I really, really love my job!

I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. Just keep repeating it to yourself and you’ll be convinced. Do you know how many times I’ve repeated it over the years? At least 428 times, or once a month for more than 36 years and 8 months!

I started saying it while operating a turret lathe in a dark, dingy machine shop. Oil from the machines permeated the air. Forget about mist collectors. I would come home with a rash all over my body from the airborne oil.

One day when machining hex stock for some fittings, I turned on the oil coolant and oil sprayed my face and glasses. I cleaned up, diligently went back to my machine and repeated the same process. Guess what? I received another face full of oil. I cleaned up again and, after my third oil shower, I remembered the definition of insanity: Repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I quit that day. I guess I really didn’t really love that job after all.

Another time, I started as a manufacturing engineer at a company that had purchased its first two CNC machining centers 6 months earlier. Well, the one worker who learned to run the machining centers and used to run the Bridgeport mill had a couple questions for me. How dare I suggest using carbide cutters instead of the HSS tools he was running? How dare I suggest applying indexable cutters?

After we continued to butt heads day after day, I would actually come home talking to myself. One day, after a particularly high level of head butting, my wife fell over, laughing hysterically, after she asked me how my day was and I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth because I was stuttering so badly. Eventually, the operator and I reached a mutual understanding and became good friends. And I started to love my job.