The way to field a complaint

Friday, Saturday, Sunday evenings the BBs tope; other nights we drink vaguely healthful Horlicks and peppermint tea. Recently the Horlicks powder was grey rather than beige and tasted of poorly conceived potato soup. Horlicks sent us a pre-paid envelope. Here are extracts from their reply:

“Our Quality Control Lab states the returned sample was found with a burned and damaged foil seal. The most likely cause is it was burnt during the heat induction stage of packing (at our supplier)… causing a burnt plastic/chemical smell. Precautions have been introduced to avoid such incidences.

“Tests (to check that powder meets strict specifications) include sensory (sic!) where trained analysts taste and comment on odour and appearance. Unfortunately this jar was not detected.

“We do carry out trending of complaints… if these come from the same date code, further investigations are carried out… In this case we set up a cross-functional team who identified the root cause. Improvements identified are now in place.”

This seems a model response. The technical fault is described, the failed checking process acknowledged, and the solution (kicking the supplier’s ass) indicated. It presumes intelligence in the customer. However I shall stick to peppermint tea.

MAD BUT GOOD In Cervantes’ 760-page Don Quixote you lose your place. Dialogue is unseparated from the rest, causing endless paragraphs. Otherwise it’s good stuff:

Sancho: “How will you do for victuals when I am gone?”
The Don: “Never let that trouble thy head. For though I had all the dainties that can feast a luxurious palate, I would feed upon nothing but the herbs and fruits which this wilderness will afford me; for the singularity of my present task consists in fasting, and half-starving myself, and in the performance of other austerities.”

A memory that survived

Early memories are fallible. Two-storey houses become bungalows, lines of poplars disappear, schoolfriend dates no longer synchronise. But here’s one that had a sequel. When very young I believed metal (didn’t matter which) was the hardest thing on earth. Then I saw an adult hacksawing off the pointed tips of nails protruding from a sheet of wood. How could metal cut metal?

Eventually I found the answer but that brief mystery retained its magic. Decades later, on professional visits to industrial plants, I saw metal cutting metal in its latest guise. Drill bits in mechanised systems easing effortlessly into blocks of machined steel. Lathes releasing elegant spirals of swarf from workpieces. Powered saws tirelessly sawing. The very heart of manufacturing; beauty born out of efficiency. It’s one of the themes in my novel.

OLD AGE WINS In 2007, in Zermatt, illness combined with a decaying body signalled an end to my thirty years of ski-ing. This traumatic moment generated not an ounce of sympathy among non-skiers. Skis lie in the attic and should be sold. Then it snowed heavily in Hereford and I found a use for my après-ski boots while others were squelching around in wet trainers. Yah sucks boo.

VORACIOUSNESS When asked how she would occupy her retirement Mrs BB replied: “By reading.” And so she has at the rate of 220 books a year. To keep up with what she’s got through she enters summaries in her “little book”. Here’s one: “The Infinities” by John Banville, 6 (out of 10). Dying mathematician and family visited by Zeus, Hermes and Pan. Beautifully written nonsense.
Very little of our reading overlaps.

Novel progress 8/1/10. Ch. 11: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 10: 44,765 words. Comments: Day devoted to editing and re-editing, including first two paras of Ch, 1.

Are we all born to lead?

Industrial efficiency reaches its zenith on a car production line. Robots move heavy objects, spot-weld body parts and spray-paint the body, pneumatic wrenches are set to to tighten nuts and bolts exactly, components come in small batches (“just-in-time”) to eliminate inventory problems, the car body is raised and lowered automatically to prevent line workers suffering back strain. But there’s a price: mind-numbing repetitive work for the humans. Can the price be reduced?

Volvo has a small plant where teams of four assemble wheels and tyres in the correct sequence of sizes and colours for four daily deliveries to the main production line. The tasks involved in this work are rotated to create interest and the position of Team Leader is also rotated after a set period. Trust the Swedes. Except that some people don’t want to be Team Leader. What’s the solution? Better education, or may some people be hard-wired to reject that form of responsibility?

Prezzies from Prague. Because of restrictions about fluids at the airport check-in the beer had to be bought in the duty-free. It’s a dark and I’m hoping the super-beer-knowledgeable RW (zS) will be able to tell me whether I’m in for an enjoyable experience or not. The Salami Minis (now a distant memory) were real hotsy-totsies and thereby delicious. And label on the peanuts – Clever – made them irresistible.

Novel progress 22-23/12/09. Ch. 8: 4094 words (finished but not edited). Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comments: Over past three days suffered a small attack of writer's block, the most boring malady known to man. Discovered a cure, wrote through afternoon then returned to the keyboard at 1 am and worked until 2.45.

