Monday morning, I got up at five like I have since Reagan, poured my thermos, drove down to the plant, and stood outside the shop gate just as first shift came walking up, and I had a binder under my arm.
I did not go in. I have never crossed a line in my life and I was not starting on the wrong side of one.
I gave the binder to Ruben Salgado, who has run the frame line eleven years, and told him it was for the floor and not for the office. Then I drank my coffee in the truck and went home.
Here is what that binder is.
In 1997 this plant changed systems and renumbered four thousand one hundred and some parts. The old numbers did not go away. They are on every drawing, every bin tag, every vendor invoice, and in the head of every supplier salesman over fifty.
The module knows the new numbers. It does not know the old ones. So when a man on the line calls for a forty-one-eleven bracket, the system says that does not exist, and everybody stands there.
I built the crosswalk at my kitchen table between 1997 and 2001, on my own time, because nobody would pay for it and the line kept going down.
Four thousand one hundred and six lines. Old number, new number, vendor number, and the bin.
Now the part that decided it, and it is not my handwriting.
Every bin in that cage has a steel tag. Stamped, not printed, by a toolmaker in 1961. Four thousand of them, every one with the part on the front.
Nobody turns them over. I did, my third week in 1996, because Deltie Vaughan told me to.
If it is not in the bin it is not in stock, no matter what the paper says. Ask the man who keeps this cage. The paper is a record of what somebody meant to do. He is a record of what happened.
Ruben took a tag off a bin, carried it into that Monday meeting, and set it on the table face down.
They called Tuesday. I let it ring. I called back Wednesday.
I am not on the floor. I am on contract three days a week, title inventory reconciliation, and what I do is sit with two young people named Kayla and Marcus and take that binder apart line by line and put it into the module properly. That will take about fourteen months.
Then those two will know it. That is the whole point and I said so out loud in a meeting.
The ops fella is still there. He comes to my table twice a week now, asks questions, and writes the answers down. He is not a bad man. He is a man who was handed a module and told it was a brain.
He apologized in March, badly, in a hallway, which is where they all do it.
He told me a filing cabinet is not a skill. A toolmaker in this plant stamped the answer to that on four thousand pieces of steel in 1961 and hung them where a man would have to be curious enough to turn one over, and in sixty-four years I have met three people who did.