The Job Coach Says Here Is A New Way To Do It

When I was at University way before I became a Job Coach, I worked for a company that made heat exchangers. It paid well. The title of the Job was Swing Shift Porter. The reality was I was the swing shift garbage man

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The building was built in the year 1860. It was a little dangerous as it was a wooden building with a lot of electric circuits and gas lines retrofitted. The processes in the plant involved heat treatments and soldiering. This meant that at 10pm the temp in the building was still over 100 degrees.

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The job was budgeted for an 8 hour shift but it only took me 4 hours. So what does an ADD 20 something do with 4 hours a day. Well my supervisor did not have any tasks for me as this was strict union shop. I was only a garbage man. I was annoyed as my supervisor suggested I find a place to sleep and that I could not do school work on the job.

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I went exploring. What I have found was there were places that suffered from poor lighting. Supervisors would use flashlights to read job tickets. Well armed with a long pole and a feather duster I began to clean light fixtures. The light improved 30%.

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On one day I got caught. I was climbing up on a great window in the workers entryway. The workers and managers had been arguing over upgrading the lighting as at noon it was dark and gloomy going into the building. I did not get caught in the act of unapproved cleaning. I got caught with the results. You could see in the hall because the windows had been virtually blackout with filth. I was told by the union representative that I was taking another man’s job. I said I wanted to meet this person as it seemed he had not been there since Lincoln was president.

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I went back to wandering around the factory. I had noticed that work in one part of the factory was slow because the aisles between the machines were very narrow and that the people that moved parts between the machines had to wait because the aisles were the width of one pallet. Traffic would not allow two hand carts to pass each other. I then took a look at the sea of pallets with parts and a job tag on each one. There was at least 40 feet of pallets on either side of the aisle. After walking on the pallets to the wall, I picked up the tag on the pallet and was astounded to see that the date on the ticket was 1944. Over the next few weeks I put all the parts from tickets that dated before 1965 back into inventory and put the pallets back in the pallet pile. Within two weeks the aisle would let the pallet jacks pass two people at a time. Here is where the law of unintended consequences took over

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There I was on a lonely loading dock in a thunderstorm dumping garbage into the dumpster. The lightning lights up the sky and the loading dock and there is this guy with black pants white shirt and a black tie with his arms folded. He said are you the night porter. I turned and faced him with my garbage man tee shirt and said who wants to know. He said are you the guy that messed with the pallets and the parts. I said maybe what you want. He said well here is what you did. The factory improved by 20% because of the widening of the of the aisles. The cost of materials fell because of the parts you put back into inventory. We do not have to spend $5000 to put new lights in the front entry because you cleaned the windows and you dropped the need for purchasing new pallets.

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He looked me in the eye and said if you will commit to work full time you can have any job in the factory.

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The secret here is this is what we all must do to get work in these difficult times. We need to find out how we can help make the company better.

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We need to look beyond our own needs and wants and find ways to help and improve the companies we want to work for.

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What you need to do is take charge and look for new ways with new tools.

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