FRIDAY III. Son of Friday

As I look around the factory I see white walls, white machines, white floor, white ceiling…… except for one spot directly above my station which is blue. Why the fuck is there a blue spot in a factory painted white? I look around the rest of the ceiling its all white except for the spot directly above me. What type of sick bastard puts a blue spot on the ceiling? The ceiling must be at least 20 Meters high they would have had to been on a ladder to paint it. Did they run out of paint and blue was the original color of the ceiling? Damn that would be cheap.
“Supervisor is coming.” says my tech who has just returned from the toilet.
“Did you have a good sleep?” I ask.
“Ya. If you sit on the toilet and face the wall you can rest your head on the cistern.”
He has a red line down one side of his face but I decide not tell him. The supervisor walks over to us.
“Ok you can stop working,” he says. I cannot tell if he is joking or not as it is pretty obvious that I haven’t been doing anything like work.
“There is a head corporate person here and he is giving a speech on the quarterly results and our plans for next Quarter.”
This wasn’t too bad as I laught when I thought back to last quarters meeting where we were told us we were the second best plant in Europe. I strolled over to line one to see if they were coming in to the meeting. The guy who works on line one was looking around guiltily.
“What have you done?” I ask.
“I left a circuit board in the machine when I went on break.”
“I thought you didn’t have any boards coming down your line?”
“Ya there weren’t but I was bored and took one from the repair station it didn’t have any capacitors on it but I wanted to see what would happen if I tested it.”
“And what happened?”
“It passed. But it turns out that if you leave a board in the machine for over an hour it turns brown.”
“So what did you do with it?”
“I put it in the bottom of that filling cabinet. There were already two boards in there so I put it on top of them.”
“Fuck sake, let’s just go into this meeting.” I say and we walk into the canteen where the meeting was on. It is already pretty crowded but we get some seats at the back. I get a look at the corporate guy, he is the typical American upper management type. Good suite and smiling at everyone as if he’s about to give them money. As he stands up to start the meeting 2 engineers and the tech from line 3 walked in. One of the engineers walks over and sits beside me.
“What kept you?” I ask.
“Just got this e-mail,” he says trying not to laugh, “it has what look like 14 women on it, but 7 of them are men. So far the tech from line 3 has done the worst he thought 6 of the men were women. If he is that bad when he’s sober imagine what he is like when he’s drunk.”
Trying to get the image of an inebriated tech from line 3 harassing some poor innocent transvestites, out of my head I turn my attention back to the meeting which has already started. The corporate guy had just finished telling everyone that we are once again the second best performing company in Europe. Then his smile falters a little and he starts talking about how the global economy has taken a down turn and how the cheaper labor in Eastern Europe and Asia means business is slow and we are going to have to tighten our belts. This means changing shift patterns without notice to make sure we meet the customers needs and that we need to find new business to break into. It’s at this point that I start thinking about the fact that we have a new line in the plant but that we only build the first half of the product. It is then packed up and sent to our sister company to be finished. Despite the fact that we have the manpower and the equipment to finish the product and our sister is further away from the end customer then we are. So I decide to ask a question.
“If we need new business why are we sending our new product to be finished in our sister plant shouldn’t we finish it here?”
He looks at me for a moment, his smile forgotten as if shocked that someone would question him. Or perhaps I should have put my hand up before shouting at him.
“Well we are not actually making any money on that product so we thought it best to split the costs between two factories.”
He turns to go back to his slide to continue but I decide not to let him off that easily.
“Why are we building something that we are not making any money on?”
He looks at me again still no smile and a couple of the managers behind him murmur something to one another. Maybe you are not supposed to shout things out in the middle of a meeting but I think, fuck it.
“This is a big customer and once we do this business with them they will consider us for more contracts which will have better margins on them.” He says and tries to put back on his smile but this time it’s a little more stretched.
He continues to explain why we are in trouble and then comes to the plan to recover profit for this quarter. This basically consists of everyone in our plant and our sister plant taking a 20% pay cut for this quarter. Once more I decide not to waste everyone’s time by raising my hand.
“Is there any guarantee that this is the only time our wages will be cut?” I shout.
Again there is a pause and stares from the front of the room. The corporate guy looks like he is sweating a little.
“Well of course we cannot guarantee anything but with new business like the new product, (the one he has just told me we are making no money on) we are confident of being back on track next quarter.”
He finishes the meeting with the usual keep up the good work crap and walks out of the room. I walk up to my supervisor and ask him for a pen and some paper. He tares off a corner from his note book and hands it to me, I write ‘I quit signed Kelly’ and hand it back to him. He looks at it for a moment and says.
“Why are you quitting?” I still cannot tell if he is joking or not but decide to tell him the truth.
“I would give two weeks notice but I don’t think this place will be here in two weeks.” I turn and walk out of the room.
As I walked out of the building I looked to my left to see a dog projectile vomit on a baby and think why the fuck did I get up this morning.



I would like to take this opportunity to say that when I decided to write a story on Friday I had been drinking. The only plan I had was after seeing a film where a dog projectile vomited on shoes I thought it would be funny to write a story which ends with a dog projectile vomiting on a baby. Seeing as the story is actually true, it was written on and about a Friday and I had seen the film about the dog the only thing I made up was the word baby. Showing once and for all that I have no creativity.
Still my first Idea was a story about a super hero dog whose only ability was to projectile vomited on babies. Luckily his arch enemy was a baby, (Maybe you know him) sergeant BA BA. I figure I could have gotten 10 posts out of that and I was going to have, ‘my dog just projectile vomited on you baby, cunt’ as the tag line. However due to the distinct possibility of legal action from Ragecorp I decided to write Friday instead.