All right then! #StoryTime Once upon a time in my misspent youth, I was the purchasing and accounts payable (did the bills) for an all in one manufacturing/sales/shipping facility.

That included buying parts for the factory, which ran Goss presses to make boxes.

Oh, excuse me, CORRUGATED CONTAINERS. (This was also the place where the owner loved me and the office manager hated me. Good times.)

Right, so I'm doing the daily grind, and the dude who runs the factory puts in a PO for a part for one of the presses.

Purchase orders always had all kinds of information attached to them, but there was a part number, so I just called up our guy at Goss and was like "Hey, I need a number seventy-five double Q" and he was "sure, that'll be $300."

And I'm like "Really. Three hundred dollars. Hang on." Put him on hold, flipped through the PO to find the three-view/orthographic drawing of the part. You know, one of these?

It so happened my 8th grade shop teacher made us learn to draw and read them.

I stare at it for a couple minutes, triple-check the material required, stare, check the material again, and get back on the phone. "Let me check, you want $300 for a rectangle of carbon steel the size of my hand, with a hole in it?"

And guy's like "why yes, you must buy Goss parts to keep your warranty alive" and I'm "these presses are older than I am, you refuse to warranty them" and he's "but Goss parts!" and I'm "I'll get back to you" and hang up on him.

Drag out the phone book (I'm old, okay), flip through for machine shops in the area who have something like "no job too small!" listed, find one, call 'em up. "Hi, I've got a really simple part we need, can I fax you the drawing, get an estimate?" Sure, so I fax it over.

Takes the guy like thirty seconds because RECTANGLE OF STEEL WITH A FUCKING HOLE IN IT, calls back and is like "Yeah... Thirty bucks? We can knock it out right now out of some scrap, when do you want it?" so I went and picked it up on my lunch hour and was a hero.

After that I'd call them for all the minor stuff, and we all got to know each other, and I'd send over the occasional pizza as thanks for fast turn-around. ON MY OWN DIME.

As these things inevitably go (if you work with old presses), eventually I had a drawing of a gear sitting on my desk, and an $800 quote from Goss. Was considering calling around to see if anyone had something like it on a shelf, but called the shop first. $200 in two days.

This is pure fucking magic, both in cost and turnaround. Because turns out they have some fucking genius gear cutter who'd been there since WW2 and practically did it from memory.

(Side story, the guy had been there longer than the current owner, and when he pissed off the owner, the owner would make up fake orders with all prime numbers, and then use the results as paper weights.)

They invited me to the holiday party, so I showed up in my lucky black dress and took a bottle of Jack, and then EVERYONE in the shop liked me, and the gear cutter talked to me and wanted to take me on as an apprentice.

This is what I'm talking about when I say, in another life, I became a gear cutter in Columbus.

But before Christmas, hub had come home and asked me to marry him. I was thinking about it. So I thought about gear-cutting, too.

I'd decided to marry hub sometime in February, and the Boss from Hell had been an insensitive bitch after I was in a car accident. (That one wasn't my fault either.) So I walked out. Just, see ya, bitch. Dropped the key in her hand. She was speechless. For once.