Perhaps it was the drink as well

Champagne, Stella Artois lager, Adnam’s and Fuller’s ale failed to dispel our conviction that there was too much to say and too little time, when Plutarch and I met yesterday at The Blogger’s Retreat. Blogonames cropped up and were rearranged in the pantheon. I mentioned I was considering resuming a dormant novel and to husband my waning resources Works Well should be closed down. “Write both,” said Plutarch succinctly. Outside it was pouring and he lent me his umbrella, explaining that his wide-brimmed leather gaucho’s hat offered sufficient protection.

And then an epiphany. On the rush-hour-jammed tube to Paddington I found myself pressed against a small man standing up and contriving to read a paperback. I was pierced with homesickness for life in London. The greatest city in the world and you pay the price in discomfort, as this man was quietly proving. It’s worth it. But London is for youth, not old age.

TECHNOLOGY IN YOUTH Trolley buses, painted blue and cream and adorned with the city’s coat of arms (Motto: Labor omnia vincit), carried me to the centre of Bradford years ago. When the driver floored the “accelerator” relays clacked open and shut, powering the motor. If you pressed your ear against the metal post supporting the overhead cables you could detect a faint whirring as the bus – as yet unseen – approached.

The bus stop I used stood close to the open door of a carpenter’s workshop where an unguarded circular saw was frequently at work. I can hear the rising scream now as the noise changed steplessly from C in alt to G# above. In those days I had perfect pitch, now I resort to perfect lies.

Fitting a doo-dah to the job

Ergonomics has nothing to do with ergo (therefore); it’s a latin/greek trick. The prefix is greek for work and the whole word is the study of man in his workplace. A comfortably grabbable kettle might well have been caressed by an ergonomist but easy to use doesn’t always mean nice to look at. The target rifle above no doubt fits the shoulder of the shooter (it’s adjustable) but it’s hardly elegant.

Ergonomics is often central to industrial efficiency, something I was supposed to know about when I was paid to write. A seminar on the subject I attended proved to be a reverse example of how careful design can help people do their job.

The seminar started – as many do – with a complete cock-up of what Americans call show-and-tell. Slides appeared upside down, in the wrong order, “flopped” or just not at all. Using the projector was non-intuitive; its ergonomics had not been tuned for the non-expert human. Speakers rested notes on a lectern that was too steeply raked; the notes repeatedly slipped off. Hilariously the microphone dangled from a necklace loop; when handed over, the next speaker had hell’s own job getting the loop over his head.

Journalism often means profiting from others’ mistakes. I reported the seminar straightforwardly, then added a comment piece. The Society of Ergonomists replied with a rueful letter which we published. During my career I attended many seminars on many subjects and I’ve forgotten them all. But not that one. Definitely a do-as-I-say, not -as-I-do.

Biting the hand that fed them - grits

When senior executives from Detroit’s Big Three recently took their begging bowls to Washington they were vilified for using company planes. Once, much humbler individuals used this form of transport.

The short-haul airliner (Alas, Relucent Reader, I’ve forgotten the type) was emblazoned with North American Rockwell’s logo and colours. Half the seats had been removed to increase leg room for the press party. In the aisle a polished wood box, somewhat larger than a Hammond organ, proved to be a well stocked bar opened while we were still climbing quite steeply. We were bound for Statesboro, Georgia, where I ate grits with red-eye gravy for the first time.

Ostensibly we were visiting a factory manufacturing control valves. In reality we were observing the latest skirmishes in the American Civil War. The factory managers all appeared to be New Yorkers who bitterly resented Statesboro. On the bus from the airport one of them commented: “You’ll see the town has a railway running through it. This is so lots of people can live on the wrong side of the tracks.”

Later were were told how to obtain a driving licence – necessary if you move to another state. “You pull up at a drive-in window in the town hall. You hand over your application form and five dollars. You’re told to drive round the town hall and pull up again to pick up your licence. Which would have been just fine except that my neighbour was driving the car.” Lots of sipping whisky that evening brought more of these stories which – inevitably – I have forgotten. Together with anything I learned about control valves.

It's a block; it's a book

Here are some items I appreciate: growing things (galanthus nivalis, say, given the season), paintings (the cliff-top church in Turner’s “Folkestone from the sea” is where we got married), combinations of poetry and music (Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt…), great prose (“… bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air…”) and slightly obscure wine regions (the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon). Plus this.

This is an engine block. It contains the moving bits like pistons and valves. It is cast from molten metal and many external surfaces carry the rough imprint of the mould because there is no need to polish them. Other surfaces, which have precise dimensional relationships, are machined until this is the case.

Some areas requiring this work are circular holes. Yet circles cannot be precise since they depend on a calculation involving π (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) and π is not an exact value. So how come the holes end up the right size? The answer has to do with tolerances, a quality shared with the translation into English of the first sentence of Proust’s A la recherche…

My blog is linked to that of Relucent Reader whose father was a precision machinist. This seemed an admirable activity until RR pointed out his dad found the work stressful. And why not? Working to tiny fractions of an inch (and it would have been inches, then) is more demanding, and carries more responsibility, than the way I earned my living and which I fondly imagined to be an adrenalin job.

