The Machining Department

It was a learning experience

I first got hired at my current job in March of 2022, they put me in the machining department on a CNC lathe. I’d never worked one of these machines before but it was absurdly simple, you put the part onto the spindle, lock it down, close the door, press the button and wait for the tools to come in and shave a few thousandths of an inch off the part and when the process was done you handed the part over so it could be gauged. Apparently they had been struggling to find someone to run the machine efficiently before I arrived. My first night I machined a little over 200 parts and the leader of the machining department, a middle aged black guy named Leonard, was impressed. After my first night I got assigned to that particular machine permanently by him.

My direct supervisor was a wiry dude named Dan, we called him Can Man Dan because he would go around at the end of every shift and check every single garbage can for returnable bottles and cans, he claimed he had over $200 worth of bottles and cans in his garage. I don’t know how he returned the bottles because his license was suspended after a DUI and he was forced to ride a bike to work. Dan was a great guy but definitely troubled, our department’s efficiency rate was very low while he was in charge, there were many times the machines malfunctioned and Dan didn’t have the know-how to fix them. Needless to say we produced a ton of scrap on a night by night basis. There were days when I would be idle for as long as 5 hours while Dan tried to dial the machines in as best he could. Unsurprisingly our numbers were regularly low and I was witness to Dan getting dressed down by management several times.

While first shift had several senior people who could help program and maintain the machines, Leonard didn’t seem to have a good knowledge of how the CNC machines functioned or how to program or troubleshoot them. In my department were three guys, me and another guy who ran the machines and Dan who oversaw the team, dialed the machines in, and gauged the parts. None of us really knew much about the machines besides the basics of how they operated. If one of the machines were malfunctioning Leonard was no help, he would simply shrug and tell us to “figure it out” and if our rates were low we’d get grief from management. The turnover rate on our crew was extremely high, I felt like I was working with a new person every week. The people Leonard typically assigned us were useless, they either couldn’t understand how to work the machines or would spend most of the shift on their phones. One guy got yelled at by Leonard for being on his phone and quit on the spot. The turnover rate back there was insane, I hardly had time to learn people’s named before they left.

One time Leonard introduced me to another woman who worked on our shift named Eva and asked if I wouldn’t mind giving her a ride home. I didn’t like being volunteered for such things especially since I didn’t feel like driving to the other side of town to drop her off, but I wanted to be a team player so I said yes. Eva was a short latina with a shitty attitude and a persecution complex.

There was another girl on our shift named Desiree and her and Eva didn’t get along, they almost got into a physical altercation during one of our employee meetings and I had to drive Eva home that night. The entire time she was going on about how Desiree had “called me out my name” and how she was a “janky hood rat bitch”, I sat in silence for 20 minutes listening to this woman who was my age go on and on like a high schooler describing a fight in home room until I finally dropped her off at her shitty apartment.

I don’t know how neither Eva or Desiree got fired, I figured management wanted to keep any workplace hostility under wraps so they let them both off with a warning. And of course two days later Eva got into another fight with another girl and was fired immediately because one of the managers was standing mere feet away when the conflict unfolded. I don’t know what women like Eva have to be so angry about, maybe this other girl had given her a look she didn’t like or some other assinine shit a mature person would shake off, people like Eva struggled with conflict avoidance to say the least. I didn’t see this unfold but when one of my coworkers told me she’d been fired and escorted out of the building I was so happy because I couldn’t do another long drive with this woman hyperventialting about “punk ass bitches” in my passenger seat.

There was another guy named Ian who worked on a specialized machine which was close to my area. He was a hard working guy but once every hour or so he would head outside to do a bump of cocaine in his car which was parked right outside the nearby exit doors, he would be wired for long segments of the day, real manic energy as you could imagine. I usually slugged a few energy drinks throughout my shift and that was more than enough, I couldn’t imagine taking narcotics and still functioning at work. One day one of the quality assurance guys named AJ was witness to Ian’s dealer showing up at work and handing him a bag of coke on one of our breaks, I don’t know why he didn’t report him. Eventually Ian flipped out at one of the managers and walked out in the middle of the day never to be seen again, I still think about him sometimes and wonder if he’s still alive same as many other of my ex coworkers.

After a while Dan got fired and I was put in charge of our 3-man team. We had a woman named Jennifer join our shift, she was trashy, kid out of wedlock, ex-con boyfriend, real hood rat attitude. But she was good on the machine and generally not too bad to work with for the most part. Things were good back in my department for a while as I was running he gauge and I had two people under me. Jennifer, and Michael, a heavily tattooed, rail-thin ex fent addict who was a little spacey but otherwise ran the machine well.

We had a good 3-person team for a while but eventually Leonard, being the lech he was, groped Jennifer which led to her quitting and him getting fired, I was surprised a suit didn’t get filed. And Michael unfortunately relapsed and left the company, I haven’t talked to him in years and fear the worst. But that was just life around these low-income people, I spoke about this in a much older post on this Substack, when dealing with people like this you’re always having to give them money and rides and put up with endless drama because they just can’t get their shit together. I don’t judge them because I’ve had some extremely rough times in my life and I was lucky enough to have help, these people have no one to rely on, it’s a thing that goes through generations, fucked up people raising fucked up kids who in turn raise more fucked up kids. Granted, using the term “raised” in this sense is a misnomer because a lot of these peoples’ parents didn’t stick around.

Eventually I left the machining department because we lost the contract for the parts I was producing and there simply wasn’t enough work to go around. Fortunately instead of getting laid off I got transferred to the assembly department and remain there to this day. I have some interesting stories about that as well but I don’t want this piece to run too long so in the interest of the reader’s attention span I’ll write a subsequent piece about my experiences in the assembly department later. I’ve been at this company over 3 years which is my second longest tenure at one job save for a janitorial position I held in my mid 20s so I’ve been witness to a lot of strange, funny, and infuriating occurences at this place. I’m leaving the company next week to move back to my hometown, I’ll never forget this place, no matter how hard I try.

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