Things go south at work

I used to love my work environment. It’s a pretty interesting job, fixing used screw machines and removing turned parts, but like all the jobs I’ve had, it wasn’t about the work as much as the people.

We were all good friends. We’d go out for lunch together, get drinks after work together, we had a fantasy sports league, went to football games together, and even our families all got together every so often. And work was always a pleasure because we’d always talk and joke amongst each other.

Recently, though, the company got more business and they hired a few more guys, and it hasn’t been the same. We still do a lot of the things we used to do outside of work, but the workplace environment has changed a lot. The company is pushing us to work faster, and that’s stressing us out. The new guys are still learning the ropes, so we have to compensate for that.
Things really came to a head the other day, when one of the new guys couldn’t find one of his machine tools. See, we all have our own tools, but we all borrow when we have to and we leave them overnight because we’ve got the trust thing going on.

Anyway, this new guy got in Fred’s, one of my buddies, face. We all told him to calm down, but he absolutely lost it. He started yelling, throwing stuff, and overturning storage boxes. Eventually, he just left, probably quit, but we were stuck to clean up his mess, and we had to waste half a day doing inventory on turned parts we’d just taken off the latest screw machine.