If you're going to stick around I'd recommend getting less salt in your diet. Second hand exposure to a machinist is enough salt to shut your kidneys down four times over.
Then there's this. OP was likely doing a production run bored out of their mind, taking the likely victims of 3 crashes and wishing they had some black vinyl for a backdrop. I swear, if most of us didn't have NDA's, there'd be a constant stream of this kind of stuff. When you sit there for 10-12 hours a day making the same thing, you get creative. There's an entire drawer in my box dedicated to interesting ways I've seen an apprentice really screw it up.
Are there's still manual production runs in the first world? The one machinist I know IRL does manual stuff now, but it's all bespoke, and his colleagues sound like they might not have heard of CNC.
That's certainly a lot of machinists. I'm not production, about half my job is maintenance. Half my job is making parts. And half my job is screwing around.
In the shop I used to work at, everything but the routers were Haas, save for the one lone Hurco. I was the only one that could and would use it, and maintenance refused to touch it. I had to crawl in there with a hammer more times than I'd care to remember. So, I feel ya.