OMG! I cant tell you how many meetings I've been in like that - back in my previous life! Trying to explain a problem and the people in charge want to talk about kittens and balloons! Or passing on it completely because I was the "expert". What a great snapshot of corporate life with examples of: thinking outside the box, shifting our paradime, looking at it from 30,000 feet, empowering, team concept, etc., etc.....
At a previous job we did a lot of aerospace work for (then) McDonnell Douglas. I was given plans to build a new design for an F15 black box made out of titanium. It was a simple square. Looking at the plans I noticed that the way it was designed the panels interlocked. It was a very strong design, but only 5 panels could be assembled at a time. It was a "which comes first, the chicken or the egg" conundrum because of the way the panels interlocked. After being cussed out by the designer (I'm serious!), we finally had a meeting with the designer and a crew of 6 avionics "stupidvisors" to figure out what to do.... I had to field questions and statements like: "why don't you put the final panel on first, then it will not be the last" "you are not seeing it the way the CAD program is showing it" "if you make it like the plans show, it will work" "can't you manufacture it all together, then we will not have an assembly problem" (I gently told them that they would have a hard time putting the guts in the black box if we manufactured it "all together"). No wonder they had to sell out to Boeing....
Jim
Topic: Hilarious engineering video (Read 6740 times)