"Fire him! No, you hired him YOU fire him!"
He's a Gorilla! He breaks everything he touches!
THE SHOP GORILLA
The Shop Gorilla leaves a swath of destruction behind him. They can break anything including anvils and wrecking balls.
The Shop Gorilla is the guy that drills holes in the table of a brand new machine and is the guy that tightens the valves on your welding equipment so that they never close right again.
The Shop Gorilla treats all your tools like public property and never provides his own.
The Shop Gorilla only knows how to tighten bolts one way (until they strip) and tighten vise handles with a pipe or sledge hammer.
Shop Gorillas are especially dangerous in blacksmith shops due to the fact that there is ALWAYS a bigger hammer and there are often irreplaceable antique machines.
The Shop Gorilla never tells you when a tool is broken and needs to be replaced and often hides the broken tool so that you may be finding the things he broke years after he is gone.
The Shop Gorilla breaks so many things that even YOU forget how many of your tools he broke.
The Shop Gorilla could never possibly pay for all the things he breaks and is the reason that many famous "Life Time Guarantees" do not apply to commercial use.
The Shop Gorilla costs you money in other ways. They are often "parts scrapers".
The more expensive the material the more mistakes they will make.
The Shop Gorilla will miss-measure that expensive piece of stainless, brass or tool steel and cut a whole batch of parts too short OR too long. . .
Yes you can save the material cut too long BUT it will probably leave you short.
The "part scraper" in our shop would spend a week or more machining a VERY expensive piece of stock only to wreck it at the last step.
AND when they break that expensive drill bit, cutter or saw blade it will be embedded in a valuable piece of stock.
The Shop Gorilla does not always look like an oaf.
They are often normal friendly folks and come in every size, age and race.
Shop Gorillas are incurable and will never do enough for you to be worth the damage they do.
Shop Gorillas think "finesse" is a fancy word used only by snobs and creeps.
If you identify a Shop Gorilla in your employ get rid of him as fast as possible.
There is many a story about men who could lift an anvil with one hand. But most don't say how big.
By Frank C. Tabor, Cartoon Art Studio