Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [129]
For me to figure out how to produce this huge amount of CDs was not really rocket science. The machines were being run 24 hours per day, the machine could crank out a certain amount in a day and there were a certain amount of days that I had to produce the amount of CDs required.
No matter how I crunched the numbers or no matter how many times I cut down the average amount of weekly downtime on the machines, I still came up short. With the current amount of equipment it could not be done.
I spent hours on this before I finally went and saw Russ Bellin. Russ had been brought in by COB to figure out how to set up Gold’s CD manufacturing line. Although Russ worked for CST, he did all of the research for Gold under the direction of COB. I am not sure how that worked corporately, but Russ knew what was done to work out the numbers and capacities of all machines in the area, so I showed him what I had worked out.
“You need more machines!” he concluded after looking over all of my workouts.
I knew he would say that. That was what I was trying to avoid. After being at the Int Base for several years, I knew the one wrong thing to tell COB was that you wanted more toys. He always nuked the person who asked for more equipment in order to make some target that he had laid out.
Nevertheless, Russ and I sat down and did all the calculations on what additional machines would be needed to make the targeted production quantities. It was not that many machines, but it would come with the hefty price tag of 2.5 million dollars!
I had to make the named quantities and if that meant buying more machines, I really had no other choice than to make that the plan and submit it. The meeting would be any day now and I had to have the plan ready when COB wanted it presented to him.
Later that week, the fateful meeting was called. COB wanted to meet with us in the CMO Int conference room. All the CMO Int Execs were there as well as Russ Bellin and his staff. When COB showed up, he was not in a good mood. I was sure that this would be a short meeting once I opened my mouth. It was. After I explained my plan to him, he went ballistic.
“I ask for production and you say you want to spend money!” Dave yelled. “What is it with these Gold guys? They always try and spend as much money as they can on anything and everything!”
Days later I was taken off post as the Producer Gold because of my plan. Of course someone who has such a destructive concept of production should not be over any areas that have to do with dissemination of Scientology materials. There is actually a policy where LRH says that people that are out-ethics or PTS should not be put on posts that involve dissemination.
Ironically, the department head over the CD manufacturing area would also be taken off post weeks later for a similar plan to mine. Who ended up replacing him? Of course it was me. COB came in to where I was working and told me that I should take the Director of A/V Manufacturing post and get the CDs made. He also said that he had a plan to get all the CDs made.
I took the post. So now I was the one directly responsible for making all of the CDs that I had failed miserably on planning out a month earlier.
In a meeting a few weeks later, COB unleashed his new plan of how we would be able to make all of the CDs needed by his impossible release date. I was sure that he was going to just extend the date and make it workable within the confines of the equipment we had already purchased and set up. I was so far off it was crazy.
His plan was to blow out a whole floor of the manufacturing building. Move all of our storage to a warehouse in Los Angeles. Make the second floor area the printing facility with banks of new printing machines that could print both color and black and white pages. We would also set up our own foil stamping equipment, laminating equipment, paper cutters, UV coating machines, hole punchers, binding equipment, additional CD replicators, you name it, anything you could imagine that would be needed, it was in