A Supervisor Warned His Manager About a Big Problem. The Manager Didn’t Listen, and the Company Ended Up Closing
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Imagine working at a manufacturing plant. If you were worried about a problem with the machinery due to lack of maintenance, what would you do? Would you wait until something breaks to deal with it, or would you try to be proactive?
In this story, one supervisor was in this situation, and he tried to be proactive by talking to the manager about it and working out a solution if something breaks.
The problem is that the manager didn’t seem to care about the problem until it was too late to fix it right away.
Let’s read all about it.
Fix this machine at all costs, but don’t spend any money? Sure!
About 5 years ago, I found myself as a 2nd shift supervisor at a small manufacturing plant. We had a line of 8 machines with 4 others that could be added to the end of the line with a series of pipes and blowers.
It all started when my boss (Plant Manager) said “I don’t really read the report that you send to me at the end of the day.”
He was trying to get a 2nd, much larger, plant running to make our small plant redundant and increase our capacity by around 8 fold so he decided not to even be involved with the small plant.
Okay cool!
OP worked a lot of overtime without getting paid extra for it.
Well, the company wasn’t doing too hot.
We had a ton of demand, but the orders were so large that we just didn’t have to capacity to fill them.
I, along with about 5 other people worked 8 weeks straight from the beginning of July to the end of August with only 2 days off during that 8 weeks and as salaried employee at $30,000 a year and not eligible for OT.
I was not a happy camper.
OP noticed a potential problem.
With the plant running around the clock, a lot of preventative maintenance was being neglected.
I went to the Plant Manager and said “hey, if we don’t shut down for a day or two and replace the bearings in the rollers in the 6th machine in the line, they are going to freeze up and the motor that turns those rollers is going to burn up.”
He said “just fix it, but don’t spend any money.”
So at the end of the night, I put in my daily report that if the motor burned up, I would ask Maintenance to pull an identical motor from one of the machines that were not connected to the current line configuration, and that way we could finish this order and to please respond if he wanted to do something different and CC’d the head of maintenance on the email.
The plant manager must not check his email.
I never heard back from him so after about a week, the bearings froze up and the motor quit working.
I put my request in to Maintenance and they pulled the motor of the machine not being used and replaced it to finish a major order.
The day we were finishing the major order that we had been working on for months, the plant manager walks up to me and the head of maintenance and says “you all need to hook those 4 extra machines up and start on the next order as soon as we get this one out the door.”
Maintenance head and I look at eachother, then back at him and I said “sorry, we can’t do that. We don’t have a motor to run the last machine. I sent you an email about it a few weeks ago and you never replied that you wanted to do something different. It is probably around $10,000 for another motor and we can hook it up tomorrow if you overnight it.”
Here’s how it all worked out.
Well, Plant Manager blew a major gasket because we all knew the company was on its last legs.
4 days later, the CEO called a mandatory meeting at 4 o’clock on the last day of the pay period and let the entire staff go.
I got unemployment and took it easy for a few months before starting my MBA and getting into data analytics.
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That was a horrible ending for the company, but it worked out well for OP.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person thinks the manager needed to read his email.
Another person shares their thoughts.
One person shares some advice about overtime pay.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who wants peace and quiet by the pool, but finds guests and loud music instead.
This is a good question.
The manager needed to check his email. He also needed to be willing to spend money to repair the machinery. Failing to repair the machinery really backfired. You don’t have a company if the machines that produce the products aren’t working.
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