Crybaby Don
Author's Note: This is the same Don mentioned in the story "Misfortune Cookie".
Don was a very ambition-challenged worker. He had a job that could be done while leaning most of the time. The real lazy part comes in where he finally after all of that leaning, should have been doing something, but still maintained a static state of inactivity.
One of my numerous jobs at this food processing company was to prepare egg roll ingredients for frozen egg rolls. We would run hundreds of pounds of meat and vegetables through a slicer. Then we would weigh out the ingredients into stainless steel barrels. Then flip the barrels into a vat of boiling water. After that, we raked the vegetables into a conveyor.
We were busy all the time. We did hard physical work with all of the lifting. We were young and strong so it was a decent job for us. There was not so much in the way of headaches on the job.
Yet Don was a big pain. We would page him to bring mung bean sprouts to us which was about all of the physical activity Don would ever see. The sprouts would arrive in large wheeled tubs about the size of a compact car. It took some effort to move them.
Don knew that if he would ignore us long enough, to keep the line from going down, we would go all the way over there and get the tubs ourselves, then bring back the empties for him. Don was also supposed to pick the empties up. When we did bring them back, we would see Don leaning on some equipment, and looking at it as if it would not run and needed his expert attention.
This behavior caused us to become very disappointed in Don.
Sometimes we chose to leave his empty tubs pile up in our department. A couple of times we moved them to the far side of the department so he would have to go get them. That really tweaked him off.
On other occasions we would take the abundance of tubs back all at once.
Don would say, "Set it over there."
Instead we belligerently jammed them all right in his way so he couldn't move. He was red hot. We put water from the drinking fountain into our fists and them rubbed our eyes like we were crying, with water running down.
"WAH!"
Everyone in his department was hooting and laughing at him. People in Don's department, other than him, worked extremely hard. They worked even harder than us, and Don did nothing to help them out.
Whenever we would page Don at lunch time for full tubs, he would come back over the loudspeaker, "I'm at lunch!" The pages both ways could be heard all over the plant. My partner and I took a liking to hearing him yell on the intercom. So if we needed some sprouts near his lunch time, we would wait a bit after we called to see if he would yell. He never disappointed. Then when he did bring the tanks over, he would slam them into the wall or equipment to show his disapproval of us.
One time I boldly paged Don while he was at lunch and waited a few seconds.
He screamed the obligatory, "I'm at lunch!"
Then I came back with a page, "Next time check to see if we need any before you go." That got the supervisor's attention since he knew Don would be furious. So, the supervisor told me that was not an appropriate page. I asked him if it would be appropriate for him to yell at us over the intercom when he should have supplied us. The supervisor said he would straighten it out.
Boy was Don mad when he brought the sprouts over. He almost slammed them into the line. He would have been a cooked goose if that would have happened. We showed our empathy for his plight by pointing at him and laughing as hard as possible.
Kosherization: At one company we paid to have a rabbi come in and declare an item was kosher so we could get their seal. Sometimes the Company would choose to ignore their blessing and run without it. Not my call. Realistically though, our cleaning process was far superior to what they expected.