Chapbook

[sasha]

It's fortunate you're mechanically inclined enough to navigate that territory with some conficence - I'm a mechanical idiot, an unrecontrucated klutz....

I've got an oil-fired forced hot air system, & until 2014 was running the same furnace since the house was built (1974, I think). For years, I nursed it along "for just one more season", until the exhaust pipe rusted through right next to the air inlet. The furnace was so old the parts weren't even manufactured any more. The tech said he "might be able to cobble something up", but now it was a safety issue, so I bit the bullet & replaced the furnace outright. A week later, I burned out my water pump (forgot that I even had a water filter, & had allowed it to silt up completely) - thousands in repairs - and a few weeks after that I lost my job - laid off. I felt like a CW song....

Fortunately, I was given 6-mo severance, which sustained me up to retirement age... I've been a free agent since....

[saw]

My house was built in 1920....so that furnace was actually 95 years old.....essentially from a time when things were built to last close to a century.....there are refrigerators in Baltimore running in people's basements built in the 40's......but capitalism could not survive if we kept building necessities to last "forever ".......I bought a brand new kitchen range in 1995. by 2001 it stopped working. A young college kid working part time for this appliance company came out. Since he didn't plan to make appliance repair a career, he came clean. He said the electronics in this model is built to fail, and it's so expensive to replace, you may as as well buy a newer model that's more expensive and will probably last longer....WTF ?

[sasha]

that's one of my newer rants - the linguistic shift of "customer service" from "how might we better serve our customers" to "how can we get our customers more compliant with our wishes?" They've got us by the balls and they know it, and they gleefully shake us down without an ounce of shame. "Don't like it? Take your business next door. They're even worse." I've already groused about the bland uniformity of product offerings - no more "just right", only "it'll do" (viewtopic.php?f=98&t=34270#p221117) but marketing has taken over as the dominant force in consumer sales. "Buy - or not, we don't care."

(in regard to the linked rant - I ended up buying a camera bag that looked ok online, but turned out to be a flimsy, cardboard piece of shit. My sister was able to sew a new strap onto my old Tamrac, so I'm back in business, and all it cost me was pint of her favorite ice cream as payment.)

[sasha]

Gotcha...

I once worked in Quality Control for a manufacturer of single-use medical products - hypodermics, trach tubes, catheters, procedural kits, and the like. It wasn't so much by choice as by necessity - I'd been laid off from the engineering job I'd held for 22 years when the company disbanded its R&D department; and had spent the better part of another year burning up my severance trying to find a similar position that wouldn't require me to relocate. I ended up back on the bottom rung, with vague assurances that I'd been hired "to get me in there". But after 10 months with only a few indifferent nibbles, I was grateful just to have someplace to go every day. (It eventually palled, but that's a different story.)

You've seen those hypodermic needles with the orange plastic thingie dangling off the business end? That's a protective sheath that snaps into place around the needle after use, protecting against accidental jabs. We not only sold them, we invented them. (I say "we", though the patents were issued long before I started there.) We didn't manufacture them ourselves, but subcontracted that task to an injection molding house an hour or so away. It was one of our high-volume products, and therefore beloved of those whose livelihoods were directly tied to sales revenue.

So when these sheaths started flunking Incoming Inspection, management took notice, and directed one of the engineers to look into it. He, in turn, asked my supervisor for a "resource" to work with him. That became me.

Christian Schultz was a bulky, amiable fellow who took his responsibilities seriously. He was more than capable, but a worrier, and for every bright light on the horizon, he was apt to obsess over the shadows they cast. If he hadn't worn his vulnerability so openly on his sleeve, his hand-wringing might have become tiresome; but his gloomy predictions were never considered pissing and moaning; rather, more like a stammer or a favorite catch phrase, it was all "oh, that's just Chris." He was a good choice for the job - not only technically competent, but personable & likeable, traits useful for pressuring the supplier into meeting our specifications.

While I'd never worked closely with him before, we weren't strangers. I'd done the occasional ad hoc measurements for him, and we'd both taken part in the usual lab-bench bull sessions; so we knew each other well enough that the step from workplace acquaintances to collaborators was an easy one. I knew him well enough not to give his kvetching undue weight, and he knew me well enough to trust that all I needed was an idea of what to look for, without a detailed tutorial on how to find it. And we both had other duties to attend to, so we weren't married. I've been in unpleasant professional relationships; this was not one of them.

We spent weeks struggling with these tolerance issuess. They didn't yet adversely affect product performance, but if they continued they might, and needed to be addressed before we had to start issuing recalls. He spent a lot of time at their facility showing them our inspection reports and trying to convey the urgency of getting their molds back into compliance. He'd return late each day with sacksful of test parts whose critical dimensions I'd check the next day, and compare to those on the blueprints. It was tedious work, and I had to give him a lot of bad news. Weeks turned into months, but gradually, imperceptibly, the numbers began coming back within their spec limits, and when the statistics finally gave the thumbs up, we began to feel the problem was resolved. Looking over my latest data sheets, he sighed with cautious relief, and shook his head with a little smile. "Boy, will I be glad to put this project to bed!"

I couldn't have agreed more, but his open optimism seemed so out of character, I wanted to comment on it - and I couldn't resist a puckish impulse to sweeten the moment with a little vinegar. "Well," I said, "it could still be a while yet. I heard from Freddie (one of the supplier's mold operators) that their material supplier is using a dye that will become unavailable by the end of the quarter. They're already looking at alternatives."

Per FDA rules, such a change in raw materials would require any medical product using that polymer to be requalified. We'd be repeating what we'd just been through, but with full performance testing, for a dozen other products as well. The expression on his face went in rapid succession from relief to confusion, disbelief, horror, and despair; I briefly wondered if I'd gone too far. I let it go on for a three-count before taking mercy on him: "Chris - I'm busting your balls." The expression changed again, to chagrin, annoyance, back to wary hopefulness, at which point he started to laugh. "You bastard!" he said. "You bastard!" He leaned back and roared with unabashed relief, and gestured to the vision system we'd become so intimate with. "I outta chain you to that thing!"

He never completely shed his reserve with me, but he smiled at me more when we passed in the halls, and seemed a tad more relaxed in our future dealings.