Going Postal

Jim goes to work everyday at seven. He works in the shipping department of a metal fabrication shop. His main job is boxing up orders before they're released onto the world. At this shop, there are two lines. One line is made up of relatively standardized parts - housings, couplings, nicks and nacks. This is the company's bread and butter. The other line is made up of one-off specialty items, custom made pieces for customers with deep pockets, tight tolerances, and a lust for the impossible. These orders come in all shapes and sizes from granule sized gears to garbage truck sized monoliths.

The packing department for the second line never knows what they're going to get from week to week. It's a challenging job and they often have to work closely with the engineers to make sure that weak points are addressed and that nothing gets stressed in a way it's not designed for. The shippers in this department even give suggestions to the engineers to make for less damage prone pieces and the engineers really do take their ideas into account.

Jim works for the first line where there are standardized boxes for the standardized parts. There's a standardized workflow and from year to year, even the level of orders seems to have its own standardized pattern.