Mess #3
Pizza Room Problems
One of the food plants I worked at had three pizza assembly rooms. One of the rooms was a high speed pizza operation. I was the supervisor of that room on second shift.
This was a very difficult operation to manage. It has been said, and I think rightly so, that if you can supervise in the food industry, you can supervise anywhere.
However, just because you can do something does not mean that you want to. I hated every single day working there with a passion without exception. They paid me very well to relocate there so I figured I owed them a year of service. Further, it doesn't look good on your resume to change companies that frequently.
Every day I would go into this Stephen King deli of a pizza room and look at our orders. We would change over 20 or more times a day, with almost no stopping. Then I would make the production schedule for our room.
First the orders had to be organized by the type of pizza sauce. The sauce was the most time-consuming thing to change. One store-brand customer had to have their own. Unfortunately for us, it was really tasty and was not going to ever be changed to our regular sauce. Nor would they allow the other brands to use their sauce. (Admittedly many years later I still go out to one of their stores and buy their pizzas from time to time.)
Next, I would arrange the orders by crust size. The crust was very demanding to manage. I wore a radio and had to call for crust size changes from the bakery, which came into our room non-stop via a direct conveyor.
I had to coordinate the correct crust size to come on the conveyor at the correct time for each order. If we did not have the crust come into the room at the correct time, we had to stack off crusts and have downtime, or send someone over to the bakery to pick up some more crusts of the size we needed until the correct size arrived by conveyor. The wrong sized crusts had to be continually stacked off.
I also had to manage the toppings. I tried to delegate this to a line person and he did a pretty good job of it. Sometimes I had to intervene. If the topping room could not supply us, we actually had to make on-the-fly real time complicated changes to the schedule and coordinate the aforementioned all over again.
Then we had to put the correct brand label on each pizza. We had our own labels for our own brand, then some of the customers wanted their own store label put on them.
To make it all that much worse, customers wanted us to put idiotic price tags on their pizzas. Most of the time, the tag was not the real price, but an inflated price to make the real price look low.
Owners of food companies love to be the direct salesmen and sell the product without worrying about how to make it all. Evidently they find the production side of things a nuisance. Our management was more than happy to oblige with the price tags. They tell the customers they can have whatever they want.
Another such owner of a place I supervised had over 900 SKU (Shelf Keeping Units) In other words, by the time you added all the various store brands and sizes, there were over 900 products.
The only problem with such "service" is that the stress of it ruins their own people's health and destroys their families. At one such location I personally knew an employee who routinely worked mandatory 16 hour plus days. (up to at least 19 hours) He dropped dead while working on the line.
I am not the person someone wants to talk to if they are a big advocate of JIT (Just In Time) While they talk about the philosophy of it, I have seen the ugly reality of it.
This low inventory madness has ruined about every job in the country. It creates total perpetual chaos. It bets that things will go perfectly, and of course they don't. The steep costs of this ideal is not readily evident on paper.
I digress even further; There was a clothing store in my hometown. They had been in business for a few generations. The clothing store was way too big for the small town, but customers came there from all over.
I asked the owner of the clothing store one time how he attracted business from other towns. He said that when times are tough, they would increase their inventory and selection, while all the other stores would cut back to save money. The store was out of business not long after it was bought by a younger couple who went in a different direction.
The pizza room was so accommodating to the customer with its nearly unlimited amount of options. Everything was custom order. This had a huge cost in changeovers, confusion, waste, and definitely misery.
Note that this "customer" is not the consumer, but a middleman.
The misery of high turnover manifests itself in hiring and training costs, which are huge when you factor in all of the mistakes a new person makes. These costs don't readily show up anywhere on the income statement.
The store chains loved the ridiculous price stickers. Sadly this stupid and deceptive practice was usually not even the real price. Retail chains would have us put them on. Then once they got to the store, they would put on a lower price with their own sticker to make it look like a discount. This marketing practice added a whole layer of complexity to managing the already unwieldy, broken production system.
Sometimes an order would only run about 5 minutes. We would scramble to get the exact amount of pizzas in the last few boxes and have to be ready to go to the next order. What brand? What price? Etc.
Sometimes, during the confusion too many cases of an order would be made up. So among our other duties, we would have to take all the labels off of the pizzas and repack then again with the correct one.
After making the schedule, it would be time for the workers to arrive. I would take into account who was absent. The low-wage people miss a lot of work because their lives are in constant turmoil. They get "hurt" a lot. Their quality is often suspect. Their comprehension of anything complex is often weak. There are always just enough of the good ones there to keep the doors open. The good ones must be treated like gold.
Another major difficulty in the multi-faceted mess is the wrapping machine. It puts the layer of clear plastic over the pizzas.
While packaging, if we would find holes bigger than a millimeter on the back of the cardboard along the seam, we would have to unwrap the pizzas. While unwrapping them, pepperoni slices or other toppings would stick to the plastic and go flying off.
Stopping the line and feeding these pizzas back through the wrapper again was a big downtime problem.
One time a USDA inspector came in and opened a twin pack of pizzas and found a pepperoni missing. Our pepperoni slicing machine was pretty good, but not infallible. Our inspection on the line was quite fallible as well.
Since this one pizza was not fully topped by one slice, it was considered underweight by the Federal Government. We had to go through and re-open pallets loaded with cases of twin-packs. We had to open and inspect every pizza for any missing pepperonis. Then we had to replace everything that fell off. We did not have good production numbers that night.
When I first started at the company, the room was a total disaster. People would wander away from the room. I caught one guy laying down in the break room in the bakery. The pizza room had a ridiculous amount of downtime. The monkeys were clearly running the zoo.
