GEMS
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After all those years of training
And work of vast import
I find my patience slowly draining
With each request for a weather report !
We've all heard the expressions knowledge is power and time is money. Given the basic definition:-
Power = Work / Time
and substituting the aforementioned equivalencies, we get:-
Knowledge = Work / Money
Of course, in the proposition we're trying to find Money so, by simple transformation:-
Money = Work / Knowledge
Therefore, as Knowledge tends to zero, Money increases. With no Knowledge, it doesn't matter how much Work is done for infinite Money!!! But actually, I'm not really having a go at Marketing.......they're pretty smart cookies, which we can prove using a hybrid of the first equations:-
Knowledge = Work / Time
Showing that the less time spent working, the more clever they become!
QED
The commercial importance of complying with "standards" has, over the past thirty years, led to a common experience shared by many........being subject to a quality assurance or technical competency audit! And you know the two lies told most often during audits, don't you?
The auditor says "I'm here to help you." To which the auditee replies "We're glad you came."
In a recent issue of Meat & Poultry magazine, editors quoted from Feathers, the publication of the California Poultry Industry Federation, telling the following story........
The US Federal Aviation Administration has a unique device for testing the strength of aeroplane cockpit windshields. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at the windshield at approximately the speed the 'plane flies. The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it will survive a real collision with a bird during flight.
It seems a British company were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand new, high speed train they were developing. They borrowed the FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken and fired. The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the driver's chair and embedded itself in the back wall of the cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.
The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:
First, thaw the chicken........
The intent of international "standards" is to facilitate consistency and common interpretation so it's amusing that documents written using British English have to be "translated" into American English when they're adopted over there. We need a standard language. Mark Twain believed many problems would be overcome by eliminating the redundancy in the construction of the English language. After all, do we really need 26 letters in the alphabet? In doing so, his resultant language sadly typifies the way many people view and understand "standards" today!!
Warning -- If any variety of English is not your native tongue, you may find this difficult to follow!
Extract from The Standardization Newsletter, February 1996. Check-out the Defense Standardization Program
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 ft, 8 1/2 in. (1.44 m).
That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools as "they" used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons use that wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the ruts.
So, who built these old rutted roads?
The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts?
The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of breaking their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by or for Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing (ruts again).
Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 ft, 8 1/2 in. derives from the original military specification (MilSpec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. MilSpecs (and bureaucracies) live forever!
(Author Unknown)
Supplemental : The British trade paper Electronics Times recently published this same story with an additional ending which answered the question of why the Roman chariots had the wheel spacing they did. It seems that this is traceable to the width of the back-ends of a pair of horses.
So, the next time someone expects you to meet an "impossible" specification, you can rightly question which horse's
[expletive deleted] it originated from!Quality is about defects, defectives, non-conformance, error, inconsistency, delay, unreturned 'phone messages, broken or unfulfilled business promises, frustration, headaches, problems at work, repair, re-doing jobs late or wrong deliveries, quick fixes, being under pressure, administrative hassle, poor attitude, low morale, poor motivation, lack of trust in products and services, wasted time, unutilized human talent, unbalanced inventories and friction between employees, managers, customers and suppliers. Lost sales, dwindling profits, increasing prices, lay-offs, plant closures and bankruptcy soon follow. This, in turn, is reflected in the performance in the country; high inflation, high interest rates, swelling government deficit, growing unemployment, increasing taxes and a plummeting economy.
Quality Control then becomes; defect control, error control, frustration control and the control of all the negative and disheartening problems just mentioned.
Quality Assurance is that some or all of the problems just described are not allowed to occur in any community or organization so that human suffering, hassles, or loss of pride in workmanship can be avoided.
From the pages of Open Systems Today - October 13, 1994 ..........
"The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) designated October 14 as World Standards Day to recognize those volunteers who have worked hard to define international standards.......The United States celebrated World Standards Day on October 11; Finland celebrated on October 13; and Italy celebrated on October 18."
No further comment about the global state of "standardization" is necessary!!!
