As with any product comprising various natural and not so natural components that is being sold into the consuming population, the mill's product is required to meet certain standards for minimizing the release of any hazardous chemical or chemical bi-product.  In order to certify that known health and safety threats are below levels that hurt humans, you hire third party professionals to test for said levels.  Something else that is generally true is that usage of these hazardous chemicals during the manufacturing process enables higher production.  So, the stage is set for conflicting needs.... use as much of the hazardous chemicals as you can to get production while limiting the secretions that may make the consumer sick, and, have the third party professional independently test all this and prove that things are being done right.  If you lose the certification because things are out of bounds, you are basically screwed.

My first conversation with the quality manager....  I may not have mentioned this yet but the quality manager did not talk to me for the first three of four days in my new job.  When he finally did darken my doorway with his presence, it was to tell me that the most recent third party certification had shown that hazardous chemical releases from our product exceeded the level at which it could continue to be certified as safe.  Basically we're screwed.

Why?  I'm working now and in the fray.  After giving the sales group a heart attack because we had to now send a formal notice of non compliance to our customers stating that the last 30 days worth of shipments could not be certified, literally millions of dollars worth of product, I began to dig into the reason for the non certifiable product.

Turns out that we were playing a shell game with the samples....  The a field guy from the third party is supposed to show up unannounced and walk into the warehouse to arbitrarily select a product right out of the normal everyday production, have the quality manager retrieve the sample, observe all steps of preparing the sample, literally sign the sample himself, and take the sample away for the test.  What was really happening was.... the field guy would let the quality manager know several days in advance of the visit, the quality manager, would select the sample after close review of the production data, virtually scrub the sample and have it waiting when the field guy arrived to retrieve it.  Test after test were close to the limit, but always passing.  Unfortunately this practice was known and accepted in this mill by a fairly limited group, just big enough to get it done.

Apparently when the previous mill manager was fired and I arrived, once again smashing the quality manager's hopes of rising a notch in the organization, he simply let the field guy take a true sample from the normal everyday production and it tested how one would expect it to test, out of compliance.

My first clue should have been when during my first few days several people simply chose to leave after being random drug tested because they new they would fail.  Now I do not have a moral issue with most drug use, I came up during the 70's and if you know your history, that generation inherited a post Vietnam drug culture that was well established, complete with channels to market.  The problem is that in a work setting where equipment and product is moving, a person really does not need to be in an altered state of mind.  So we in the USA do drug screens, random drug tests, for cause drug tests, pretty much anything to catch those nasty violators of the drug free work place.

By the way, what most people do not know is that there are several ways to beat the screens but like so many rule breaking activities, others will know.

If you are going to have a successful drug ring in a mill that has drug screening you must have a way to beat the screening.  It takes several people and a protocol to operate.  It also requires knowing all of the users.  The users need to be paying attention to the different indicators that a screening is going to happen and need to be prepared for their particular method of beating it.  Leaving the mill to avoid being tested is ineffective because you might as well admit guilt and, your name does not disappear from the list of people to be sampled just because you went missing.  The person responsible for testing simply waits until you show up and either conducts the drug screen or takes you away to a clinic.

Here is how it worked in my new world of ever ending interesting and exciting things....

In the case of random screening there is always a list that is generated, typically within the previous 24 hours leading into the screening event.  Those charged with facilitating the screening get the list.  In the mill's case, this person was a key player.  He happened to be in an administrative position that had access to all typical employee records.  He would look at the list, compare it to the work schedule and begin to notify people that the screening was coming.  The word would travel quickly thru the group and it was up to each individual to be prepared.

There are number of ways to get prepared.  The absolutely most effective way is to have a clean sample of your own urine somewhere on or inside of your body that keeps it at body temperature.  The volume has to be adequate for duplicate samples, 8 ounces should do it.  Men really only have three choices reliable storage choices.... a container taped between their butt cheeks, taped next to their testes or inserted into their ass.  Women have three as well, and possibly a fourth.... the ever reliable taped between their butt cheeks, inserted into their ass, inserted into their vagina or, depending on cup size, taped under a breast.  Some of you are probably shocked and some of you know what I am talking about.

Getting the sample from its storage location and uncontaminated into the screening cup is a bit tricky, but usually by the time you are willing to walk around with a tube full of urine shoved up your ass, you can figure out how to get it into the cup.  The safest way is a flexible surgical tube affixed to the storage container that is routed to the natural drainage location and a damn reliable valve.  It also has to be body temperature so it is usually only used with the groin area storage locations.  More tape.  That's gotta be tough in those hot sweaty working conditions that are typical of manufacturing facilities.  Near as I could determine, as much as 42 out of 131 employees were in the game when the thing began to be exposed.

