In the last blog I vented my most annoying compliance issue. This week I thought I would switch gears to my most amusing and embarrassing Quality moments.

There are three that are so vivid that it’s as if they happened yesterday.

The first one involved my first major design project for a wave solder system with an attached ultrasonic degreasing bath and a drying system. I had worked with an equally eager but inexperienced fellow Mechanical Engineer. We designed the heck out of this thing. It had heatproof conveyer belts under the infrared soldering station then through a second ultrasonic bath to remove the flux from our lovely soldered four inch circuit board bristling with resisters and capacitors. Then they made a final trip through a warm air drying system emerging from the machine clean, dry and ready to assemble. It had pneumatic attenuators and heated hose lines. I am telling you Rube Goldberg would have wept with joy at the sight of it. Finally, the thing was assembled and we were like proud parents ready to show it off. So confident were we that we had nailed it, we invited our boss who had finagled the considerable budget to build it. We had tested all the various components but not the finished assembly with solder paste, PCBs and the dryer all running together. What could possibly go wrong?

Our boss stood there with our other colleagues to watch the start. The pick and place machine dutifully deposited the boards on the conveyer and they disappeared into the oven. We heard the air line attenuators cycling on and off and stood there smiling and waiting for the finished items to emerge. Our smile slowly became harder to maintain as nothing came out of the darn thing. When we finally shut it down and looked inside there was a flotilla of circuit boards bobbing in the Freon degreasing bath. We had set the hose pressure on the dryer too high and it blew them right off the belt. It was easily repaired but it was a career lesson in the “Plan, Do, Check, Act“, cycle we would never forget.

The next one was an adventure I was just happy to have survived. It took place at a large local testing facility in front of a full Bird Colonel. We were testing a navigation component for fire and explosion. In brief, an explosive mixture of JP4 (Jet Fuel) and aviation gasoline were atomized into a pressure chamber and we started at 50,000 feet and began depressurizing as the component was cycled on and off. A small sample of the atmosphere was siphoned off into a little chamber and ignited to confirm it was combustible. It was my first time witnessing the test so I tried to act as if it was an everyday occurrence that it blew the small sample off the large chamber with such force it embedded in the wall 20 feet away. I was still standing there when I heard a voice on the PA yelling “Run, Mary run!” I realized I was alone and took off through the first door I saw into the “Sand and Dust” test room which was like a constant massive dust storm. I emerged on the other side looking pretty much like the Pillsbury Dough girl. It seems the test tech had reversed the ratio of 4 to 1 JP4 to aviation gas and essentially created a bomb. I never observed or conducted a reliability test without creating a checklist no matter who was conducting the test, ever again.

The last one involved extremely expensive infrared detectors we had built for a large German satellite manufacturer. At different points in time they flew in Dr. Gilsa Shick, a humorless woman who could not decide what she disliked more; Boston, American Beer or me. I had never gotten an “OK job” much less a smile out of her. We gowned up and entered the double airlock into the cleanroom. The detectors were on a small tray under a microscope looking like jewelry waiting for her. I had inspected everything several times over determined to get some sort of compliment from her. She sat down, looked at me and asked derisively “Ms. McAtee, you understand that this is an unmanned satellite??”  I mumbled something and sat down in her seat and looked into the microscope. There in one of the unsealed $70,000 dollars per unit detector was a very live Ladybug. How it got into the clean room through the two airlocks I will never know. We looked at each other and we both started laughing. It was the beginning of a friendship that has endured for over twenty years. The detectors survived the Ladybug and the satellite is still in service today. We had not factored this into our process FMEA.

In life, it is pretty much a constant toss-up between being the windshield or being the Ladybug. Each of these events were a teachable moment. Each one was predictable, preventable and certainly correctable. I had FMEAs, Corrective Action analysis tools and reams of Predictive Design Analysis and Risk Assessments and I was too inexperienced or distracted to use them properly. Take every bump and bruise your career gives you and use the opportunity to learn from them. Depend on your Quality tools.  You might start by making a list of your most trying career events and what tools might have prevented or mitigated the outcome; Risk Assessment and Controls, Corrective and Preventive Action tools, Documentation and Checklists. You might be surprised by what you learn about the events and yourself.

Bio:

Mary McAtee – VP Compliance & Product Management at IBS America, Inc.  Mary is a mechanical engineer and longtime quality and business process professional who enjoys watching people and organizations succeed.  She began her career as a reliability engineer in the defense industry more than 25 years ago. After spending several years as a contributing member of the Joint Electronic Defense Engineering Council, she became interested in ISO compliance standards. Ms. McAtee has been a lead assessor since 1991 and was one of the first TickIT assessors in the United States. She has assisted several organizations in their quest for registration and is currently the VP of Compliance at IBS America, Inc., A Siemens Business.

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