skippy the bush kangaroo: question of the day...

Monday, November 30, 2009

question of the day...

when you're running a printing press at around 31,000 revolutions per hour... and the paper trail suddenly breaks with a loud snap... and it takes you about two full seconds to figure out what that loud snap was because you almost never hear a noise like that... and the press is still running... and before you can slam your fist upon the nearest emergency stop button, the paper has wrapped around one of the cylinders about thirty times... and the belt for that cylinder is still turning, but the gears have frozen up... and because it takes the press about three seconds to roll to a complete stop, the friction between the moving belt and the unmoving gears creates one hell of an unpleasant noise until everything stops turning...

do you try to fix as much of the mess as you can before your boss finds out, or do you just seek your boss out first and say, "y'all ain't gonna like this, but..."

discuss...

Labels: life, questions

posted by Jim Yeager at 6:48 AM |

3 Comments:

Dunno your boss, but if it was me, I'd be happier to know that the problem was fixed or what needs to be repaired, than to be told of a problem without some sense of the scope.

commented by

mahakal, 10:07 AM PST

My dad ran a litho press for more than 35 years; mostly business forms and checks. He lost a finger tip once and got his hand caught once, and he's mostly deaf because they didn't used to have earplugs or headphones back when he got started.

I asked him once what his biggest nightmare would be; would it be having his hand caught with greater injury?

He said when he had nightmares about work, it was that the presses would be running and the paper was gone. He said he had vivid nightmares about that.

commented by

donnah, 7:27 AM PST

Mahakal: I went straight to my boss first thing. My basic philosophy in these situations is, Expect The Worst. Work And Hope For The Best. And I've had a lot of success with this approach over the years. Hard to believe, but when speaking from the heart comes naturally to you and just plain don't give a damn anymore, some things just seem to go your way.

Donnah: I have the occasional long and vivid mightmare about printing, too. But for me, the killers are the ones where no matter what I do to get the press running, I can't get it to run. These dreams are in the same league as the ones in which I'm being pursued by a big, bad, growling man-eating monster and I'm running away from it in super slow-motion. It's the same primal terror to me...

commented by

Jim Yeager, 8:17 AM PST

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