06/20/2019
“Some days a diamond, some days a stone”.
Never really understood that phrase until yesterday. We’ve been working on a large order. We improved our processes and came up with some real time savings without cutting quality. Things were looking up.
Then we had an equipment failure. Not just any piece, but the one machine critical to our process. We didn’t have a second one. Lots of calls to shops around town searching for a repairman to look at it. Even started looking online for a whole replacement. Grim indeed!
Then we got ahold of Holland’s Sew Shoppe and our favorite repairman, Eddie. They had closed their local Boise store (much to our dismay), but were still at their Ontario, OR location. Eddie listened to the problem description over the phone, and was 90%+ sure what was wrong. Dashed over to Ontario that afternoon. As we walked into the shop, Eddie greeted us personally and relayed he had done some additional research since our call. He was now 99%+ sure what the core fault was and provided a verbal estimate on repair costs and timeframe. Neither piece of information was good.
Eddie then asked a couple of usage questions, and said he had an alternative solution. He showed us a very lightly used machine he had taken in that would easily meet our requirements. He took the time to go over all aspects of it, did several demos and even gave a quick tutorial on usage and features. We left the shop with the machine in hand, highly satisfied. Got it back to the workshop, plugged in, set up and ready to use come the morning.
After a long day, we finally had a replacement machine to continue on with our order processing. We even came across another, albeit much older, machine that we can stage as a backup should this new (to us) machine conk out.
As the day wound down, I realized I had only one cup of coffee all day.