Frances' Retirement Speech

Speech for coworker Frances Moon, who is retiring with an amazing 52 years of service.

 

Just so you all will know, I try to make the length of these retirement speeches based on how long the person has worked for the company. This looks long, but only because I printed the words so big so I could read it. When I was writing this, I realized it will be tough to get through without shedding a tear. So get your Kleenexes ready. Usually I’ll write a bunch of stuff then chicken out from saying half of it. But not this time.  

 

Many people affectionately call Frances by her famous nickname. I could never do that. If you don’t know her nickname, I’ll tell you what it is, for informational purposes. But you have to know the full story.

 

Sandra Born was hired in 1986. The scheduling department had her, Frances, and Sandra Thompson. Us young inside sales guys were afraid to go over and ask to cut a hot order. Old Neil Hollingsworth fought in the war and he was scared. One of the three was worse than the others. I won’t say who. It wasn’t Frances. Her initials were Sandra Born. So Neil started calling Born Godzilla. He said she was the type of woman who made you appreciate your wife.

 

Sometimes a person gets a nickname because it’s the opposite of what they’re like. People call me Grumpy. What? Oh, never mind. In football when extra defenders blitz the quarterback, its called Mad Dog. And that’s kinda what Frances did with the tube mill schedule. So many moving parts, and she could cut through and tackle the toughest problems. Actually Mad Dog what what we were going to call her brother George.    

 

Frances managed the ultra-complicated tube mill schedule for years and years, And years and years and years. Frances was managing the tube mill schedule before the term “ultra” was a thing. This was back in the days before the internet and email. Computers were clunky and not at all as helpful as they are nowadays. We had notebooks full of information that we’d look at to figure things out by hand. Frances would calculate tube mill run times and yields and the like.

 

Frances was a wiz at physical inventory. Before bar code scanning. We’d print out several long wide printouts. We called them books. Some of the books would be taken out in the plant to use to check off the tags. Like now, RMP was always two districts, so each counting team had to carry around two big books. Frances was in her command center back in the office with printouts and inventory tags, matching and figuring out what was kept and what was written off. Since it was so manual we’d start like on Thursday and usually work through Saturday and Sunday. It always snowed on inventory weekend, several feet of snow. But we didn’t know it because we were stuck in our office without windows. I had no idea what was going on. Still don’t. But I didn’t have to – Frances had it under control. Okay Sandra Thompson knew a lot too, but she’s already retired and we’re talking about Frances.

 

When we went onto the AS400 in the 1990’s, RMP didn’t really have a good trainer. Me. The general line districts had teams helping with the conversion. No one ever understood RMP so we had to figure it out by ourselves. Training was for three weeks, then we went live. We all worked long hours that first week just to cut and ship orders. That Saturday we all came in to try and catch up. I remember sitting there with Frances and Sandra Thompson trying to finalize a material processing order. We worked all day and updated three orders. But thank goodness Frances and Sandra got the hang of it.

 

The conversion helped us figure out that for years Accounting had double charged district 21 for the tube mill processing. Before that the balance sheets showed us losing money and struggling to break even. This was long before John Nichol and Kevin Richardson. Once we got the books corrected the tube mill became one of the most profitable districts. We went from worst to first like the Braves. Frances was pictured on the cover of the Tull Today magazine. Okay we all were, it was a group photo.

 

Terry Mesnard came on board and quickly realized how indispensable Frances and her scheduling team is to the entire operation. Mesnard still has nightmares about this place.

 

Frances I don’t know if you ever noticed, but for years we’ve had the same little routine going with our phone calls. Frances doesn’t call me that much, but when she does I know it’s important. My phone will ring and I see Frances on my caller ID. Instead of picking up the phone with my normal greeting (ROOOOB HICKMAN!). Instead I say “Hey there!” and Frances will say “How are you?” I’m going to miss that.      

 

One of Frances’s greatest accomplishments was training her replacement. So many times a person retires and takes that knowledge with them. We would’ve been sunk had that happened. Patsy you have big shoes to fill. I’ll come back for your retirement in 30 years.

 

Sometimes it’s hard for me to call her Frances, though she’s not THAT much older than me. I can say that not because she’s old, but because I am old.

 

One time back in the late 80’s or early 90’s Frances was going to be out for a month or two. We didn’t know what we were going to do. We had just hired a tall, handsome young country boy to be an inside salesman (not me). He had (count) (1) just graduated from college, (2) gotten married, (3) moved from the country (4) to the city, and (5) taken a new job with us. All high stress factors. People are encouraged to only tackle one of these a year.

 

We decided to let him fill in for Frances. Man that would stress me out for sure. Really the only reason I tell this story is because he called her Miss Frances. And that’s how I’ll remember you. We’re all gonna miss you, Miss Frances!