An old job... or two.

Rather than do the list of jobs bit, I figured I'd mention a bit about one place I worked. The place was a little shop that did some design, some electrical assembly and some motor repair. I started doing some assembly there as a part-time job during school, I think, or else it was just a Summer job at first.

The electrical assembly wasn't small stuff like putting a radio together, but putting together things like control panels for industrial applications. This wasn't pure 'stuff the part in and solder'. Instead it was: remove packing from console case, remove steel panels from case, layout mounting holes (we had templates for most of this), drill the mounting holes, tap the mounting holes, mount larger parts and rails for smaller parts, mount the smaller part, wire it all together. There was also a tiny bit of welding using a stud-welder to put grounding points in the case. It may sound simple and overall it was simple. It was also my first encounter with poor low-level management. More on that a bit later.

When the "panel shop" was slow for a while, I wound up working in the "motor shop" - the shops were effectively two different buildings that had been joined by a short hallway. Here, I mainly wound coils. Sometimes I'd do tests on the stators (the non-moving outer part) of motors to make sure that they did not need repair. This involved passing a well-insulated cable through the stator and turning on a current, then feeling around the stator for hot spots. If the laminations were shorted, induced current would rapidly heat that area. Most tests were no big deal and I think I only encounter a bad stator once. One larger motor required a large current. You get to wondering just what all can go wrong and what electric field might do when working up close with 400 Amps.

Both jobs could be done by pretty much anyone, really. It was the panel shop supervisor who kept reminding everyone of that - which didn't help any. It further didn't help when they did hire someone "off the street" and that person turned out not to do so well after all. The other bit was the "shut up and get to work - if you're talking you ain't working" bit. Talk was needed, some for the job, and some to keep it from being mind-numbingly boring.

The motor shop supervisor was almost the exact opposite. He never said anything, that I recall, about getting just anyone to do something or other. His rule was, "So long as you're moving and doing stuff, being productive, I don't care how much you talk or what about." This made the much more boring job of coil winding much more interesting than the panel shop work. There'd be the usual talk of the news and sports, but also all manner of other things. Some things which some folks might never expect in a blatantly blue-collar job got serious and interesting discussion. Public Radio was often the radio station of choice. One guy even took his lunch late just to listen to Chapter A Day in peace as he worked.

The difference in attitude between the shops was amazing. The panel shop was often depressing, and not just from the country music some liked to have on the radio. The motor shop was almost never depressing. It was often harder, duller work, but that didn't matter.

One shop never turned a profit. The running joke, even after I'd left, was that it was the non-profit division of the company. The other shop was profitable - and set production records three months straight in a particularly hot and nasty Summer. It should surprise nobody which is which, yet both were at the same company and in the same location.