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The Holzma Saw

When I was younger I used to work at a woodworking plant that produced, among other things, cabinet doors. I operated an automated saw affectionately called "The Holzma." Take a gander.
I was tasked with producing rectangles of wood of various dimensions by operating this thing during the night shift. Now, supposedly, the reason behind creating automated sawing systems like this is to increase the productivity of factories producing cut up boards that are to be turned into cabinet doors and other things. I think the system works great if you maintain it and don't use it past it's intended life but I wouldn't know how the saw performs optimally because the particular saw I was operating had obviously been used and abused to no end.

Chains would break. Saw teeth would chip. Pistons would misalign. Wood would bind against the machine in the wrong spots. Air hoses would suddenly disconnect from their connections and dance erratically. Choking, I'd dig into piles of sawdust trying to find which small rubber piece had gone flying so that I could try to find a replacement in the repair parts room. It seemed as though each night, the saw would break for a different reason. I'd produce some parts, start feeling good about my prospects of having a productive night, and then bam, the saw would stop working.

I had a neighbor on the night shift. He was working a machine adjacent to me that put veneer on the sheets I'd eventually be cutting with my saw. I was "downstream" from him in the process flow. I just call him the fat man. Loud. Intimidating. Fat. That's what he was.

One night the machine seemed to be operating without a hitch and I produced two-hundred parts. I was feeling like a baller. I pushed the pallet of neatly stacked parts out onto a roller, signally that it was ready to be moved into a staging area where it would await the next phase of processing. The fat man saw this and approached, tape measurer in hand. I had no idea what he was doing at first. Then he started measuring the parts I had made. I saw his lip curl into a smirk. "They're all the wrong size," he said. "Oh," I said. "Ummmm... How did that happen?" He ignored my question and walked over to the Holzma. He stopped the machine from running and punched a few buttons on the terminal screen. I was trying to see what he was doing but he was too large to see around and probably navigating around in this terminal program too quickly for me to comprehend anyways. He got a hammer out and started banging on one of the guard rails of the saw. He started the machine back up, measured the first few parts that it produced, puffed his chest out, let out a "Hummph!" and walked away. I was enraged. "Who the FUCK is this guy?" I thought. It's like he already knew the machine wasn't calibrated correctly, but he let me continue working anyways, and when I needed help, instead of answering any questions I had he just fixed the thing and walked away. He was rubbing my nose in the dirt. It was the ultimate power move of "kid you don't know shit and I know it."

The fat man bullied me. He'd make fun of me for going to college but not being smart enough to fix these "simple" problems with the Holzma. He'd put doubt in my mind about if I was going to keep my job by pointing out that management wouldn't be happy with me because of how far behind I was on orders. He acted as if I was an annoying nuisance when I took him away from his job to help me. Sometimes I tried to lighten the mood with a joke and he'd just stare at me as if it wasn't the right time for that. He was intimidating in other ways to. My guess is he weighed around three-hundred pounds and he was quite tall and even though his gut was huge, he had some muscle for sure. He got angry sometimes but he never put his hands on me.

I hated asking this guy for help but I had to because sometimes I was just lost and didn't know what else to do. There's a lift that brings up these large sheets of wood onto the saw to be cut and it got stuck one night. After stubbornly fucking around with it for about an hour on my own, I finally mustered up the courage to ask the fat man if he could help me. He punched a reset button that I didn't even know was there and made sure to push the top right corner of the sheet stack flush against these two metal poles with his fork truck. After that lesson I made sure to keep the stack flush against the guard rails. The lift never gave me trouble again.

The cycle would repeat over and over again. Something would break. I would swear at the ceiling and try to figure out things for myself. I wouldn't figure out how to fix the saw. I would spend thirty minutes trying to gather the mental strength to ask the fat man to help me. I'd finally do it. The fat man would bully me, ignore my questions, and purposely withhold information, all the while fixing something I had struggled with for an hour in about five minutes. I'd get pissed.

There was a big stack of papers nestled in a cubby hole at my work station. That's where all the customer orders for parts were kept. The stack was thick and that meant the factory was behind on processing their orders which meant customers were pissed which meant my manager was pissed which meant that if I broke the saw by doing something I wasn't supposed to, which was very likely, I was under the gun because I was making the day shift guy's job harder. At the time, wanting to prove myself, it was very stressful for me to mentally contend with the idea that I was regularly fucking up the flow of parts out of my machine. My mind conjured up all sorts of crazy shit to say about the situation:

I'm dumb.
I don't get it.
This is hopeless.
This job fucking blows.
How am I ever supposed to get recognized as a good worker if this saw keeps breaking down? I hate this saw.
I hate this job.
I hate this fat man who keeps waddling over here to give me advice that I can't understand and can't turn into action to fix things.

I would lie in bed at night wondering if I was even smart enough to be a factory worker.

But through all this struggle, something good was happening, even though I was too angry to be aware of it at the time. I was learning. I was observing what the fat man would do and because my job depended on it, I'd remember exactly what he did. Then I'd do it when things would go wrong and I'd be up and running. Through this process I gradually learned what to check for before starting the saw and that saved me some pain. I knew where to start looking to see if things were getting out of alignment and made sure to stop the saw and re-adjust before the snapping sounds started. I learned how to fix a small set of the most common problems that would occur with the saw.

Once I learned how to harness the Holzma, I started pushing parts out like a man possessed. I came back to the saw every night, driven by rage and vengeance, wanting to prove that I could produce. At one point they were running out of room in the staging area to put my produced parts. The paper stack of orders thinned.

And, right around the time I started finally getting good at the Holzma, the fat man began to like me. I started standing up for myself. I would say, "listen I don't know everything about this job but for you to expect me to know where to look when this particular problem happens isn't realistic. I need you to help explain things." After I said that he started revealing a little more information when I'd asked questions. I'd yell at him over the noise of the machines as I drove by on my fork-truck, "If the stars align, I won't have to ask you for any help tonight!" He'd laugh. He started coming over to ask about how I was doing on the saw. Sometimes, although it was very rare, he'd even ask me for help in holding a particularly large board that he needed to rip down to length on the table saw.

I didn't realized what I had learned from this job until a few years after I quit. I had learned that learning was possible under the tutelage of a bad teacher. I had learned that progress is possible even when you think you're too incompetent to be a factory worker. I learned that bullies are people too and that they aren't an impossible barrier you can't push through. I learned how to laugh at myself and my situation when the saw would really break badly and I'd have to spend the rest of my night sniffing glue on a different machine. I learned that even if the job wasn't the most exciting, was hard manual labor, and didn't align with my passions, that was no excuse not to perform to the best of my ability.

So, thank you for being my teachers you big green, fat bastards.