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Today is my last day on evening shift for a while.

I agreed to move shifts as requested by my supervisor. I start Monday, 7 am. I have never had a job that regularly required me to start that early. At the height of season, we will be in at 5 am…

I will be working with the bane of the department. LOL That’s my pet name for the daytime coordinator. Here’s a perfect example why:

My machine has three milling stations used for most commercial work, together, they take off the fold of the page signatures and prep the pages for glue. They are: the grinding station, the notcher and the fiber rougher, in sequence. Last night, as I started the machine to set my cover rails, I hear this ugly “Pa-tank-a-tank-tang!!” as something not-paper bounces its way up the vacuum exhaust system of the milling stations.

Not good. I take a look at the milling head and find that two of the fifteen teeth had rather massive chunks taken out of them. I still have no idea what it was. I had no books in the machine at the time. Since the first two jobs in queue were Beyond-ridiculously-tiny-for-this-type-of-machine books, the night coordinator said to give it a shot. The books were so tiny, that I lost six hours trying to run eighteen in total. That is number of books, not number of jobs… Ugh. The third book was tiny in trim size also, but noticeably fatter in thickness. (I do like some girth…) I didn’t think much of it and dropped in a book after setting up the machine.

“Pa-tank-a-tank-tang!!!”

Shit. A third tooth was gone. At this point, myself and the other operator on the off-shifts both agree that running a job that needs the miller is a bad idea. We were just lucky that the metal went up the exhaust system both times. The next one could take out the other two milling stations, or damage the aluminum wheels in the glue pots next in sequence in the machine.

As a rule, the entire set of teeth need to be replaced as a whole, because the height needs to be set-just so and each set needs to be precisely sharpened to like sizes or the whole thing can go whackers. I know this all because last year, my single biggest act of damage to this machine in three years involved taking out almost half of the set in one move… So, the three of us (two operators and the night coordinator) go to the parts shelf and dig through boxes.

We only find one partial set. The day coordinator (the only person that orders parts for the equipment in our department) never ordered a new set. I am sure he had a perfectly good panic moment at the time and decided the parts just weren’t important enough at the time…

*sigh*

This will be my fate as of Monday.

In all, it will likely be a wash. The most important factor in accepting the shift change…? I have been hugely unhappy here for the past year. I feel there is nothing much I have influence over changing. This is a change, good or bad. It is something that I had the power to effect, so I did.

We shall see.