On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:17 AM, J. Landman Gay <[email protected]>wrote:
> Richmond Mathewson wrote: > >> J. Landman Gay wrote: >> >>> Personally I think we should next discuss the practice of putting little >>> sticker labels on every single individual piece of fruit in the supermarket. >>> If you really want to push my buttons, that'll do it. >>> >> >> 'Tis nothing! I know a chap in Bulgaria who sticks sticky labels on each >> apricot while they are still green and hanging on the tree with >> their predicted dates of ripening. >> > > You made that up, right? ;) > > OK, I'll give you one that is absolutely true. An acquaintance invited me to visit one of his factories in China, he worked for MadCatz that make PC game controllers and they were having an issue with one of their combined steering, gearshift, brake and accelerator modules so he was off to investigate. The factory was one of the better ones I've visited but still stereotypical of what you see in the movies, a long conveyor belt with women sitting either side armed with appropriate tools and boxes of parts behind them, they'd each add their assigned bit and at the end of the conveyor you had a completed product. At the 'finished' end there was a girl who'd plug the device in, do a couple of laps around Silverstone or Monaco and if everything was OK into it's box it went. As we were there for a QC problem I noted that when she grabbed the controller off the conveyor it already had one of those ubiquitous gold QC stickers attached. Strange I thought, surely that was her job to apply the sticker but as she wasn't I figured I'd stroll backwards up the conveyor to see who exactly was applying the QC sticker. Turned out I had to stroll all the way back to the very FIRST girl on the line, she pulled the base plate out of her box of parts and applied the very first part. The box of hundreds of base plates came with the QC sticker already applied! For the one person who may only be slightly interest in what the real problem was. Turned out that as winter had descended on the region it was getting darker earlier. The region had electricity restriction so part of the Factory ran on Mains whilst luxury items like Lights had their own diesel generator for power, but this only came on at a certain time. So there was a period of about 30-60 min where it became quite dim in the factory and the girls responsible for soldering the 16 rainbow coloured cable were occasionally getting the white and cream coloured cables mixed up. The solution, turn the generator on earlier, NO, too costly. Instead, make a simple socket, battery and lamp device that plugged into the cable, if the lamp failed to illuminated the cables were crossed so the girls needed to unsolder the connection and swap the two white looking cables! _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
