Dumb things said/dealt with at work

[cpscdave]

So tomorrow we are having a FAT test to show successful reading of 1 single memory location over a Modbus TCP connection.
The client scheduled it for 8 hours and is bringing 20 people.

Makes me curious what are some other dumb things people have encountered at work??


A few of my other favorites:
"Why is coding taking so long, I could do this in a day. I mean it's just drag and drop!"
"Why doesn't your controller have a memory location to indicate that its unpowered??"
I once got screamed at while at an industrial site, when I refused to touch a electrical panel that had 480Vac in it, that had been left open overnight, during a massive rain storm. (I'm an EE not an electrician, I'm not even legally allowed to touch panels at the best of times lol)

 

[jedishrfu]

One engineering manager said to me that he could appreciate the difficulties of programming in C because he wrote a BASIC program once. I had to smile it was so funny comparing a 40 line program to a 10,000 line program+library code.

His team of engineers always did everything to undermine our work with their BASIC programs because they believed they were faster and more reliable until they hit the 64K limit in PC DOS and were forced to switch.

One trying example was when they would swap out our C program that was required to monitor all 200 sensors in their bay with their BASIC version that monitored 20 only sensors but hey it did it faster so its better right? We couldn't get our program to run for 24 hours because they'd interrupt it and do the swap at night. A very frustrating time.

With respect to the electrical panel, during a VLSI test system demo, someone leaned on the emergency shutoff switch, a big red circular button in a recessed well on the wall about shoulder height. Boom, everything crashed like a meteorite had just hit the place.

 

[Lord Anoobis]

The scene: Airbus A340-600 leaking fuel from a tank panel after refuelling prior to a test flight.
The cause: Someone had loosened some of the screws during maintenance then realized that the panel was not among those to be removed and simply fastened them again.
No test flight until the seal is replaced, bear in mind that management is on the scene. One bloke heads off to obtain a seal. A short while later he returns, fresh seal in hand. When the packaging is opened, it turns out to be very different in appearance to what we know is to be installed.
Me: "This is the wrong seal."
Manager: "No, no. This is clearly a BETTER seal. I can tell by the shape."
And there I was thinking for years that part numbers and diagrams were the way to go.