[BlueStreak]

This is indeed disgusting behaviour, and shouldn't be tolerated. Factories are dangerous places as it is, throw alcohol and/or drugs into the mix and you are putting your life and the lives of others on the line.

We recently sent four guys from our maintenance department out for drug/alcohol testing over an incident involving improper rebuilding of a large centrifugal impeller type fan. The fan is similar in design to the fan in your vacuum cleaner only it is cast steel, four feet in diameter, driven by a 100hp motor and weighs several hundred pounds. Because they failed to properly pack the bearings in grease, the bearings became extremely hot, the pillow blocks (bearing housings) exploded sending chucks of cast iron flying over fifty feet. The impeller itself slammed into the side of it's housing, destroying it, but miraculously did not break through and leave the housing. The drive shaft, 5 inches in diameter and 4.5 feet long was bent like a noodle and you could see where the impeller twisted off of it. In short, someone could very easily have been killed, or grievously injured.

So far no positive test results have come back. But, all four men have been written up and warned. If anyone comes up positive, he's gone.

I can tell you guys, the type of behavior seen in that video is not limited to auto industry or union shops. I've worked in non-union plants and seen people snorting coke in the bathrooms, coming back from lunch stinking of beer, even finding places to sneak off to and get high-------inside the plant. I will say that it seems to be less commonplace now than it did say, twenty years ago, but it still happens.

The company I work for now is pretty good at prevention with simple rules against loitering in the parking lot, drug testing policies such as the one mentioned above, etc.
I only know of one incident of a man gettting caught with beer in his locker.

Personally, I don't see how anyone can do it. I have never gone to work drunk or high. I just can't function that way.

Not trying to downplay the behaviour, but to an extent I can see Dons point. Fox does politicize everything, and I mean everything. If a pidgeon shits on a clean statue it is somehow Obamas fault. If an alien spaceship should show up and start shooting death rays about, it'll be because the Democrats failed to secure the stratosphere. And don't give me that, "That's the Detroit style" horsehockey either. They do the same thing everywhere. I will uabashedly tell you I despise FoxNews and every single smug faced, self-righteous conspiracy theorist dickhead that works for them. (And most of their viewers as well.)


Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite,
Dave