Shockers

Well, this was just the day for surprises. A surprise that just made me scratch my head was a printout of a picture of a football. After a few hours, my co-worker who was in a meeting yesterday for a few hours explained to me what it was. Yesterday's meeting was planning the activities in the lab. Now, we in the lab generally do a good job of coordinating work to make all of our deadlines even when they are difficult. We refer to these extra meetings "defensive huddles" because they end exactly where we started: get the guy with the ball. We already know what to do, but every now and then we stop to be told to do what we already know is needed.

The good surprise was that the waterjet made it through the night without dying (it had a habbit of throwing a fatal error in the software whenever the antivirus decided to perform an update). This will save me some headaches.

The big surprise, for better or worse, is that our technican is leaving. He does the work that nobody really want to do nor has time for. It typically took some time for him to get to it and you needed to stay on top of him to make sure it got done and done exactly, but it definatly freed up hours that I and others just could not afford to lose.

With that on the near horizon, there has been some shifting going around and planning changes. I think that I am going to be sucked into more shop work since I know more about the machinery and been putting extra hours in the shop due to the waterjet. I really want to get back to testing.

So, today was good other than the surprises. I got 18 compression specimen cranked out (6 ungaged, and I gaged 3) in addition to three hours of waterjet work and running the oven.

I'm pondering setting up a work ticket system to better coordinate activites now that we are one person down. I'll have to see about editing my old (and very crude) system (PHP and MySQL based) I built last year for task management.