Dammit, Mongo!

I had another work dream again last night. Ugh. I was back at my favorite locale (YC Honda) working at my old job. As per usual, things were different, and I was no longer a senior tech, but a bumbling newbie, requiring constant babysitting and assistance. Some things were the same: there wasn't enough work to go around, and guys were being less than helpful, since everyone had to scrap to get their hours.

Silva, aka "the Mongo Man," was no exception. Now, normally he'd have been the most helpful of the bunch. In real life, he'd have stopped whatever he was doing to lend a hand, even if it meant losing time on his job. He'd eventually gotten himself fired for allowing himself to fall behind so often that his hours were the lowest of anyone in the shop, racking up more than the acceptable amount of "unapplied time." 

Unapplied time is wasted or otherwise unbillable time, which the employer pays for when the mechanic is either standing around too much or is struggling to do the job in the "flat rate" time that is allotted for the particular job he is working on. The idea, as a flat rate mechanic, is to beat the flat rate and clock more hours than you are actually present at work. This is usually done by upselling multiple jobs on the same car and utilizing the overlapping labor time, cutting corners wherever possible.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good, as the saying goes, and in this dream at least, Mongo was being as good as it gets. 

I had managed to land a car that should have been a gravy boat. It was a 2001 Civic, or something equivalent. I'd upsold some brakes and sway bar links. Simple stuff. I should have breezed through it, but it was taking me all day, as I struggled with each nut and bolt. At this rate, my unapplied time would be in the traditional Mongo territory, and I'd eventually get called out for it.

I asked Mongo for some help and he said, sure, he'd help me in a minute. He just had to finish what he was doing. He'd taken the brake lathe apart and reconfigured it to machine some cover plate for a transmission. When I went over to use the brake lathe, it was in pieces, and I was completely unaware of how to reconfigure it for its primary purpose as a brake lathe. And Mongo was nowhere to be found.

I just stood there, fumbled a bit, and stood there some more, staring at the brake lathe in just the same manner as Mongo used to do when he was perplexed by some unique job for which he was mentally unprepared. His normal diagnostic procedure was to stare at something for a really long time and just hope that the answer would present itself. 

Nothing was presenting itself to me, though, and eventually my boss, as played by Neal Patrick Harris, showed up to find out what the holdup was. I told him about Mongo and the brake lathe, and he set out to make things right. First he went looking for Mongo to try to get him to reconfigure the brake lathe. Being unable to find him, he then attempted to help me himself, but that just resulted in the two of us struggling to find and reassemble the parts.

As Mongo was turning in his paperwork and getting praised for his banner day of productivity, I was losing so much time that I'd most likely hear about it and be reprimanded. So much for my triumphant return to the work force. 

Cory Allred showed up, fresh from prison, as he always seems to be, in any dream I have with him in it, overly muscled and speaking in inmate jargon. He suggested that I shank Mongo or some other such retribution oriented solution. Cory should have been as familiar with the brake lathe as anyone, since he'd spent so much time working in the machine shop while in the joint, but, no, shanking Mongo seemed to be the only kind of advice I was getting. 

I may be embellishing that last point, but that was the feeling I had of it. No one was able to put the lathe back together again, and Mongo deserved a good shanking in my book.