Tagged (again) lol...

Connie Jane nailed me this time, and since it's one that I've already done, I am going to try to answer differently where I can (there are only so mahy in some categories, sorry...a rather boring person I guess).

4 jobs I've held:

Instead of the "resume" like last time, I thought I'd put some of the jobs I've held at GM over the years...

1. When I hired in I was assigned to the "prime booth" as a painter. I hand sprayed the top of the firewall, the inside and outside of the front and rear door window rails, around the opening for the "backlight" (rear glass) and the inside of the deck lid (trunk lid). I made the mistake as my fingers started to swell from pulling the trigger on the paint gun of counting how many times I pulled it per car, times 549 cars a night, 6 days a week, and promised myself I'd never do that again!

I tried wearing a respirator about a week in because I was coughing up paint, my nose was coated with it inside, food was losing it's taste, etc.. After about 3 hours the valve in the bottom of the mask was "sticking" because it was coated with the lacquer primer we were spraying. About that same time I sneezed, and thought my eardrums were going to burst; I gave up the mask!

I did my 90 day probation there, and was lucky enough to get "bumped" out by a girl trying to go to dayshift. I was never so happy to be bumped in my whole life! We shut down for Christmas and it was a 3 days before I quit coughing up paint and blowing it out of my nose, and a week before my taste buds started to wake up. The only good thing about it was I didn't have a cold the whole time I worked in there, probably because a virus couldn't live in all the lacquer that was in my lungs!

2. Wax dip operator. They made a machine to coat the inside of the fenders with molten wax to help keep them from rusting. The fenders were hanging on a "carrier" and rolled in to a stop station, and these two tanks of molten wax raised automatically to dip the bottom 10" of the fenders, then lowered. They planned it as an unattended operation, but when the tanks lowered discovered that they had to assign people to clean the wax off the paint on the outside of the fenders! It was a sitdown job, a rarity, and lasted about a year before they decided to have a single operator spray the inside of the fenders so there was no clean up.

3. Bondrite operator. They used a spray phosphate system to "etch" the metal before it was primed to help rustproof it and help it hold paint, along with cleaning it. There was one system for the car "body" and another for the "sheet metal" (hoods and fenders). Each had 7 different "vats" of solutions that had to be monitored, using chemical tests; some you had to shovel soap into, others you had to set pumps and change 55 gallon barrels. You also had to wear a respirator (most of the chemicals were carcinogens and toxins) and look inside to check the spray nozzles. I learned the job when I was the "trainer" for the group it was in (you had to know and be able to do each job in that group, there were 23 of them at one point), then as we transitioned to the "new" plant I'm in now and the operators moved, I took over the job for the last 6 months we were in the "old" (what started as the North American B-25 plant, bought from the government after WW2 by GM) plant.

4. Material stockman. Right now, I drive a forklift, I have 15 different parts, some in "racks", some in fiberglass boxes. 3 different kinds of "rear window" glass, 5 racks of "shelfboards" (the panel below your rear window), 3 racks of "cowl screens" (the grillwork under the back edge of your hood, right and left wiper arms, the rear wiper arm for the hatchback and the motor that drives it, a roof glass for the hatchback, a small carpet panel that goes in the trunk, and 5 boxes of "carpet retainers". My forklift has a radio monitor on it, and when an operator reaches a pre-determined number of parts left, they are supposed to push a button that pops a message on my screen to tell me what they need. Most of my parts are 20 to a rack,
some are 23, a few are 40, two are 112, and one is 108. Since the multiples are close to 20 as well, I get very little peace...

For each of these I have to go pick up the full box or rack, climb down and open it, drive to the job, remove the empty, set in the full, then return the empty to a location for a dock driver to pick it up so it can be shipped out. For the parts that are close to my area, it's about a 4 minute cycle; for the ones that are further away, it's about 8 minutes to change one. I haven't counted it on my current job, on my last one I counted 140 times a night up and down off the forklift just to handle parts, not including the times I got up and down for my own reasons...(and I said I wouldn't ever do that again, lol).

Now for the more boring stuff:

4 places I've lived (not much I can change here, very boring life)

1. Kansas City, Kansas 1955-1973

2. Imperial Beach, California 1973-1978
a. NAS Imperial Beach

b. USS Kittyhawk (WestPac cruise '73-74, the one after the riots)
(Hawaii; the Phillipines; "Yankee station" off the coast of Vietnam; Hong Kong; Singapore; Mombasa, Kenya; the Persian Gulf, first US carrier there; then home again via the Phillipines and Hawaii)

c. USS Ranger (EastPac shakedown cruise out of NAS Alameda)

3. Kansas City, KS 1978-present

Four TV shows I keep up with:

1. How I Met Your Mother
2. Courting Alex
3. Freddie
4. Gilmore Girls

Four shows I'd watch again:

1. China Beach
2. Northern Exposure
3. Casey Jones (Alan Hale & Dub Taylor, in repeats when I was very small)
4. Twelve O'Clock High (the early ones with Robert Lansing)

Four places I'd rather be: (this one I can't change much)

1. Yorkshire, England for 4 seasons (Bronte country)
2. Spending a summer slowly crossing Europe from England to the Amalfi coast in
Italy.
3. Table Rock Lake, Missouri
4. Spending a week with each person on the list at the right!

My music list:

1. Joni Mitchell "Miles of Aisles" (live recording of 1974 concert)
2. Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck, the Berlin concerts
3. Gerry Mulligan "The Paris Jazz Festival, 1954"
4. Louis Armstrong, "The Complete Hot Fives and Sevens"

Some are the same, some I changed where I could. Time to shower, eat and go to work again! Hope you are each having a wonderful day!

alan