How did this begin to get exposed in the mill?   Two things happened.... the administrative person that I spoke of casually notified a couple of front line supervisors and a department head that were in an informal conversation following a meeting as they left my office.  I have often wondered if he was comfortable doing that because the fired one was "in the know", or if he was delivering me yet another piece of shit to deal with.  Anyway, the other thing that happened was a member of the group that found out his girlfriend was sleeping with another member of the group.  Oops, never piss a guy off that is harboring a delicate secret that can hurt you.  By the time that discussion was over I knew the players, the pecking order, each persons drug of choice, where the drugs were used, methods for beating the screening, secondary protocols when someone found themselves on the screening list without a clean sample, how the drugs entered the work place, what contractors were involved, approximate price and availability of drugs that might appeal to me, police affiliations, on and on.

Just so you know, drug screening is a bit controversial and positive drug tests present several problems.  The actual mechanics of collecting and processing the screen must be defensible or bad things happen.  Companies are not inclined to want the press of a large drug problem in one of their facilities.  There in lies the dilemma I faced.  This was a fortune 500 company wanting to sell the division that included this mill.  So, we lived with the effect on performance and safety and a convoluted "catch um one at a time" strategy that took three years to get lucky and blow a hole in process.

By the way, standard drug screening has a limited number of constituents that it samples for.  Most new designer drugs simply do not get noticed.  Also, there are thresholds of concentration that most casual users can avoid exceeding by timing and quantity of use.  The flip side is that a positive screen usually means a significant change in one's employment situation.  You decide....

Every mill has people getting stuff done and even in the most modern work settings, someone to lead.  This mill had a curious work structure that attempted to mix modern work structure with the old.  The old part required front line supervision.

An interesting cast of characters....  The most senior guy (they were all male) was handsome, articulate, energetic and came with the ominous reputation of supporting what was later discovered to be a well established and highly functional illegal drug ring in the mill.  The next guy was what is referred to as a super operator that had been promoted because he could run equipment very well.  He had a good work ethic and could, as you might guess, pretty much keep the equipment running.  He had no supervisor training and no good mentor in our little dysfunctional group of managers.  The next guy was ex-military and near as I could tell suffering from some sort of trauma causing him to be over reactive unpredictably and aggressively get in your face when he did so.  He actually fit quite well in the organization that was in place, as did all of these guys.  The last guy had not actually been promoted into the supervisor position yet and was filling in for some earlier departed soul.  He came from a reasonably wealthy family and was working in a mill because he could not see eye to eye with family members in the family business.  I am pretty sure I have never seen a more diverse group of misfits in my life.  Hey, it'll be fine, we will work to replace the bad with the good and the misdirected energy, once properly directed, will be more than adequate to drive success, maybe.  

A phenomenon that occurs in industry is the occasional visit by outsiders to the mill.  This can range from the owners of the mill, to local school children, to state officials, to customers.  A new mill tends to get an unusually high number of these visits, sometimes several a week.  Go figure, people taking time to look at a bunch of moving parts. A testament to our curiosity about mechanical things.  Anyway, part of being a good host is to tour these visitors and show the goods.  In the case of most mills there is an established tour route complete with "points of interest", safe, and keeping folks away from the areas that are not for public viewing.  This route does not venture into the far corners and was quite clean, if you look past the occasional pile of debris, cigarette butt, food wrapper, et cetera.  Any good mill manager wants to see the far corners, a different tour, a tour of the areas not so often visited.  You learn a lot by just looking.  After the public tour route I took the plant manager on the other tour.  True to the slowly unveiling of my new world, this brand new mill was filthy.

After three years of operation there were still bolts, welding rod, lose wires, pieces of steel, extra gears, you name it strewn along the walking areas and in the corners.  Not so much that one could not walk most everywhere, yet enough to say "we don't give a crap about our mill".  The lunch room tables did not look like they had been wiped off in months.  The restrooms were filthy from those human activities that take place in restrooms.  Wow, what a great opportunity! 