The block reminds me of these things.

Greed: it has powerful after-effects

Those affected by the financial crisis may be divided into three: those who brought it on themselves (banks, financial experts, tax dodgers and lazy-minded manufacturers), ordinary folk advised by experts and who got reamed (the majority of us) and those who did everything possible to avoid the situation (yet still got reamed). A word of sympathy for the latter group.

While I was still working my magazine carried a story researched by my assistant editor about Nissan’s UK operation. How different it seemed from so many British enterprises. A new factory with a parent prepared to accept losses for a decade, huge and continuing investment in technology and systems, management based on weekly if not daily consultation with the workforce, a reward for anyone whose suggestion helped improve efficiency, training that meant something and involvement in the local community.

Yesterday, Nissan UK laid off a quarter of its workforce. I’m gutted for all those who have suffered but as an observer of industry I’m particularly heart-slufted (a special angoisse experienced only in the West Riding) by this one. It’s enough for me to consider – at least for a nano-second – the possibility of compensation in an after-life.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART

Eclogue 27e. Distrust adjectives, adverbs, related phrases and excess.
Before: “Please, please,” she said in a voice that carried a note of entreaty, “reconsider your reckless driving and pull into that safe layby.”
After: “Stop!” she implored.
Note: Eclogue still misused.

What industry can get up to

It’s a hand pallet truck (actually, only a model). Slide the forks into the slots of a pallet on the floor, work the pump to raise the forks a couple of centimetres and one person can easily move a one-ton load.

But how do you paint such an awkward shape? Passing it through a paint bath is a no-no. The paint would clog up the raisable undercarriage and the hydraulic pump. Here’s how in a state-of-the-art Swedish factory twenty or thirty years ago.

A skilled sentient being does the job with a paint gun. Attached to the gun is a cassette recorder capable of tracking the gun’s movements. The cassette is transferred to a player which drives a robot. And the robot, equipped with its own paint gun, faithfully reproduces the skilled human’s work. Because the paint, usually in powder form, and the pallet truck are electrostatically negative and positive, very little paint is wasted.

They not only did this but also gave birth to Ingmar Bergman.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 46b. Setting long and short sentences side by side can have a pleasing effect.

Example: With lengthy DIY projects it is quite understandable that the desire to finish the job might outweigh a wish for perfection. It happened to God!
Note: Eclogue is inappropriate but, what the hell, I wanted to use it.

Incompetence rapidly rewarded

Being theoretical rather than practical I have initiated many techno-disasters. This was the most spectacular.

Years ago (“the often times” – as my daughter says) one fuelled a two-stroke motorbike by pouring first petrol then oil into the tank then agitating the bike to mix the two. Frequently neat oil got into the carburettor, snuffing out the engine. That meant stripping the carb and cleaning it.

This happened with my 125 cc BSA Bantam, and I carelessly reassembled the carb so that the slide was at the top of its action not the bottom – leaving the throttle wide open. When kickstarted the engine whined immediately to maximum revs. How to stop it? No ignition, of course, and the twistgrip was inoperative.

So I reached for the high tension lead feeding the sparking plug and wrenched it free. But there were many many volts emerging from that lead and I was thrown across the backyard and crashed into the dividing wall. Painful. I will continue to shrive myself in a continuing if intermittent series on other such disasters.

TECHNO-MUSIC AT CHRISTMAS
For he is like a refiner’s fire. Messiah.

Das sehn wir auch den Rädern ab…
Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn...

Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind…
Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihn,
Und wollen gar noch schneller sein...

(We see this also with the wheels…
They don't like to stand still...

The stones themselves, heavy though they are…
They join in the cheerful dance,
And want to go yet faster...) Die schöne Müllerin.

Type setter's toast; presses still roar

During a professional low tide I wearied of giving space on MotorCycling’s letter page to readers celebrating the Golden Age of British Bikes. Disapproving of many models cited I inserted a fake letter decrying this tendency, adding “nostalgia is a suspect emotion”. The foam-flecked response was gratifying. Yet here I am being just as nostalgic.

But not about badly engineered bikes with total-loss oil systems. Rather the mechanisms of publishing. This is a Linotype which set type in the hot-metal days. Press a keyboard key and a brass mould (for a letter, a number, a punctuation mark or a space) came tinkling out of the large box on top. Repeat this until sufficient moulds for a line of type assemble themselves in the machine’s bowels.

Work another control and molten type-metal from the Linotype’s small furnace – Just imagine it! – flows into the moulds to cast that one line of type. Start again. A newspaper might well own two dozen such machines, tinkling away and smelling like… well, over to Proust. Now my humdrum computer can do the same job and I haven’t seen a Linotype for thirty years.

