First Steps

How did I get here?

That's a question most people ask themselves at one point or another. There can be a lot behind it, could be very little behind it, but its a question that bears asking.

With me I know it started because I got jilted.

There was a company I was part of at one point that had a high turn over rate, and due to that we lost our Manufacturing Manager after a month of work. The CEO (it was a very small startup) wanted us to keep going, keep making our product, keep ensuring the testing was going through. However, we couldn't do that without someone dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's.

So I, after maybe three years of working in a team setting, with two years experience in quality control, and about 8 months in manufacturing. I said simply: I can read, and I know our processes, I'll do what she did until they can hire someone on. It meant taking a huge step back from the manufacturing, the work I really wanted to do at the time. However, if we didn't get the paper work reviewed and approved it didn't matter how much we made. If it wasn't releasable it was all going to waste. So I sat at my desk and got to work.

It wasn't too difficult at first, just reviewing the associated manufacturing forms to ensure that the results and yields met our acceptance criteria. However as time wore on, and the elusive manufacturing manager continued to evade us, I began to learn more. I began receiving the disease panels that we used for some of our product to ensure that the material we were using wasn't dangerous to our operators or the end user. I started learning how to (even though I loathe it now) use Master Control and write SOPs. I looked up who our vendors were and coordinated with them so our cleanrooms were monitored and we maintained our ISO certification. I communicated with my team to determine when they could work most efficiently and when they would need to get menial work done.

I taught myself everything I thought I needed to know in order to run the place.

Then they hired someone. He came on board with a can-do attitude and a charismatic smile... with no background in the industry. I had spent months trying to figure out how to run our little startup to the best of it's ability, and they hired someone else because he was older and had a degree in chemistry that he hadn't used in 15 years! I had no say though. I hadn't realized that even though I was doing the work needed to keep our manufacturing team running. I had been doing it too quietly. I hadn't made it clear that I had been working, that I had been leading, that I had been heading this whole thing.

It made my blood boil.

They gave him the job and I let him. I introduced myself, told him I'd been running things since the last manager left and that if he needed help with anything to let me know. He gave me this... passive smile that left me thinking that he didn't hear a word I'd said, and thanked me. Fine, I thought, drown then.

He didn't. Not right away at least. I wanted the place to succeed so I kept running things on the sly while he did... something, in that big pretty glass corner office. It went on like this until his passiveness caught up to him. Meetings would come up and he would bellow and bluster about how well the manufacturing team was doing. Without actually describing what it was that they did. This continued on for weeks at a time, and I just kept quiet. Let him do what he thought was right. Our CEO ate it right up, and at one point he thought that our manage was so knowledgeable that he asked him something.

On a day that we were short staffed and no one could go in the cleanrooms. Our CEO asked the manager to go in and perform the process himself. The manager smiled and said, "sure thing." I was in our lab section of the manufacturing suite doing inventory on our supplies and I watched him as he gowned up. He didn't make it past the sterile hood. He stuck his head out of the gowning suite to ask me a question, and I told him, "I don't think you're supposed to wear the hood outside of the clean suite." The man blew up at me, asking me where I 'got off' on telling him how to do his job. That I reported to him and that I should listen to him because of it. I did my best not to argue, I let him rant and rave, and just knew that I was done. He slammed the door and I went back to my inventory and went back to my desk to write an email to HR.

I never got to send it.

He left the company a week later due to 'family issues.' That was fine by me, I left the company a week after him.

Long story short: that was the first push. That was the main thing that lead me to where I am now, because if a man like that could get into the field and get paid decent money for doing jack?

Then Imagine what I could do.