Incompetent Engineers

That was my first job after graduating in mechanical engineering.

It was a medium sized company with its factory producing high precision engineering parts on order. Company was closely held private company run by a family. Managing director of the firm was an engineer with long experience. His wife was the other director. She wasn't an engineer. She was an English language professor in a local college.

They had also appointed their nephew Vijay in the firm. He was in charge of production.

The company had bagged a prestigious and large order for manufacture of a high precision part from one of the important clients. Every time, after the batch of these was manufactured and dispatched to the client company, they used to send it back by stamping on them, "Rejected". Vijay was trying his best to manufacture the parts within the precise minute tolerances prescribed on the drawings of the part but for some reason or the other, the demanded standards could not be met.

The company could not bill on the client for this order for a good number of days and it was a drain on company's finances. The managing director was worried and more worried was his wife who used to take enormous interest in the company's affairs and also used to interfere in all the matters, even the technical matters a lot.

In a meeting when this problem of repeated rejection was being discussed, she asked Vijay, "Why Vijay, what is the problem; why our parts are being rejected?". Vijay said, "These are very precise parts." Then he further added in layman's language, knowing that his aunt did not comprehend the engineering technical terms, "And the client has specified very small tolerances on certain dimensions of the part and that's what we are not able to get correctly".

She almost shouted at him in an accusing tone, "You engineers here are all incompetent. When you can't produce the parts with such small tolerances, I don't know how are you going to produce the parts with large tolerances when we get orders for them in future. I don't know how this company is ever going to do well despite all of you bright engineers being around".

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