By A. Daniel Bodine
desertmountaintimes.com
Hee, hee! Will never forget Bea. An older spinster on a diodes assembly line at the huge Texas Instruments plant in North Dallas, she was the first to show this ol' slow country boy that “girls are not always nice to each other.” Even if their ages are 25 years apart.
ti, the letters pronounced separately like that in English around the globe, is probably the best place I've ever worked. Both as economic support in my long college years and as a maturation force for the shy introvert I was, the company was there for me at the right time in my life. When I took military leave in '67 to enter the U.S Navy it had something like 40,000 employees worldwide, most in Big D. Don't even think about mentioning semiconductors in polite conversation without bringing up Texas Instruments. It started out as the leader, and has kept the position.
Bullying in the workplace--and especially women to women--is high among topics in our national conversation now. There've been some tragic incidents related to it. So reading some homespun philosophy on what companies can consider, I smiled and thought of Bea. As a naïve line assistant on evening shift one night, she got me in big trouble with the line supervisor after going ballistic when she returned from break, and saw what a relief operator I'd spelled for her had done to her machine. Wow! I'd never seen such fury!
A diode, first of all, among humpteen-dozen different usages, is a very small device found in almost every electronic system from radars to television, to put a certain bias or switch voltage on a particular junction, to enable the system to function properly. In the 60's and 70's we could produce a million or more a day of them, simply by taking a “wafer” (built in another ti department; the size of two specks of dirt joined together with a tiny, thin, highly conductive slice of material in between—one wafer side having a positive charge; the other, a negative charge); and sandwiching it inside a tiny, circular glass envelope between two metal “leads,” or small wires. All of this was then sealed, of course, with heat to melt the glass; and then painted or striped; to make a nice, convenient diode ready for some product manufacturer's circuit-board.
Bea's machine was one of the old flame sealers (later replaced sometime after I'd returned from the Navy by hydrogen conveyor ovens, which greatly increased production capacity), with 10-12 revolving “arms,” which actually connected a “lead” wire to a glass envelope and carried it through a circular series of flame sealers, before allowing it to slide down a trough onto the operator's desk. The operator then, using nothing more than tweezers, slid the units into tracks on foot-long, thin, metal trays, each one holding 50 lead units, where they then were taken to another assembly point.
What angered Bea was the young replacement operator—an attractive, flirty type who'd spent most of the 15 minute break period talking to me—had allowed hundreds of the units from the trough to fall just willy-nilly all over the desk and the floor without once bothering to shut off the machine. And I'd stood there and never noticed it. Iholi!
Then, of course, after the supervisor called me into the office and asked me where I'd had my head at the time; and we began asking questions later about the relationship between the two women; I understood why Bea had gotten so angry. There'd been a long, long period of “acting tacky” by the other woman toward her, we learned. And I was dressed down for being unaware of that, too.
There are many more definitions of workplace harassment now, of course, as well as legal laws to protect workers, but the bottom line is that anyone in any kind of supervisory role has got to be alert to conditions in the work place; and be completely neutral when fractions occur. Regardless of how attractive or handsome the person smiling at you is.
When Bea first came back that night from her break and saw what'd happened , and began accusing the other woman of deliberately wrecking her night, I'd immediately stepped in with something like, “Oh now, Bea, you know she wouldn't do something like that.” And that's when Bea began screaming and crying, flailing her arms hysterically. Oh, did I have some things to learn!
That act would allow me to grow and develop and assume a line supervisor job myself years later. It was the beginning of the lesson, Professionalism, I was to learn, that needs to be at the core of every working relationship in our world with people. And it begins with consideration for others.
We could all be more productive. And probably happier, too. I thank ti for teaching it to me.
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