Rooster's Revenge

My day is like a soap opera: one big meaningless drama that never seems to end.

Let’s take one trivial example. I am tasked with creating an automated calculation in Excel that computes the number of days waiting for a job to get reviewed. The existing table had the start and end dates that are manually typed by the user.

Simple enough.

Like I always say, anything worth doing is worth over doing. How can I over do something like this?

How about showing a blank cell if there is no start date? Clean.

How about automatically calculating the days waiting if there is a start date but no end date yet? Cool.

Hey, why not subtract weekends and paid holidays? Sweet.

Let’s color code the cells so that if the response is within 1 day, it is green. In 2 days, it goes to yellow. When we hit 3 or more days, we go red. Nice.

And take it one step further. If what is typed in the cell is not a date, then show a blank cell instead of an error message. Damn.

The equation is simple enough. It is:

=IF(ISBLANK(A4),”",IF(ISBLANK(B4),NETWORKDAYS(A4,TODAY(),Holiday)-1,IF(ISTEXT(A4),”",IF(ISERROR(A4),”",(NETWORKDAYS(A4,B4,Holiday)-1)))))

The A4 is the date out cell, B4 is the date in cell, and Holiday pulls from a list of dates. Click here to download an example (is an 2007 Excel file).

So, where does the drama start? I work with a guy that told me straight up that he does not want me working with him and all that. It could be anyone in the seat. He is just insecure. I don’t like dealing with insecure, irrational people. But, that is part of the game.

Well, my new buddy proudly announces today that he does not use the date in /out thing anymore since I added the calculation to it.

Not that I really give two shits, but it does make the “trying to get along” thing difficult. Perplexing to me, it is, when intelligent people behave like children.

Scratch that. My 8 year old was more respectful and mature when he was 2.

I digress.

Bottom line is I still have alot of game left in me. I may not be as fast or sharp as I was 20 years ago, but I have more experience than most in their 60s.

My goal is simple: I want to be on a championship caliber team. Plain and simple.

I have the skills, knowledge, and experience to take any die group to the highest levels. But, somehow, I keep finding myself in these situations where politics and psychology seem to take precedence over profit and prosperity.

I totally get why Brett Favre changes his mind about playing football about as much as I change mine about being in this business. It is tough getting older.

I am certainly not getting any younger. I may have mellowed some, but my tolerance for babies and bullshit still hovers around zero.

I think Christopher McCandless had the right idea. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would have chosen that path instead of the one that I did.

I won’t be blogging on dies and stamping for a while – if ever again. I have said all I have to say for the time being. And all I say is met with skepticism or criticism – so I will save us all the bother and not be one.

The time has come for me to move along.

“Are you serious?” was my response to Bob Martin at Bud Martin’s Hardware store last night at 8:33 PM.

The store closed just minutes before I arrived, and I needed a bolt.

After a day in the cutthroat trenches of the die world, I found that the little things matter. Funny how things turn out.

See, we just moved to a new community in a small town in Michigan that I call home. My son met a friend, and that friend broke the hand brake on her bicycle earlier that evening.

While I am no longer in the comfortable financial position I was at the start of the century, I wanted to help this kid out. So, I drove to two bike shops to burn $40 on a new hand brake and a kickstand.

Like most dies, you go to fix one thing and see a few more things in need of repair. I get the new hand brake on and discover the gooseneck is so loose that the handbars are about to pull right out of the frame.

Fixed that.

Then, I notice the tires are seriously low on air.

Fixed that.

I go to put the kickstand on and discover the carriage bolt that came with it is about 10 mm short. So, I run to the local hardware store. A real hardware store.

As I pull into the parking lot, I see the lights are out. Two men are chatting in the parking lot. “You probably just closed, right?” I ask.

“Yeah. You look like you are in a bind. What do you need?”

I hold up the carriage bolt and say, “This one is about 3/8 too short. I can come back tomorow. No big deal.”

To me, it was a big deal because tomorrow to the little girl meant tomorrow night.

“C’mon,” Mr. Martin says as he waves to follow him back into the store.

“Really?” I am in disbelief.

He opens the store, goes in the back, and gets the new carriage bolt. I am now holding the bolt in one hand and cash in the other.

“Next time you come in, give 29 cents to the cashier,” he tells me.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

Now, I know we are talking about 29 cents here. But it is the principle. No way in hell Home Depot or Lowe’s will let you do that. Their respective return policies kick ass, but they don’t have a forward policy that I am aware of.

“I will be in tomorrow, Sir.”

“No. The next time you are in, just leave 29 cents. No problem. I am glad I could help you out of a bind.”

Are you serious?

Guess where my first choice for hardware products is now? It is the little things that matter.

As for my son’s friend, she is estatic that her bike is fixed.

I am getting old.

The world is changing around me and I can’t stop it.

Back in my day, being friends with someone meant you could go to lunch together.

Share a good meal.

Share a few laughs.

Escape from the hell of your day for an hour.

These days, I dine alone.

Why? Because the people who I thought were my friends go greeting card shopping for lunch.

What the fuck?

But, a good friend will do that. I guess.

You know. Get you a clever get well card.

Just in case you should ever get sick.

Well, I am sick of getting old.

And sick of eating alone. Laughing at my own jokes.

Happy trails to all my friends with their sick sense of humor.

With any luck, I can get on a regular blog schedule again.

I have been in the professional moving business lately. In the past 7 months, I have moved 7 times. I am not talking about moving from the couch to the kitchen table. I am talking about household moves.

Seven.

Five of these came in the past 10 weeks. Most recently, last week.

And that was the last one. I hope.

We had environmental issues at the last place that forced me to move in and out. In and out. In and out. In and out. In and out.

How real pro movers do this day in and day out for a living is beyond me.

Then again, they probably say the same thing about die guys. How can we keep working with the same shitty product designs and the same shitty software? Program after program.

“Have you tried a different process?”

“Yes”, I say.

“How about different form steels?”

“Yes.”

“How about different materials?”

“Yes.”

“Well, try different materials until you find one that works,” the engineer says to me.

Now, nevermind that the forming condition is impossible to make in any ferrous material. The product design is simply not manufacturable.

But, give me an inch of rope and I will take about 10 feet of it, find a tree, and end up hanging you with it.

Which leads me to my latest invention: Super Steel.

I found a material that will work. Are you ready for the mechanical properties? Here they are:

• Yield Strength: 5000 MPa
• Tensile Strength: 20,000 MPa
• n: 0.5
• r: 2.0

This is super formable yet super strong. I am working on a super coating so that instead of the die surfaces wearing, the die actually gets better with use. No more polishing and sharpening required. This means inserts and all that are a thing of the past.

Sure. I have to work out something with press force and energy. But I shall find a way or make one.

My view of dies is their architecture should be driven by both the production volume and material strength of the stampings. Unfortunately, this is fuzzy in practice. Many die standards and quoting systems do not take both into account.

The illustration below captures how I believe dies should be built based on the combination of production life and material strength:

There are three main categories of architectures: Low, Standard, and High. It works like this: Depending on the combination of production volume and material tensile strength, the low and high architectures are variations of what you would consider a typical or standard die to look like. The Low variety uses less inserts and lower grade materials. The High variety uses more inserts and higher grade materials to sustain the tool under high force and high hits conditions.