A must do for any new mill manager is a tour.  I needed to have a look at the assets and meet a few people.  I was looking forward to this because I am curious by nature and I work in mills because of the equipment, smells, noises, mechanical movements, and of course, the people.  The plant manager leads me around, pointing and talking, and I begin the questions, you know.... what goes where, problems, so forth and so on.  His answers and tour guide diatribe quickly become dark and a little scary.  Every section of this new mill had major equipment reliability problems because of a fundamentally flawed philosophy.... fix it as cheaply as possible, get it running as quickly as possible during break downs, run equipment to failure, be hostile and abusive of the employees, and reward the folks that were able to accomplish all of the above.  How does anyone get that far afield of reality, does it not make sense that with any new mechanical device or equipment you should maintain it as close to the new condition as possible??  With virtually hundreds of thousand wear points, switches, lines of programming, gizmos, the first three years of this mills life had effectively infected the mill with the mechanical and systems equivalent of HIV.

 

The front line supervisors and those that made up the department heads now held my future in their hands.  The person right below the mill manager in the pecking order is a plant manager whom was a product of corporate succession, very bright, well educated in science and engineering with no natural interpersonal skills. He spent most of his time being miserable because of this and was the other player in the scandal that had gotten the mill manager fired.  The quality manager was there because he wanted to climb to the plant manager's position quickly and figured he could do that in a new mill.  He was viciously political, felt he had been cheated because someone else was in the plant manager roll, loyal to a fault to the fired one, and sleeping with his female quality supervisor 20 years younger than himself.  The purchasing manager was left behind from the construction of the mill, which meant the spare parts were basically stored in not so well organized rows and scattered about, and he had a key role in a well established and efficient drug ring in the mill.  The maintenance manager was a nice man in the final years of his career.  He had come from a large corporation and was busy not understand the dynamics of the shit storm he was in.  The environmental manager was like me, new to the group and as I eventually became, he was equally puzzled at the degree of dishonesty and incompetence in the crew.  The facilities maintenance was made up of four guys.  One was an honest engineer that could solve almost any problem but could not communicate with the mixture of misfits around him. Another was a dishonest engineer that was overcome with jealousy of the honest engineer and had resorted to drinking, lying and sabotage to hold his place.  Another was the key keeper that I mentioned earlier who was generally a good guy but so far in over his head that he did not actually do anything except aggravate the rest of the crew.  The last facilities maintenance was a hard working, get'r done guy.  The health and safety guy was a bit paranoid and reputedly moved into his job after exposing himself to an employee in the mill while he was a front line supervisor.  Interesting way for the fired one to build trust with the workforce, uh, promote a supervisor to safety manager to get him away from the shocked female to whom he had shown his penis.  Oh yah, this gentleman was also part of the scandal that got the previous mill manager fired.

Welcome to my new life....

By the end of the weekend the office was usable and my wife and I headed home for the evening.  Around 9:00 o'clock the phone rings.  A very confident voice begins to inform me that everyone is ok, the mill has been evacuated, the equipment is mostly stopped (before the evacuation was forced by thick black smoke), the fire department is there in their special breathing gear to enter the now smoke darkened building, and by the way, welcome to my new job. 

The fire was apparently out when I arrived.  The new boss, me, climbs out of my older car, not a pickup, and begins the journey into the real war.  The evacuees are still in the gathering area, which is the parking area, so.... my arrival at the scene in crisis could not have been staged to be more dramatic, and, I am now being sized up by the people that I will rely on to for survival, cool.  Following the hoses and smoke odor I find myself standing in a once new, now smoke darkened smelly pump room.  The production process uses heated oil to cure the product.  The oil travels around in thousands of feet of sealed piping and a lot of pumps at oil temperatures that can exceed 500°, which is hot enough to flame if the oil leaks out of the systems and mixes with air.  This makes it pretty frigg'n important to operate the system in such a way that it does not spring leaks.  What I later learned.... turns out one of the engineers in my new world was quite good at getting into computer controlled programming and had modified the control logic in such a way that allowed rapid heating and cooling of the entire system, essentially heating and cooling the system quicker than it should.  This was done to minimize the lost production time.  Unfortunately, this had damaged the seal in the pump.  The seal failed, the oil leaked out hot enough to flame, mixed with air and flamed.  To make it interesting, the programming change was done a year earlier when the mill first became operational, meaning that the damage to this one pump seal meant that virtually hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage had been done to innumerable seals, pump parts and pieces of a system that fails by throwing flames while spraying 500° oil.  There was no way to change the entire system, or to even find all the damage and repair it before it was obvious.  So, we wait until the system springs a leak, flames up, rush to control the damage and move on.  Foreshadowing is beginning to be replaced by reality.

I eventually tracked the key-keeper down, and managed to pry a key from the security net, giving me access to the new office.  In the key-keeper's defense, prior to coming to his current job he had worked in a highly secure facility where even air space was restricted.  Regardless, he had made an enemy of me on some level that would not work in his favor.

