Surprise!!!

Ever notice how when you go to leave a message on someone's phone your IQ seems to drop to about half the normal level??? I wonder if that's because when you're actually talking to someone they reply before you can get too stupid??? There's my random rave for the day...

I had a couple surprises today at work. Remember how I kept going on about the tool I made last week not having a machine big enough to fit it??? Well, when I got in today, there was a different machine in the place of the first one!!! It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Of course, it was nowhere near ready to start making product on yet. A bit later, I was talking to one of the machine operators (I think the only one still there from when my old company was bought by these jokers 5 years ago) and he asked "isn't that the machine you guys used to have at the old place???" Yes, that was it!!! The owner of the old place had picked it up (probably for next to nothing, she is a very shrewd businesswoman) and it was sitting in our plant for probably 4 or 5 years, never got hooked up or anything. Only thing it got used for was when one of our lines would break down it would get parts stolen off it. I spoke briefly to Sloppy Joe AKA Messy Marvin and made mention of that to him, and he said yea, it was missing a lot of parts. Ironically, they yanked a bunch of them off the line that they took out.

The next surprise came a while later on. The plant manager came up to me while I was taking my break and tells me they want to make another tool, exactly like the one I made last week!!! I thought he was joking at first, they aren't even running the one I made!!! No, they're actually going to have another company start to form the parts too!!! It amazes me that we can actually pay someone else to run our jobs and still make money. Even more amazing is that the customer we're selling it to is doing a little processing on it, then selling it to the actual customer, and from there it goes to retail!!! A lot of fingers in that pot, tell you what.

Interestingly, I had a dream this morning where my wife had gone into business selling frozen foods, and that's pretty much how she was doing it, buying from a supplier and selling to a retailer. I was asking her how could she possibly be making much doing that, and she was showing me the figures. Guess I've been around that kind of thing long enough to see plenty of people doing just that. All you need is a phone, a warehouse and a calculator with a markup key!!!

Got another hit on Wheres George, putting my numbers at an interesting place. I have 333 bills that have been hit, and, with multiple hits on bills, a total of 369 hits. I thought that was pretty wild.