Work in a hurricane’s aftermath

The old saying “when it rains, it pours” often rings true, but what about “when it storms, it rains work”? Or something like that. It stormed quite a bit on the East Coast this hurricane season, and the work seemed to flow right along continuously. North Carolina has been hit hard in the past few years, so we needed a break from all the damage. This season’s break was bittersweet, since Texas and Florida were hammered by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

It’s never easy to watch these storms do their damage. I feel the pain and pray for all the lives affected.

Some shops thrive off of these storms and make most of their revenue in the aftermath. We, on the other hand, don’t want to see a storm or hurricane come remotely close to our shores. Our workload is not normally dictated by a storm, but this time was different.

As a result of the recent hurricanes, we received a couple of orders from some of our regular customers, and we were alerted that several more might follow. In a job shop, you ride the wave when you can and adapt to the ever-changing conditions. Several phone calls followed, and the floodgates began to open. My dad told my co-worker Doug Teets and me that “we were about to get very busy.” We both smiled and said that sounded good to us!

The nice thing about running a repeat job is that less effort is required to push the work onto the shop floor. When things are slower in the shop, you have to work much harder in the front office to push work. I’m not saying we slack off in the office, but it is nice to have a little cushion of time to work with when the workload becomes heavy.

It turned out a bunch of the products we make for one customer were completely ruined during the flood. As many people know, almost nothing is salvageable after a flood.

Then there’s cleanup. Another customer’s products aid in cleaning up flood trash, so this client upped its order volume to meet demand. This was also good news, but we were up to the gills in work. Many of our guys got to work overtime. I told one of the new hires, Justin Mullins, to take it while ya can. It’s not always like this.

To add fuel to the fire, a third customer turned us onto a large order that had nothing to do with the storm’s destruction. They just happened to get a big order and had some due dates that were going to be a crunch. We had to push the guys and our machines hard to make this happen.

We did receive a little relief when our first customer sent an email with the subject line “No Room at the Inn.” We were to hold all shipments until further notice. That let us focus on some other pressing orders for a few days while the customer pushed some product out its door.Managing to stay on top of all these orders was aided by utilizing some lights-out cutting on our laser. Our laser operator also came in on the weekend and tried his best to stay ahead of the curve. The guys tend to get a little antsy waiting on freshly cut parts to finish their job.

Like many jobs, there are due dates, and then there are I-needed-it-yesterday situations. We kept everyone happy by staying ahead of schedule, but that didn't mean customers weren't chomping at the bits to get their parts before we were supposed to have them done.

I don't think the aftermath of this horrible hurricane season is going to clear up anytime soon. We will keep plugging away doing what we can to help our customers fulfill orders. Like I said, “Take it while ya can.”

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