The first visit to my new office was on a weekend before my official start date.  The office, like the mill was only 3 years old, so it only showed the wear of the previous 2 managers.  That's right, previous 2 managers in 3 years.   Anyway, my wife and I brought cleaning supplies and paint to spiff up the office before I took residence. 

This office is huge, probably designed by a person that had become fed up with not having enough space.  Some new large, cheap laminated furniture established the necessary working and storage space.  Large windows on two sides looking into the fields and woods across the way.  A real corner office.  A bit unusual, and I suppose a real treat for a mill manager.  No view of the foyer.  Can't see the enemy on approach unless they are coming from the fields and woods across the way.  The floor was trashed under the desk chair from the sand that had not been swept up being ground into the tile under the precariously smelling office chair.  One of my personal observations.... excessive flatulence in the chair leaves behind part of what you, well you know.  Anyway, the desk was surprisingly sparse evidencing a person not inclined to do administrative tasks.  I was a bit jealous since I had just spent a week loading up all my crap in to boxes.  A separate small table set in the room for those "come around from behind your desk" meetings.  I am not sure why anyone would do this, but there were remnants left behind of someone cleaning, what smelled like dog shit from their shoe on one of the table feet.  I get my plastic scraper and head for the fossilized shoe cleaning and discover that it is in-fact dog shit.  This event could not have been a better foreshadow of my upcoming experience.

Dinner with the boss occurred on about night 3.  Nearby sports pub with the threat of karaoke if dinner lasted too long.  Just he and I, small talk, some praise as to how well the mill I was at was running, a little business, and a question.... how would I like to leave my current successful job and take on the next door mill with a few problems?  It's a new state of the art mill with a few problems, all of which can be solved.  My first real big mistake in this saga happened right there.  Being the good soldier and armed with a reasonable measure of confidence and humility, I said yes.  That was a defining moment in my life.  Saying yes because I would normally say yes, and not thinking thru what was going to happen to my great life, was about to define my life.  There was a battle ahead and I would never have known the twists and turns awaiting me.

My wife has always made sure that the world kept turning, including making it easy for me to concentrate on whatever job I had.  She was consulted and we both agreed that saying yes was the right thing to do.  What she did not realize, nor did I, was that this was the end of me, the old me, the way she knew me.  It would be slow and organic and would be more noticeable in time lapse, but, I would begin to become the product of constant chaos and puzzlement of how so many things could be done wrong by a group of people charged with running a business.

I diligently packed up my office to move across the street.  Pretty amazing how much crap one can accumulate in those desk and file cabinet drawers. Soon the boxes were packed and the move was ready.  I contacted the key-keeper across the road to get a key for my new office and discovered that it may require an audience complete with a scroll sealed with the stamp of the fired one giving permission to get a key.  Get a clue.... never refuse to issue a key to the new boss.  It may be a long slow journey, but, the day may come when that simple act of rudeness becomes the grain of sand in the scale that tips your ass out of your job.

The scandal soon unfolded.  The manager from the mill next door was fired, his computer was shipped off to corporate IT for extraction of all data, his personal belongings were soon on my desk for some sort of discreet delivery to him, and my boss was now in the area for a prolonged stay. 

I was once told that it is good to know the various ways to get terminal in a company.  Apparently one of those ways is to fail a government regulated test then mysteriously lose the official results.  Maybe add a little drama by throwing the person hand delivering the results to you off of the site and claim that they were never delivered.

That afternoon a fascinating thing happened that I would have never thought to do.  The fired manager began making calls and informing people that he had been fired.  Do people really do that?  What is the purpose?  I believe I would go quietly and hope the day would soon end.  Anyway, there was a benign story spun about how it was hard to understand why this would happen, and some shock.  Not a word about the lost test results.  The next amazing occurrence was that evening when there was a thrown together "I've been fired" wake or celebration or not sure what to call it gathering, possibly to determine if there was enough rage to retake the mill?  Many drinks were had by all and at the end of the gathering a small group of staunch followers pledged their allegiance to the fired one and cursed the clear lack of judgment that had ultimately brought them to that place.

He once told me that he clearly understood the game of hockey because he was given a stick and told to take the field and hit something or someone until the crowd raised their voice.  Now I was a bit of an athlete in youth, so I pretty much remember this guy.  What I had not seen was the post hockey stick wielding version trying to run a mill, getting fired, organizing a gathering to talk all grades of junk about the event, et cetera.

Anyway, it was pretty much over for him....