All the scribes were gone

The millwrights wrestled the large crated drill press off loading dock 22 at the General Electric plant in Louisville and rolled it through the factory and over to the mechanical shop. The huge machine was replacing a similar World War II vintage machine in the shop.

It would be another two weeks before representatives from the factory would come to install, level, and configure the electronics on the machine. Meanwhile, electricians in our shop had installed an electrical panel and wood blocks had been removed from the floor so that a concrete pad could be poured.

As the large crated machine sat near the shop, a 2 x 2 x 3 foot wooden crate caught the attention of workers in the shop. Often large machines would ship with a set of tools and someone pulled the lid off the box to see what goodies might be in there. But instead of finding tools, the box was full of finely crafted machinists’ scribes. These are eight inch long hardened stainless steel rods with honed points on each end that machinists use to scribe layout lines.

The scribes were very nice and useful to many of the workers in the large plant. As the box sat open in the middle of the floor over a two week period, workers would walk by and scoop up a few of the scribes to stash in their tool boxes or to take home. By the time the factory representative arrived two weeks later, all the scribes were gone.

I was working with the factory guy to remove the crate from the large machine when he noticed the empty box sitting at the base of the large press. "Oh, so that is what happened to those things," he said, "they were supposed to go to another customer. "Let’s see," he said, "5000 scribes at $11 each, that was a $55,000 mistake."