kyrasantae | Day 1.5 Flares, or, CABINETS R SRS BZNS

Day 1.5

First thing today was that Anthony and I put on the finishing touches to the glass-paneled cabinet we were working on yesterday (it was essentially done yesterday, so it's on yesterday's 'items assembled' list). It has three sides with glass, and glass shelves. We needed to move it aside so that we can work on something else at our bench.

Me: "If we put it there, it's in the way of people getting by with their pallet jacks."
HER: "They're careful."

The way we put it, only a bit of the back and one of the short glass sides are exposed. I don't know what you think, but if you expose two of three glass sides of the case to the pathway, and somebody isn't careful and breaks it, then we're at fault because we put it there. You can't use "they're careful" as an excuse to NOT take all reasonable steps to keep the piece safe. That's called DEFERRING RESPONSIBILITY.
*****
We have a large bank of power drill battery chargers by the wall, charging spare batteries (TONS of them). She comes by and starts talking about "if you need to take a replacement, take one of these at the back instead of these at the front."
Anthony: "Yeah, the lights on the front ones are blinking, so they're still charging."
HER: "So take the ones from the back and don't use the front ones." etc. etc.
Anthony: "And your point is....?"
HER: "The back ones are fully charged but I unplugged the chargers."
Anthony: "You could have just said that."
*****
She disappeared randomly for long stretches of time during the shift. We know that one of them was an unannounced coffee break, but we kind of wonder about those other times.
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She asked if I wanted to take a long lunch again. "No, not today," I said. No need to come across as being any more demanding.
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We got "lectured" twice about the alignment of cabinet doors. They're tricky. They don't like to be straight. We know this, and we try really really hard to get them to line up but usually they don't do so very well. We do our best.

First, we got lectured the WRONG way:
SHE calls us over to where one of our cabinets has been taken out into the store.
"You see these hinges? This side's hinges are screwed on with the screws at the lower end of the hole, while the other side has them at the top of the hole [they're made so you can slide them up and down for fine adjustment]. You can move them to get the doors to align."
Anthony says we've already tried that (and we really do spend almost 10 minutes just fiddling with these doors after each cabinet that we build).
I point out a slight difficulty with that idea, that is, that the door of the cabinet is tilted downward at the centreline, and so moving the hinges (and therefore the entire door) up and down may not actually help. It'll still be tilted. And that we've already tried doing that.
SHE says, "you can move it up and down first, and THEN you can adjust them side to side [that's the thing about the hinges that she "showed" us a couple of days ago]..." etc. etc.
Me: "We've already tried that and it...— you know what, I'm NOT going to explain this anymore." I throw down my hands and go back to what I was doing. [Doing the side-to-side adjustment tends to widen or lessen the gap between the doors on both sides, but doesn't tend to pull the doors back up into parallel.]
She calls from across the aisle, "I'm just trying to show you how to fix this."
Me: "Don't act like you know everything! Even if you do, you should listen to what other people have to say!"
Her: "Well I'm your supervisor. And don't talk like that in front of customers!"
Anthony: "You're our supervisor, not our manager."

It was bad of me to snap, but it's not like she's being very professional about her job either, talking down to us like that. I almost wanted to play my engineering card, that I look at things and I try to understand how they work and what the purpose of each element of it is (and Anthony's studying aircraft maintenance - also very technical stuff), but I knew it wasn't very valid.

The RIGHT way:
This is the IKEA manager who is actually overseeing the assembly work that we do. She tells us that these doors are really really crooked, and did we try adjusting the hinges?
Yes, we said. In fact we spend a lot of time on it.
She says: the reason why we have HER check the stuff and then I check the stuff when it comes out is that they need to be the best they can be, and ultimately we're a business and if customers don't think it fits together well or looks right, they won't buy it. Every time you guys open up a kit and there's damaged parts, that's lost money, and it adds up really quick. Can you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE try to get them really really straight?
We understand, and they looked fine before we brought them out into the store, we said.
Well maybe all of the moving and the sliding of the cabinet ruins the alignment, and it's easier to see it on an even floor like this one [it's just concrete inside the workshop], she says. Maybe you can adjust them here instead of inside.
Yeah, we can bring out some tools and adjust them once each cabinet is out on the floor.
That's good, just take out your level and fix it up when it's out here.

*Explain what the problem is.
*Explain why the problem needs to be solved.
*Suggest why the problem might be occurring.
*Propose a solution.
It's like the 'background' section of a lab report or a scientific paper!
*****
There's another guy in our team. I haven't talked about him, but he's a little older and he often winds up having to build with HER, but he's quite... patient and puts up with her well, though he agrees that she does have a bit of an attitude problem.

I think someone takes their job WAY TOO SERIOUSLY.

Our boss showed up at the end of the shift today and asked us if there were any tools we needed. When he walked in, the two guys and I were trying to act relaxed but stay tight-lipped at the same time. Right at the end of his visit (and the end of our shift) he goes away with HER and the manager to discuss... stuff (the weekly report, I guess)

The guys wonder if she'd have the guts to mention OUR attitude. As for myself, I'm pretty sure she did. The boss will be in again on Monday, and I think a reasonable boss would try to collect both sides of the story before making any judgments. I write all of these examples down so that I don't forget them.

Items assembled