High Priests lesson on Kindness

An application for the lesson on “Kindness” in High Priests Quorum

On Sunday Dec 16, 2012 in the High Priests Quorum Meeting we had a lesson taught by Brother Stone. The lesson was from the Teachings of the Presidents George Albert Smith Chapter 21: The Power of Kindness.

I had a chance to try out what was taught and this was the experience that came from it with some historical information to set the stage.

On April 20, 2011 I was laid off from my position with Provo Craft as an Image Specialist. I went without income for about 10 months before starting as an SOS Temp employee. I was asked to go to work for a place called SupraNaturals in February of 2012. I was working on what was called Line 7. I worked there making boxes and inspecting product labels as they came off the line. About a month later a Line Lead came to myself and Laurie and told us that she had noticed how we always seemed to be able to keep busy and know when someone else needed help and would then go and help them without being asked. I was also given several opportunities to work on other lines and in the course of just a few weeks had worked on line 2 putting on bottles on the very front end of the line. I had worked sifting a health food dry drink mix, inspected bottles of Vitamin D as they came off line 3, put platic bottles on Line 4 as they packged vitamin tablets, learned to disassemble, clean and reassemble the filler on line 5 and many other tasks across all of the lines. A couple of weeks later the same line lead asked if I wanted to run the filler machine called a KISS Packaging machine. I said I would be willing to try it and soon was running it the whole time. Having had a background in maintenance I was also able to fix it and make it run better that it had before for other operators. I was having a lot of fun and learning a lot. Soon after that my Supervisor found employment in Salt Lake City and a new Supervisor was hired. I was soon thereafter asked if I wanted to be employed full time by Supra and so June 4, 2012 I became a regular employee of Supra. Well when I became an operator in Line 7 and a full time employee a fellow worker by the name of Kenny told me that I would soon be carrying a radio. The reason for it was, according to him, that he knew I would be in the line when my line lead most likely would not be there. So I was soon given a radio to carry. It was at that same time that I had been talked to by one of the three main bosses, Jed Mower, and asked to apply for a position to run a sleever machine. I applied but another fellow was hired and I was left to work on line 7 as a machine operator. A month or so after that I was approached by my supervisor and asked if I wanted to learn to run the FOGG filler on line 2 and not to read too much into it but that they also had another young man who wanted to learn it so they might give it to him. Well I never heard anymore about that for about a month and then one day was assigned to Line 2. I had worked various parts of line 2before while a temp employee so I knew a little about the room. In fact one day I had been asked to empty some bottles of drink that they were filling that day back into the holding tank for the pasteurizer. The temperature in the tank is 185 degrees F and it was a very hot task. I was able to stay in and empty all 120 bottles but was very sweaty when I came out of the room. It was my first taste of how hot that line was during the production process.

The operator Jeana was pretty nice and told us that it was her sauna room. Since I had a radio I became used to listening to the banter that would take place between some of the other operators as they would talk over the radio. Line two especially since Jeana seemed to like to make fun of her supervisor Jed Marshall. She always seemed to be belittling him but he seemed to always give it back as well.

At 90 days after I had been employed in September I was given a very high rating on my evaluation and found later that I was the only one that had actually been given a 90 day evaluation out of all of the employees in my department. In early Oct I was then asked to cross train in line 2 on the FOGG filler. I was to soon discover that they had trained the other young man but that he would miss two ot three days every week and they finally wanted to have me do it since I was very dependable. I then started in what would become a nightmare. I think I even understand why the other young man would miss so many days since I was soon wishing I could also but that wasn’t my mode of operation. I was asked a number of times if I enjoyed running that machine and I would always say Yes since I really did. It was a fun machine and much more complicated than any others that I had operated while at Supra. However Jeana was a great operator but very poor trainer and had very poor people skills. I would soon come to realize that the bantering across the radio with Jed was more of a power struggle than I could have ever imagined. Jeana loved to banter since she knew she had the upper hand in the fact that she was operating the front end of the line and Jed the backend. It is a situation where it is very important to run both ends of the line as evenly as possible since if the back end went down and the front end could then no longer operate the product would have to be put into a cooling cycle called cool down in order not to burn the product that was pasteurizing at such a hot temperature. There was basically a window of 10 minutes before it would start to burn I was told. Well I learned fairly quickly or so I thought until she started to have me run it by myself and then I quickly learned that there were a lot of little details that she hadn’t taught me. That would have been OK except that she handled it by yelling at me and making very snide comments somewhat under her breath so that I couldn’t totally understand what she was saying. Then she would get mad at me for even the slightest mistakes and when the supervisor or maintenance people would come in she would make comments that didn’t particularly say it was me but the intension to point the finger at me regardless of what the reason really had been. I started to dislike going to work and even dreading each day that I would get up where before I had really enjoyed it because I knew I was appreciated in the work that I had been performing.

Here are a couple on instances where I was really struggling to even stay ay work.

