The Write Up Before My Pension Vested

The night in question, I need to tell it the way it actually happened, because the write-up told it a different way.

Third shift runs with one setup man on duty whose whole job is handling tooling changes on whichever press needs a die swapped between runs.

For about four months, that man had been a fellow named Earl, who put in for a transfer to days in September because his wife’s health needed him home nights, and that transfer got approved, and somebody was supposed to schedule a replacement setup man starting the first week of October.

Nobody did. I don’t know to this day whether that was Tyler’s doing directly or a scheduling software hiccup he never caught, and either way it does not much matter, because the result was the same: on the night of the ninth, Press Twelve needed a die change at eleven-thirty for the next day’s run, and there was no setup man on the floor to do it, and Press Twelve sitting idle for a shift costs the plant more money in four hours than my whole week’s pay.

Gib Lindqvist was foreman that night. Gib has run third shift for about as long as I’ve worked it, and Gib knew exactly two men on that floor who could do that particular die change clean and fast without a setup man standing over them, and I was one of them, and I was running Press Four at the time, which was between cycles and could sit locked out for the forty minutes it would take without costing the plant one part.

“Russ, I need you on Twelve,” Gib said. “Lock out Four first.”

“You got it.”

I locked out Press Four the way the safety manual says to lock it out, tag with my name and the time on it, and I walked over to Twelve, and DeShawn Carter was standing right there loading stock, and he heard the whole thing same as I did, because Gib doesn’t whisper.

I did the die change. Forty-one minutes by my own watch, start to finish, and I walked back to Press Four, pulled my own lock, and finished the shift.

I did not think one more thing about it until Tyler Beck called me into his office two weeks later with a printout from a camera that had gone in as part of what the holding company called a modernization initiative, which is a nice way of saying they put cameras up where there never used to be any, and told me the camera showed me leaving my post for forty minutes with, in his words, no record of authorization.

“I have Gib’s authorization,” I told him. “Gib told me himself, DeShawn was standing right there.”

“Gib’s shift report that night doesn’t mention it.”