Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Pour hot coffee down your pants

So. I work two part-time jobs for the same company, basically. I work 30 hours a week as their surface mount assembler, and 10 hours a week as their technical writer. Well, my writing handler panicked for some reason and begged my assembly supervisor to let him have me on writing all day today. My assembly boss doesn't really have a choice because my writing boss outranks him, so he had me "train" a coworker on how to surface mount as quick as I could and then go do writing for the rest of the day.

So, the panic was, my writing boss wanted me to finish three priority SOPs (standard operating procedures) today.

One of them I had already completed up to the testing phase. I had worked on it on Tuesday and when the time came to write up the testing part, the shipping department had already packed them all up to be sent out so I couldn't take any pictures. We had another one of those units made today, and it took about 5 minutes for someone to walk me through the testing procedures and it will take about 10 minutes to plug those pictures into the SOP and get the change order circulating for it.

The second one already has an SOP for it, but they changed a piece of hardware and needed a new picture. Again, it took maybe five minutes to walk through the new hardware procedure and it won't take long to add it to the existing SOP.

The third one is a totally new procedure, but in order to write the SOP, I have to shadow someone who is making it, write down what they do at each step, and take pictures of each step. That's no biggie, except that no one is making one today so it would be absolutely impossible for me to make that SOP today.

So... I asked my writing handler if he wanted me to go back to assembly (since the guy I trained on surface mounting was complaining of a headache about an hour after he got started because of concentrating for extended periods on the tiny components and he isn't used to it so he's going very slowly. He can't help that, everyone goes slow when it's their first time.) And my writing boss goes "Nah! I already have permission to keep you, so I'm just going to keep you!"

So I'm working on non-priority SOPs now, and there are only two of those that I can do at the moment. I already have all the pictures and shadowing done for one, and the other is a quick procedure that will not take more than half an hour from start to finish. Assembly will be all behind downstairs today, meanwhile upstairs I have nothing to do. xD Plus tomorrow they are making the new procedure, so I will be upstairs on SOPs tomorrow whether I finish my ten hours today or not. Assembly does not get to play with me this week.

One of the engineers' computer died. So the engineers have gotten nothing done all day and they are crabby over getting nothing done all day.

The accountant is mad at my assembly boss because he signed off on one of my SOPs without reading it and missed the fact that I missed a huge important step. You have to read those before you sign off on them. No really, you do! Especially when I'm writing SOPs for things I have never made before. I'm taking someone else's word for it, the word of whoever I'm shadowing. That needs checked on, that's why I send it around to 4 different departments and get it signed off by every single one before publishing it.

The assembly boss is mad at one of my coworkers because he lost a date stamp and then blamed it on me. The engineers had it up in their office, I'm the one who is least intimidated by the engineers (I'm married to one of them and friends with the other and they are nice, normal people but everyone else is scared of them) so my boss asked me to retrieve it. I fetched it (with the permission of the engineers) and put it on my boss's desk. My boss used it between then and now, he KNOWS I put it on his desk. My coworker then used it and lost it, then told my boss that he hadn't seen it since I got it from the engineers. Lies and slander! The boss yelled at him for lying. Then the same coworker filed down the tip of a flat head screw driver to a sharp point and my boss accidentally stabbed himself in the hand with it and there was blood and shouting. xD