Cost Savings Proposal
In 1965 I started work as an apprentice mechanical draftsman, with a big engineering company in Belleville, Ontario. It was one of those wonderful old companies that looked after their employees, had a great apprenticeship program, and like so many other Canadian companies has now ceased to exist.
The drafting office and the cafeteria were up in the very top of the old steel shop. The sales and administrative offices were in another part of the complex, down on the main floor. The stairs from the main floor up to the drafting office and the cafeteria were made from open structural grating.
There was a tool crib directly below the stairs, and some eagle eyed senior administrative puke noticed that just before lunch time there would be a mass gathering of machinists and welders in the tool crib.---The secretaries mostly wore mini-skirts, but---they were skirts.---and the stair treads were open grating----You get the picture.
A corporate decision was made to build a new tool crib, away from the staircase. The old tool crib wasnt dismantled, but sat vacant.
Now, if any of you can remember back that far, there was a big financial crisis (isnt there always) in the late 1960s. The companys future was looking grim!!! Someone in head office decided that they should ask all of the employees to come up with cost saving proposals.
Now you have to picture this---There were about 30 draftsmen up in the old drafting office, and in many ways, we were a little world unto ourselves. I was a country kid, who grew up Up North about 100 miles north of Belleville, with a lumberjack father, a housewife mother, and a whole flock of drunken uncles with wicked senses of humour.
I decided to write a cost saving proposal, (which would only be seen by my co-workers in the drafting office.) I somehow got hold of the appropriate forms, and put forth that it would be a great idea for the company to buy a flock of baby pigs in the spring. We could keep them all in the old tool crib (which after all, was vacant anyways) and feed them on scraps from the cafeteria. I think I even suggested that a hole be cut in the cafeteria floor, and people could just throw their breadcrusts, apple cores, etcetera down the hole, directly to the pigs. Then, in the fall, we could use one of the company work trucks to truck all the pigs up to the sales barn at Hoard station and sell the pigs, thus making a tidy profit for our financially whipped company!!!
I had no IDEA!!!!
By the end of the day that cost savings proposal had been through the whole damn plant, seen by the senior engineers, the financial planning gurus, the personnel department, the secretarial pool, even the janitors.---I was famous!!!
When you are a third year apprentice, thats not the kind of fame you are really looking for. However, I lived to tell the tale, and was with that same company for another 17 years.---And every time that we went through a depression, a recession, or whatever label the government stuck on it, some cheerfull SOB would suggest that if times got any harder, they might just have to get Brian Rupnow to write another cost savings proposal!!!
Brian RupnowOct.-2013
