"Progress" - - At A Tedious Pace

Thursday, February 19

Yesterday I was working on another aluminum bulkhead with a contractor named Elmore. Elmore is a tall, skinny black man with a hatchet face and a goatee. He has a 24-year-old son who is also working on our ship and is a dead-ringer for his father - - or at least a dead ringer for how his father must have looked 24 years ago - - right down to the goatee. Elmore Sr. is quiet and not articulate, but a good worker, a "self-starter," and a competent, knowledgeable fitter.

Well, we got in a couple of hours work before we came to a dead stop because we needed some tack welding. We had a welder assigned to us, but no firewatches, so the welder couldn’t even strike an arc. Some bean counter had cut the number of firewatches on our ship. They are short of aluminum welders, but because of the lack of firewatches two aluminum welders spent the entire day idle. Makes sense to cut costs like that, right? Should I have been surprised to see this kind of incompetence and disorganization? I see it nearly every day. Well, Elmore Sr. and I joked that today we would have the firewatches but no welder. We were wrong. They still hadn’t resolved the firewatch problem and one of the aluminum welders laid out, so we had neither.

We had just come up with a couple of things we could do without a welder, when Starner, who was late again this morning, came and threw a monkey wrench in our plans. He said that because we didn’t have a welder or firewatches he was going to put us on another job for the day - - a job helping Vince. Vince is working on another part of the aluminum job and he already has a helper. Starner said some things had to be finished on that part of the job for the 50 percent progress review, which is coming up in a few days. Just to refresh your memory, a couple of weeks ago he told us they’d already had the 50 percent review and we were over our quota of hours. Obviously, that was bullshit, at least the part about the 50 percent review having taken place.

There are two related motives for wanting to show certain progress for this review. Starner and the other supervisors are under pressure from their bosses to show progress, but in the end it’s about money. (Surprise!) For one thing, if the ship isn’t completed on schedule it means big fines for the company. But also, the government pays in installments based on the percentage of work completed. The problem here is that what Starner wants done can cause disruption of the production plan. That is to say, of Vince’s production plan.

Vince, or Vicente, is a Chicano from California, close to retirement age and hard of hearing. He is an affable, humorous guy, but he’s very plodding and methodical in his work and he is going to do things his way come hell or high water. He’s also a pack rat. He spent at least two weeks assembling materials and tools for the job before he began any work at all. He’s got I don’t know how many fish boxes containing every tool known to shipfitting and then some, as well as hoards of every kind of supply from earplugs and respirator cartridges to saw blades, grinding wheels, and extension cords. As I watched him marshal this war chest it reminded me of Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War, who built up a huge, well equipped army around Washington for a never-to-happen invasion of the South. (It was this that prompted Lincoln to make his famous quip, "If you’re not going to use this army, I’d like to borrow it for a week.")

Unlike McClellan, Vince did eventually get under way, but at his own pace - - a tedious pace - - and with the help of several assistants. But Starner’s attempt to dictate a faster and the order that Vince would do things resulted in almost nothing getting done today, either by Vince and his helper, who I call "Glitch," or by Elmore and myself, since we weren’t about to step in and take over Vince’s job.