Drawer Guides

 

Our Italian friend Chicco  Franchini  posted an absolutely hilarious  video on Facebook today. Titled “The Expert” it’s about being the only engineer in a business meeting where a department of an unnamed company has been assigned to draw  vertical red lines with green ink. When the only engineer in theroom  points out that this can’t be done chaos ensues. Hence this post. So my engineer friends won’t think that they are alone.Now I’m a long way from being a real engineer but I know that 2+2=4 so I have an unfair advantage over lots of people.  Including a wonderful but slightly  disorganized group of co-workers.

Along about 1992 the company I worked for had almost completed the change from multi product  wood products to  making exclusively furniture.  Everything else we did was a commodity and the business was well over capacity so margins were small to non existent. So furniture it was. We developed  two lines of furniture based on wide use of common parts and featuring a unique (for us) roller drawer guide.  The guides had become common in kitchen cabinets and were spreading into furniture business so it made good sense to use them. That’s when the fun began. We sold one of the lines to our biggest customer. From the proposed ship date we worked backwards and made a timeline for finalizing the design, producing ,checking and distributing  the production drawings, sizing the boxes and getting everything in house to make shipment on time.  We had regular status meetings on the commitments we were making and everybody was sure they had their area under complete control. The guides became an object of some dispute because of the costs involves so there were endless discussions about who to buy them from and how much to pay. I was the QC guy and I wasn’t normally invited to the meetings but one day I was asked to sit in. We were 9 weeks from making shipment. The endless discussion of the drawer guides began anew. “These cost $1.05 a set, those cost $.95 a set, these have 5 mounting holes, those have 6, they aren’t interchangeable one vendor toanother”.Etc, Etc. I was fast running out of patience so I asked “What’s the lead time?” the purchasing agent consulted his notes and said 8 weeks, so I said “Sounds like we need to quit talking, make a decision, and place an order” Later that afternoon the CFO called and asked me to come to his office. He gave me the whole project and that morphed into running  new product development for about 8 months. Wonderful learning experience and it gave me the opportunity to promote a really fine young man into the department after I had it up and running. I also learned to do the costing, took over keeping the production drawings in order and took the instruction sheets in house. This allowed massive reductions in development time and kept us competitive against the Chinese imports for 10 years.

 

After the successful launch of the new line we decided to replace our economy line of furniture with a completely new design. In the past developing a new line usually took a year to 18 months and the sales guys had become very good at making excuses when we had to postpone shipment. I like to do what I say I’m going to do, so I decided keep to the schedule and deliver on time. We went from designer sketches to packaging product in 6 weeks. There was an unwritten protocol that design changes had to be formally evaluated and put into the system  after the costing process. So we were two days from packaging when UPS delivered a package addressed to me with a note and a pair of incredibly cheap galvanized drawer guides, they had rough edges, sharp corners and were clearly unsuited for use in a product the customer would assemble. Additionally they weren’t available in the volume required for our production. The note from the sales manager said,  “Please include these guides in the first shipment of Etc. scheduled for shipment later this month”  I put the note and the guides back in the box, took it to the operations manager, said “I think this belongs to you” turned around and left. We laughed about it later but this was unfortunately one of the problems you have as a (quasi)engineer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

The title is Phillip Seymour Hoffman but this could be a post about any number of famous and creative people who have drunk or doped themselves to death in the last 40-50 years.

Around 20 years ago, I’m thinking it was our 30^th wedding anniversary, Marilyn and I spent a long weekend in San Francisco. We stayed in a boutique hotel near Union Square,  had dinner Saturday night at Absinthe, went to North Beach, hit Biordi for some window shopping, and had a wonderful time. I don’t remember where else we ate except that the hotel had a breakfast deal with a café on the corner.  When we finished breakfast I think we had plans to shop Union Square, have lunch and head home.  We walked out the door  of the café and started toward Union Square. About mid-block a small crowd had gathered. They were watching a guy who was lying on the sidewalk in obvious distress. Clearly one of San Francisco’s many homeless and probably addicted to something that served him badly, he was shivering and semi-conscious. Someone in the crowd had gone to phone for help. I advised the other bystanders not to touch him (you never know with druggies and I had some experience at work with people whose chemical balance was unbalanced)

I don’t know who this guy was, I don’t know if he was ever a beloved son or brother or worse a father, He was too young to be a Vietnam Vet and likely too old for any of the Middle East conflicts. I don’t know if he lived or died. The EMT crews in big cities call them frequent flyers because they take them to the emergency rooms so often. In many cases they know them by name or at least by some street name. Fifty years ago they abused alcohol, the police picked them up, judges sent them to work farms and once in a while they got sober and became productive members of society. Now we give “support groups” grants to “help the less fortunate”. Every medium to large city has a population of the “less fortunate”. They don’t have to work, they receive better medical care than the working poor, and their “helpers” make good salaries helping them. It’s a win-win. Except when they are lying on a sidewalk in the center of one of the most beautiful cities on the planet possibly dying of a drug overdose. Surrounded by visitors  to the beautiful city.

How does this relate to a brilliant actor who at the age of 46 with three children put enough Heroin in his arm to kill himself. Except for one thing it’s exactly the same. Millions of people loved Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s work, nobody that we know of loved the homeless guy on Geary Street. And nobody cared enough about either one of them to make them stop, or find out who was selling them the drugs and make that person stop. It’s our loss.  We lost both their work products. We don’t know what those products would have been. We just can’t afford to keep doing this. And it doesn’t have anything to do with helping the “less fortunate”.