OT Re: Newbie... Strict Compilation mode (and fruit)

[Kay C Lan]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:17 AM, J. Landman Gay <jacque at hyperactivesw.com>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!