen machines later the packaging. certain changeovers take three mechanics up to five hours to do that.. fifteen man hours. considering we have 5 production lines, that is quite a hefty chunk of manhours going to changeover work.

then you always have the ego-clashes, between the machine operators and the mechanics, always fighting about who knows better. it does get to be a pain trying to teach teamwork to wizened old men and cocky young high-school dropouts! sometimes the radios we wear on the lapels are so full of people yelling that it's all gobbledygook, and this is beside all the hellish noise the machines make!

so the management part consumes most of my time at work.. and the remaining time is for me to do what i love most about this job - greasemonkey work! i can get out there with one of the mechanics and learn about the equipment while i repair it! that summed together accounts for the 50-55 hours a week that i work. i'm getting used to the jet-lag effect of working night shift.. these days i just lay my down and catch my sleep whenever i can!