Berserker

Well, work finally did it. They've done all kinds of idiotic things that I could just laugh off. Like when they thought there wasn't enough of a rapport between operators and maintenance so all maintenance people were asked to start each day by greeting all the operators and exchanging some small talk. Of course it didn't work out. We'd show up and they'd start explaining problems they were having with their machines and we'd inform them no, we're just here to chit chat for a while, boss's orders. And there was the request to do follow-up visits on every major maintenance job we'd do during the day. Which is silly because operators will let you know in a hurry if things didn't work out. Not to mention the request to help operators run their machines when we weren't busy. As a former operator if any maintenance person would have come and tried to help me run my machines, I would have chased them away with the biggest thing I could find to swing. Which is a nice segue...

There is a deep, dark place within Jake that few have had the misfortune of witnessing. While everything work has thrown my way thus far I could simply go along with, try out, and most probably laugh about later, last week they screwed up big time. After putting in 18 hours of overtime last week providing some much needed maintenance support for other shifts, the big boss man comes out and has all of our benches moved from our usual spot off to the side where all of the big tools, machine tools, and parts are and out to the middle of the factory floor. I figured it wasn't going to go well, but I gave it a shot. Within an hour it turned out to be far worse than I had suspected. I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that Jake crossed that line of no return. From that point there are only two things that might satiate me.

1. Our benches getting moved back to their original location which had numerous advantages.
2. I drink the blood of my enemies from their hollowed out skulls.
   

That's the problem with Viking blood, but I'm trying my best to keep number two from occurring.

Word finally made its way around the plant that Jake, easy going Jake, the Jake that everyone gets along with and everyone wants working on their machine, that Jake was pissed off. And not quickly pissed off and then settled back down like the day I came in and found my brand new parts mutilated by some maintenance hack for the third day in a row. No, that was only kind of frightening. Nobody has ever seen me pissed off for an entire shift, let alone three. And never in a dark and brooding vengeful way. So my supervisor, after insisting that I had to give the new setup a fair try and me insisting once again that I had and that this wasn't going to work, finally asked me why I was so sure. I related the story of the time I was looking for a new car and went to test drive a Fiero. I climbed in, went to test the accelerator, and realized I couldn't hit the accelerator without also hitting the brake. Maybe I could have driven the thing by contorting my foot and depressing the accelerator with my toes or something, but there was no need to even leave the lot. It just wasn't going to work out. And I tried out the new setup and knew within an hour, it just wasn't going to work out.

Luckily he understood. The problem being, the order to move came from the very top. And hierarchies being what they are, the channels can take some time. In the meanwhile, every manager and lead keeps coming up and telling me to calm down, to just try it out for a while, to not do anything rash. There is fear, and the smell of fear only strengthens the yearning for the taste of blood. And at the end of the day, Jake tapping a new drum of oil using the large bung wrench, which looks altogether too much like a war hammer...

VALHALLA!!!