Home / Humor

Posts Tagged ‘Humor’

Being the “mother” at Setpoint

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 by Setpoint

I’m not sure I like the title of Mother at Setpoint. I guess because then I am the oldest female working here. Aside from that it has its advantages. Sitting at the front desk and being in charge of the candy dish people come to my desk often. So while they are there they will tell me about their family and what they did over the weekend or what their plans are for a vacation. I know most of their family and now I can ask how they are doing. Most people like to talk about their family and so it’s been fun to get to know them in a more personal way. Being the mother of 4 children it’s a natural thing for me to get involved in all the employees personal lives.

I think being older and having raised a family sometimes people will come to you with questions and ask for advice or some input on a situation. Just watching them with their kids makes me smile to see what good parents we have at Setpoint. They are all striving to become great parents.

Being the mother also means that you see the kitchen and think that someone will clean that mess up but after a couple of days and it is still there you just clean it up because it’s easier than finding out who made the mess and will I ever find out who did it? Probably not. Whenever we have a Setpoint party it seems that the girls always seem to get the clean up job so I do have some help there.

My job at Setpoint is to hand out the checks so it’s kind of like allowance that a mother will give her kids. So everyone likes to see me coming when I have checks that’s always a plus.

I like my job at Setpoint and it is my family away from home since we spend a lot of time at work. There is a special bond and we are all concerned about everyone else. Last year my husband lost his job and everyone was so concerned about me I knew that if I needed anything they would be there for me.

Open Book Finance - The Board

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 by ksmith

What do your numbers mean?  Here at Setpoint we practice Open Book Finances.  Every week we look at the numbers that show us how far along we are on our projects.  In our newest YouTube video Joe Knight, our CFO, talks about how we know if we are making money.  He shows some key ratios that can be used in any industry to measure this.

 

The Brainstorm King

Thursday, June 26th, 2008 by Mark

its-good-to-be-king 

“Let’s go to the whiteboard.”

Leak Check Gripper Retrofit

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 by Justin

4upgripper_01Setpoint was asked to retrofit a two up pick and place to a four up pick and place on a leak check machine.  This would be no problem, but due to space constraints we were only allowed to use one gripper. One gripper gripping four pars is not trivial due to the fact that the world is not perfect and every thing is not exactly the same size and shape.  We quickly made a prototype to see if this was even going to be possible. 

When we got the grippers in we tested them on some parts given to us by the customer. The test showed potential. We did, however, see that some parts if rotated became loose.  To solve this, we made some UHMW inserts that would give some compliance to the grippers.  After bench testing the UHMW gripper inserts on the parts given to us it looked as if the grippers would work.  The machine that we were retrofitting ran parts with three different heights.  After retrofitting the machine and running it we found that for the two taller parts the grippers worked fine, but for the smaller one the gripper did not work. 

To make the grippers work on the smaller parts Warren suggested using O-rings.  Instead of using O-rings we went one step further and made the UHMW gripper inserts out of polyurethane.  The polyurethane were more compliant and we could 4upgripper_02shape it to hug the whole part unlike an O-ring.  This gave us our best result yet.  The only problem with the polyurethane is that it would wear too fast and the gripper inserts were being replaced every three days.  This was unacceptable so we went back to the drawing board. 

We decided to make the gripper a three-point gripper.  This helped, but then we were told that we could not use polyurethane any more due to its poor wear properties.  We were so close to making the grippers work, but if we could not use polyurethane then this 4 up gripper tooling was not going to work.  Then it just so happened that I found an O-ring that worked perfectly with the current configuration of our gripper.  I quickly put them on and found they worked great.  I knew that I was going get an “I told you so” from Warren… and I did.  I took the grippers up to the customer and put them on and they ran fine.  I guess the moral of all this bla bla bla is listen to your shop guys.