Immediately we started doing better. There was nowhere to go but up. This progress continued through the weeks and months that followed. I worked hard with the people who were used to doing things their own way, to assemble a better team.
Those who did not want to get with the program would be weeded out. Sometimes I would get people in the room who were too good for the job (literally) and should have been making more money working somewhere else. I treated them with respect and gave them more important responsibilities. They would either stay awhile longer or get promoted and be more long term.
Another issue in dealing with the chaotic room was getting the line to stop when things started to get out of control. They would pile up unwrapped pizzas at the wrapper. They would pile up pizzas without toppings at the topping machine. They were piled way up to be packed. Stacked pizzas would look terrible if they sat there for long.
I couldn't figure out why they would stack stuff up and not stop. They agreed that they wanted to not have to work around stacks of pizzas. But then they still kept doing it. Finally, I realized they were previously often yelled at by my boss, Priscilla. Priscilla yelled at people not to stop the line.
From what she told me, Priscilla thought I could be a good tyrant like her. Maybe she thought I would go into the room and forcibly whip everyone into shape and make her look like the fantastic manager that she was not.
As I mentioned, I hated every single day I worked there with a passion. To be fair, much of it was Priscilla's doing. She was far from qualified to be my boss. On a personal level, she was difficult to work with. She would talk down to everyone like they were a child. She had a negative opinion of black people. Her only management experience was evidently rooted in being a mom.
I totally disagreed with her way of doing things. She did nothing but add to the chaos and waste. She did not come into the room much, at my request, but when she did, all she did was come in there and yell around at my people awhile and make them stack up pizzas. When she would leave, I would immediately stop and bring the situation back to a sensible working condition.
In her simple mind, she expected us to never have problems with the entire mess I have described here. When we did, she would try to blame me by saying, "You had a really rough night last night." Of course we did. We always did. Then she would come up with her simplistic solutions such as , "You have to keep the lines running and don't let them stop all the time." It was like I was supposed to prevent the problems by yelling at the people. The supervisors who yelled at the people in the other pizza rooms were held in high esteem at the Company by their "coordinators".
One Afternoon, Priscilla decided that she needed to personally intervene after one of these "rough nights". She came into the room for an extended period of time and was yelling at my people for not doing things her chaotic way. Her yelling came across to them as for no good reason and contemptuous. People started asking me to get her out of the room. I knew they were right. She wasn't helping anything.
So I did just that. I asked her to let me run the room. This is what I was there for. She insinuated that I was incompetent. I did not have all of the "experience" that she had. In my mind, I was under-hired and should have been her boss.
Therefore I requested a private meeting with her. I basically told her I disagreed with her way of doing things and that her expectations were unreasonable. She stood up and glared at me, in contempt, and told me nothing. Very unprofessional, I thought.
Then she went and got her boss the production manager, Mr. Poindexter. Poindexter swallowed Priscilla's version of what was going on without even listening to me. Poindexter had almost never even set foot into my room. He was a little guy who wanted to show me who was boss, I guess. That surprised me, because I thought he was a lot smarter than that.
Poindexter told me that he was moving me temporarily into one of the slow rooms. This was supposedly my degrading punishment for my belligerent display of trying to talk to my boss. I was elated to get away from her nonsense.
That job in the slow room was such cake. I did not mind it at all. No tension, no chaos. It seemed to me I could be quite content to stay there.
But after only a week or so, Priscilla came into the room and asked me if I was ready to come back to her room.
I flatly told her, "no."
To my astonishment, she said, "I can't believe you said that."
Why would I want to go back to her torment?
The guy who replaced me for a week in the high speed room was a big time yeller. I understood it because he didn't know any other way. So we did get along okay.
He wanted out of there badly. He pleaded with the managers. He told them how tough it was in there and how bad he wanted out.
At least some of my people wanted me back. Poindexter put me back, rationalizing that I had learned my "lesson", even though I never dropped the contention that they were always totally off-base.
Due to the brevity of my stay in the slow room, I felt that their quick reversal gave me righteous leverage over my cowardly detractors.
As an epilogue to all this pizza pain; the next company I went to also hired Poindexter. Awhile after I was there. I knew he was going to be a problem for me there. Sure enough, Poindexter still had the idea I was a troublemaker. My co-workers at the new company wondered what his problem was. I suspect Poindexter and Priscilla submarined me later in my goofy career by giving me some bad references.
I resolved that I would never tolerate anyone like them again. Ever.
The Phantom Wrestler
Perhaps he heard of my wrestling loss to Armando (from Canadian Adventure) or because he was bigger than me, Cleon was bragging that he could beat me in a wrestling bout. I asked him if he ever had any wrestling training, and he told me he hadn't.
I told him there was no chance he would beat me. He said he could with no problem, so I challenged him.
When I was involved in High School wrestling, once in awhile someone would think it was easier than it looked, and they were big and bad, so they came into the practice room to challenge us. It was barely worth our attention. We knew that our smallest guy could take anyone who wandered in. So I was basically assured of a victory, and I gave Cleon no satisfaction at all. So we agreed to meet at a town park after work for the match.
Word of the match spread like wildfire. When I got to the park it was closed. Cars from work were pouring into the park to see the action. I thought for sure we were going to get busted, but I was not going to be the one who backed down from the challenge.
We waited for awhile and no Cleon. We wondered, what was taking him so long? A guy from another area of the plant was there. He went to the nearby bar and found Cleon sitting there drinking. Cleon told the guy that he guessed he fooled us all.
I proclaimed victory by default and got out of there before the police came. A disappointed crowd badgered Cleon hard while he was at work the next day.
I reminded him that the challenge was still open. He never took me up on it. Wimp.