Overtime

It was a Friday afternoon in November, and I was ready to go home. The week had been long — a series of small problems that added up to a lot of frustration. A coolant pump failure on Tuesday that took half a day to repair. A bad batch of raw material on Wednesday that had to be returned and replaced. A customer change order on Thursday that forced us to rework thirty completed parts. By Friday at four o’clock, I was running on fumes and looking forward to a weekend of doing absolutely nothing productive. ...

His name was Jake, and he was maybe nineteen years old. Fresh out of a two-year trade program at the local community college, green as they come, and eager — almost too eager. He’d been with us for about three months, and every day he showed up fifteen minutes early and stayed fifteen minutes late just to absorb everything he could. He had that hungry look in his eye, the one that says “I want to be good at this more than anything.” ...

The Apprentice Who Stayed Late: An Overtime Lesson That Stuck I clocked out at 3:55 that Friday, and I was happy about it. It had been a long week — a Monday morning spindle alarm, a coolant pump that gave out Wednesday afternoon, and a customer who kept moving his tolerance windows. I wanted to beat traffic, get home, and not think about chips or feeds or G-code until Monday. ...