Volume 2 - Chapter 83 - Malthezar Oranis III
| "Look, I'm going to say what every single Emperor-damned Factory Manager in the Outer Industrial Belt has been thinking for the last six years but has been too smart—or too scared—to put on record. And since I am apparently neither of those things today, let's get fucking into it. The UHF Military Complex does not fucking understand how factories work. And I don't mean that as an insult, truly. I mean it as a precise, technical observation that I have submitted—in fucking writing—to the Strategic Logistics Division on fourteen separate occasions, acknowledged on exactly zero of them. They don't understand how factories work because nobody in that Emperor-forsaken building has ever stood on a production floor in their life. They have looked at numbers on a spreadsheet—which is not the same fucking thing, mind you!—and I would very much like them to explain that to my floor supervisors the next time we get a Priority Reclassification at 0200 on a rest cycle. Let—Let me just walk you through what an actual fucking Priority Reclassification means at ground level, since nobody in the UHF’s vast and apparently factory-illiterate military complex seems interested in asking: It means the Class-7 Composite Plating we were producing—eleven-hour pour cycle, which cannot be fucking interrupted once the secondary alloy mix is introduced without scrapping the entire Emperor-fucked batch—is now suddenly secondary. The new priority is Mk. IV Thruster Housing Assemblies, which need a completely different materials configuration and fourteen hours of line reconfiguration before we can even begin. So: Eleven hours of plating, scrapped. Fourteen hours of reconfiguration. Eighteen to thirty-six hours of Thruster Housing production before the next Reclassification arrives. That is not a fucking production schedule! That is a running document that describes what we were going to produce before Command changed their minds a-fucking-gain! And the economics of it—Emperor's bleeding fucking asshole, the economics of it…! Every scrapped batch goes into the quarterly report, which means I submit—every quarter—a report that makes me look like I'm running this facility into the ground through sheer and utter incompetence. I have had weeks with nine Reclassifications. Nine. My senior accounting officer eats lunch in the storage annexe because it's the only room where her comms signal is too weak to reach the Logistics Division. And frankly, I've started considering joining her! Then there's transport. We hit the targets, we have product staged and ready—aaaaand the window moves. It moves because the transport wing runs its own Reclassification system, completely independent of ours, synchronized with fucking nothing or the Void or whatever! So the product sits in our staging area taking up space we need for the next run. A colleague of mine calculated that completed product spends over forty percent of its facility time waiting for collection. Forty fucking percent! I submitted that figure to the Logistics Division in PFC922. It was acknowledged. It is now 937 and the numbers have gotten worse. I am not asking for your sympathy here. I am asking for one synchronized scheduling system that talks to both production and transport before sending down a Reclassification at 0200. I—I will help build it. Truly, I will! I will fucking fund it myself if that's what it takes. It’s not a complicated request, is it? It just apparently really feels like one." — [Shortened Excerpt from: Crucible-class Heavy Fabrication Complex, Mourne Secundus Transcript piece, Edran Polk, Facility Manager — Independent Industrial Correspondent Series, "The Weight of the War Economy", PFC 937]
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