Imagine doing your job really well, but you’re told your supervisor has to double check your work before you can continue. Would you ignore the rule to prevent downtime, or would you follow the rule to avoid getting written up?

In this story, one machinist is in this exact situation, and he chooses the second option, which catches the owner’s attention.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Supervisor wants me to have a buy off on every first part

I am a machinist in a CNC aerospace shop. I’ve been here for 4 years, never worked a different chop and everything I know is learned from this shop.

The machines I run are multi-pallet machines that can hold over 20 parts each and is completely automated with the exception of the loading/unloading of parts and tooling.

One machine holds over 300 tools and the other holds almost 200 tools.

He’s the primary operator for these machines.

A few years ago, when I was taught how these machines run and essentially made into the primary operated for these machines, I was told to have every first part bought off on each order that runs, even if the next order was the same part as the previous order.

My supervisor was really cool to me and I enjoyed working with him.

This buy off policy started because someone kept running parts and not checking them properly and scrapped thousands of dollars in parts.

He made a decision to avoid getting write ups.

For about a month straight, people were getting write-ups for not having buy offs done.

To save myself the hassle, I decided i would be extremely meticulous about making sure my parts were bought off properly every time.

I would end up with 3-5 orders of parts running back to back, and i would run first part from each order, take 5 different parts to my lead and have them go through the 15-20 minute process of buying them off and would not run the machines until the parts were fully bought off.

I caused dozens of hours of downtime on the machines during this month because sometimes there wasn’t an available lead to check my parts, even though I checked them myself very thoroughly after they were finished.

His idea worked!

After a month of lost time and profits due to expediting the parts for processing and shipping, the owner called me in for a meeting and asked why my machined weren’t running all the time.

I told him “(lead supervisor) wants a buy off on every order that runs, so until the parts are bought off, I don’t run the machines.”

After that meeting, the policy changed to checking parts and keeping running at the discretion of the operator and only needing buy offs if something measured wrong or it was a new part we’ve reprogrammed, never made before or haven’t ran in a while.

It’s great that being extra meticulous, and causing downtime because of it, got the rules to change.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

In case you’re wondering what a “buy off” is…

This person shares what’s wise and what’s not wise about this situation.

This person shares two options.

It is better to catch a mistake early.

Time is money.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.