Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[PJs]

TM51,

First off ISO is pretty much a joke in most places to get orders (like $10-$20k for a CE approval) based on an "apparent standard of practice". I did a fair amount of vendor qualification over the years all over the country, some Canada and Europe and found most of the ISO businesses in scramble mode trying to keep up with it and some of the pedagogue inspectors. It's also permeated with paper-wasters trying to come up with a scheme to keep their jobs, collect insignificant data and satisfy ISO requirements...All in my humble opinion of course. Not that I disagree with the concept of a Standard of practice for manufacturing...but it's been muddled beyond recognition in a lot of instances...another mouse built to gubment specs.

Small story: I was once task with building a "show" unit for our reps and trade shows with tough specs. It had to be about the size of a bread box, <90lbs, wheels/handles, clients see the operation of it from 50', and a crate to ship it around the world and survive multiple times, all right side up of course. Most of our units were the size of a refrigerator or beer frig's. Really an R&D project that included all of our technology and some new stuff I came up with to fit in a small box the reps could handle...and a quartz bell jar no less. It ended up being a 83lb blivet. I did all design and about 85% of the build except for sheet metal and some trick machining on the 7075 flange and stainless feed-through for the tiny cryo-coil, with < 5% loss.

The thing that happened was as I was getting close to finishing it. I was sitting in my little R&D space with all these technologies on the bench and had just finished building a very unique stack technology (Cryo-refrigeration) I had come up with for space saving and here comes the VP-Sales with a bunch of Japanese guys we were negotiating with to license our technology. They all had cameras and as soon as they entered started shooting pictures of everything including my new stack...I actually hollered at the VP...What are you doing! OH, Oh it's ok they are with me and we're on a shop tour and thought I would show them what you are working on. My jaw dropped and I threw a towel over my stack. Believe it or not I got called on the carpet for yelling at him in front of them. Funnier yet was the VP was a 25yr Big Blue (IBM) guy! Nuff Said! NDR's, yeah right....let a lone job descriptions, really?

Sorry to hear about your friend C-Bag. That's a hard one to swallow! Good for you to dump the 9 for safety and sanity. Worked with some temps over the years and think your number is about right!

Old, old saying I just made up: The hard part with dufi is herding them to water but it's much tougher to hold all their heads underwater at the same time without getting kicked.

~PJ