We were running a product for Young Living that was being processed into square bottle when the machine was really designed to run round bottles. There was a lot of bottles being broken in the machine and that was somewhat disconcerting to begin with. However part of the operation also requires putting mess sleeves onto the bottles after they are filled. A few bottles can be missed but not many so Jeana said that since we were short handed (we needed 5 people just to sleeve and we had 3) that she and our supervisor, Brandon, would help out. Well due to a few other problem neither one of them actually helped so I went and while running the machine would try to help sleeve the bottles. Then all heck broke loose and Jeana ended up coming in and taking over on the machine. Since I was still trying to learn then I would stand behind her and watch as closely as I could. All of a sudden she threw her hands into the air and said here do it yourself and walked out. Later I was told by Brandon that I was not operating the machine and that she was having to do it all. In response to that I said I had been trying to and he responded that he had mostly observed that she was doing it all. I just about lost it then and told him that we needed to talk after this was all done. Well that never happened but things seemed to settle down a little so I just kept trying to do my job and not get Jeana rattled.

Another time a red light went off and since I hadn’t been trained what was happening I tried to stop production and get things settled down and her response to that was I should have done things totally different and now QA could make us go through the entire process to be sure things were OK. Well we did have to redo about 100 bottles that had processed before I knew what was happening. Another time with a different red light on a different machine I hadn’t noticed it was on until she yelled at me asking how long it had been on. When I told her I didn’t know she blew into a rage and again started talking somewhat under her breath across the room.  These were just three examples of how she was handling it. Brandon on the other hand had worked with me a couple for days when Jeana was not there and each time he would answer my questions and help me understand how the process worked. It is that kind of training that I really need since I don’t make mistakes as easily when I understand the process and reasons behind why the process is operated.

Well I was beginning to understand now that Jeana’s mode of operation was to belittle, and even abuse people. She was not physically or sexually abusive but rather very emotional, verbal and mentally abusive. I was really struggling to go to work with a decent attitude. One day just a week or so before the main event I had been asked by one of my co-workers how I put up with Jeana. I merely said it takes some patience. THEN, came the day when I would get a lesson. I had been praying almost nonstop during the working days for Heavenly Father to help me cope with and understand Jeana and it would take a lesson on Sunday in the High Priests Quorum meeting to give me the help I needed. It was on Marie’s birthday December 16^th that I would sit through a lesson taught by Brother Dennis Stone on Kindness and how President George Albert Smith would handle situations with kindness and diffuse any problems. I decided that I would need to try that with Jeana. So Monday I went to work and sure enough the first thing Jeana told me that morning was about something that she had told me I needed to do each morning but I had apparently missed the very first step in the process and thus it was doing no good at all and she made sure I knew it. Well I asked her to show me what I had misunderstood and simply replied I already did it. There was no offer to explain what I would need to know to do it correctly as she figured I should have already learned it. Well a little later in the day when I asked what the process was for doing a product to product push that we would have to do that day she said in a somewhat angry tone that we had done it a hundred times and I should already know and stomped off. Well as we went through the day I knew that she was really quite concerned about it herself because several times as I would look aver toward the part of the room where she was sitting I could tell she was reading the operating procedure for that very process. You see our supervisor had left for a buffalo hunt on the 14^th and he was the one who usually did that process for us, which by the way had only happened once since I had been started to train on line 2. That night as we were ending the day and calculating the product we had used and finishing the paperwork I went up to her and told her that I really thought she did a great job on the product to product push I told her I could tell that she had been very concerned about it but that I thought it went very smoothly. She didn’t look at me but in a more quiet voice that I had expected told me that she had been concerned and that it had gone pretty good. Well that was all that was said and then I told her as I left that I appreciated how well she had done it.

The next day she was scheduled to have it off and I was also going to take it off but decided to go in for 6 hours at least and help put bottles on the line as we completed what had not been done the day before. So I enjoyed that day and then went home to play with Brooklyn and Kade. Wednesday I again approached the day with great apprehension but went to work expecting it to be as the others had been. I was really surprised however that Jeana seemed to be a whole different person. We were even able to discuss parts of the process that I was not still really sure of why we did what we did. Of course I approached it not as a direct question but rather by just making a comment that would lead into a discussion if she wanted. I found that I went home that day feeling much better about how things had gone even though I still did not totally have all the answers that I will need to operate effectively. Thursday and Friday were even fun even though someone had parked in her spot Thursday morning and she was pretty upset about it before even getting into the plant. I saw others get the abuse that had been directed toward me many other times and even though there were a couple of instances where she could have done it to me again during those two days she still was very civil with me.

Well, Heavenly Father had taught me how to handle the situation and at least for now it is working. I will just have to keep looking and commenting in kindness to her during work days and hope to keep the attitude in the proper form needed for us to both be able to work together. Thank You Heavenly Father for the lesson on Kindness I will never forget that one.