Steal This Blog!

Normally, I don’t work at the bakery on Fridays.  I’m there mainly to speed along the mass production work we do there, which is on the order of 100 cases of bread products a week.  It normally takes us about four workdays to pull off the orders, with a crew of four or five people.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t work on Wednesday because of a cooler malfunction, so we did end up working today to complete our work.

Apparently, there was quite a glut of work this morning, and the owner called me to let me know I should come in later, so they could do all the custom/artisan work before the manufacturing shlubs get there.  I turned my phone off the previous evening, so I didn’t get the message, and I showed up an hour earlier than he wanted.  He put me to work anyway, doing some of the small-order custom work they do every morning.  It was quite a good time, and felt like the early days of my old man’s business.

I noticed something about the owner, Doug, while I was working.  When stressed, he acts just like my father does.  I pointed this out to his wife, commenting that it’s not necessarily a good thing, because my father has had two strokes in the last ten years.  “Oh, Doug had one,” said Lori, his wife.  Apparently, four or five years ago, my boss had a minor stroke, and I jumped up and down and said, “I knew it!  I knew it!”

He’s got all the same mannerisms as my old man.  It’s not something you could pick out, it’s a lot of things.  You just have to spend time around stroke patients, and you’ll start to see.

So anyway, we blasted through today’s work partly due to my observations and suggestions about how we do production.  I’ve got quite a heap of production management experience, and I just rock at efficiency.  I can’t clean up my own room to save my life, but I can plan everyone else’s floorplan with no hassle at all.  And we rocked it.  Faster than ever.

The crew is starting to get over the shock of meeting me.  Almost all my good friends got over it at some point, realizing that I really am who I am, and rarely if ever false in the way I present myself.  I say and do what I think a lot of people would say and do, but they’re too caught up in their own idea of themselves (either that, or I’m too much of an egomaniac to consider other people’s feelings when I participate in society, or both).  They’re starting to understand my sense of humor and see me as less of an asshole and more of just a funny guy.  I don’t know, it’s kind of interesting to see it all start to click.

Also, I got a call from the local Democratic leader, who had nothing but praise for my work on their website and for my interest in the party.  I want to get involved in the party, see it into the modern age, and perhaps actually make a difference in local and state issues, instead of sitting on the edge of it all and complaining.

All in all, it’s been a pretty productive day.  We’ll see how the weekend turns out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.