Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [65]
Chapter Twelve – Sweetest Perfection
We had been running the high-speed copy line for a few months and were getting better and better at figuring out what caused the tapes not to pass through quality control. Soon, we were up to almost 40,000 cassettes a week and were able to do that week after week. It was November, four whole months since the flood and since the organization was assigned “Confusion”. It had been an extremely rough time.
We lost Bruce Ploetz to the Rehabilitation Project Force in Los Angeles. He had been up all night in Tapes on two different occasions and no one knew he was sleeping under a desk until he missed morning muster. He was sent to the RPF and we had not seen him since. We could not believe they actually sent him. There were tons of people that missed one muster and ended up staying up all night, but no one missed a second. Except Bruce. I never thought he should have gone. He never slept and was probably the smartest person on the entire base. You could explain a type of electronic device you were trying to make and Bruce could write the circuit board schematic for it right there! I think he was the smartest person I ever met in my life. He was a cool guy that was just around to help. I thought that people took advantage of him. He had helped build and wire almost all of the audio and video production lines on the base. He had also helped design the E-Meter and even held one of the patents!
Either way, we had been having a few tiny problems with a few machines that neither Luigi nor Bob Ferris (the technician assigned to our area) could figure out how to handle. If we could fix these last few machines for good, we could hit our 50,000 target.
Then one day it happened. Bruce Ploetz walked into Tapes. He was back. Bruce had lost some weight and had gotten a haircut, but other than that it was the same old Bruce. Bruce was told what problems we were having with the last few machines. He listened to what Bob told him was wrong and walked off into the technician room. He came back a few minutes later and started to tinker with one of the machines. If Bruce could fix these last machines, we might have a chance.
It was the third week in November and, within a week of his return, Bruce had managed to fix the last few machines giving us problems. We ran the line day and night and managed to reach 50,192 cassettes produced by Thursday, 2:00 p.m. November 22, 1990. We were pumped. We had done it. We had literally accomplished the impossible.
Mathematically it was almost impossible to do what we did. We could produce around 25 cassettes on average from a single pancake factoring a bit of loss and the few that flunked here and there. It took 2000 pancakes to produce 50,000 cassettes and it took around 5 minutes to check each pancake. That is 23.8 hours a day worth of quality control, and two staff assigned to do it. That means that there is 20 minutes each day where we do not have to be sitting in the chair checking pancakes. There are 168 hours in a week. We spent at least 120 of those working or on the way to work and the rest sleeping. Physically there was no time for anything else.
That afternoon we were all called into the mess hall around 4:00 p.m for a briefing. Hopefully we were not going to be yelled at. We were not in the mood. We had made our target. We wanted to be upgraded into normal conditions again.
We set up the mess hall for a briefing and moved all the tables and chairs out of the way.
We were lined up just like on the day when we were assigned Confusion. COB walked in. He announced that we had made the target of 50,000 tapes in one week on the Gauss line. Our names were all read out. We all went up to the podium and were given chocolates and flowers. After we filed back in line, Miscavige announced that we were upgraded out of lower conditions and that we could have