One mechanism still remains. To print many newspapers in next to no time you need a press. And a Heidelberg, a Hoe or a Crabtree in full flight (and full throat) resembles open warfare. The power of the press indeed, all directed towards an ephemeral product with a life-span often measured in minutes. The newspapers I worked on were printed in a Bradford street called Hall Ings and the soles of my feet twitch sympathetically down the years as I remember the roar and vibration of those majestic machines.

Now, the computer does the measuring

Pretty boring photo, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s forgivable since it’s here for sentimental reasons.

The millimetric scale on the right suggests it’s a ruler. However the units on the left won’t be familiar to everyone for this is an em-rule used in an activity that has almost disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to lay out a page design for a magazine or a newspaper you cut up galley-proofs with a pair of scissors and glued them to a large sheet of paper. The stone-hand or clicker at the printer’s used this to create the design for real with cast metal type. Now the designer creates a virtual page on a computer screen and sends the result over the wires in file form.

Printing employs some of the most wilfully obscure units outside pharmacology. Typeface heights come in points and there are a handy 72 of them to the inch. Theoretically column widths could be similarly measured but because this would lead to large figures ems (equivalent to 12 points) are preferred. These archaic units are retained on DTP software and elsewhere on computers because printing is nothing if not conservative.

When computer design became widely available I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Now, with a perversity born out of wishes granted, I have sentimental (if not practical) regrets. Print-shops were smelly, dirty, esoteric places filled with ex-apprentice craftsmen who shared a journalist’s desire to put ink on paper. I enjoyed their company. The em-rule is a memorial to that friendship.

A manufacturer for our times

“So what kind of magazine is it? The shitty kind?” Ivor Tiefenbrun opening the batting when I interviewed him in 1987 about his Glasgow hi-fi systems company, Linn Products. No complaints, it was a dream interview.

Linn is renowned for quality and prices. An LP turntable (they still do them) costs £2000, plus £250 for the power supply. But I was there to find out how products were made. Tiefenbrun’s methods were ambitious and techno-sharp-edge. “Automation as the first step to more automation,” Tiefenbrun said. Getting hold of the stuff wasn’t giving him any joy.

Tilting back, feet on the desk, in jeans and an open-necked shirt (both rare among businessmen then) and wreathed in Gauloise smoke, he railed against suppliers’ poor service and lack of realism. “One quote for the automated handling system was bigger than the budget for the whole new factory. Another company was well down on price but they gazumped us.”

And: “Planning delays eroded our budgets and cost us a fortune. All the state bodies have buggered us about. Some 10% of the building cost is related to fire protection; it’s just a joke.”

A lot of it was too technical – but funny and profane – for general consumption. If he hadn’t been someone with a worldwide reputation he might have been seen as a blowhard. But he often knew more about technology than those supplying it. Later I actually paid to hear him speak about manufacturing at a prestige event organised by the Royal Society of Arts. One memorable sentence: “Those that didn’t know about willies would think it was a good thing to have.”

A ton up - but not on a motorbike

My hundredth post so let’s celebrate the metric system. Inevitably the French were the first to adopt it (as an exercise of pure reason) though I thought they’d designated the metre as something like one ten-millionth of the distance of the equator. Not so. A French abbot and scientist proposed the milliare as a minute of arc along the meridian. Which conceivably might be the same thing.

Benefit 1. Arithmetic. Remember the longwindedness of performing calculations in fractions (eg, 7/16 x 14/57). The decimal point blew all that into the weeds.

Benefit 2. Technology. Nuts and bolts in the GB were designated like this: 3/8 in. BSW (standing for British Standard Whitworth) and there were other systems. Now – as far as I know – they’re all metric and it’s so much simpler. “Give me a 5 mm bolt, 2 cm long please.”

Benefit 3. Science. To the unitiated it may not seem simpler but expressing 0.000,000,0008 mm as 8x10-9 mm (Sorry. Need to work out HTML superscript here) obviously does save paper.

Benefit 4. Peace of mind. Got a long journey ahead of you on the Continong? Change the settings on the satnav from miles to kilometres and be encouraged (Yes, I know it’s illusory, but illusions have their uses) as they whistle away behind you.

Disadvantages. The USA remains agnostic. Metrics does away with a useful height benchmark for homo sapiens and, at 6 ft 1½ in. (“just a little over 6 ft”) I find myself lacking a familiar definition.

This was how I saw it

WORLD WAR TWO: A child’s view of
technology

Metal shortage. To build more battleships the railings round the school were removed with oxy-acetylene torches. Sparks and glare for fascinated (totally unprotected) kids. Afterwards the remaining stumps of metal were removed from wall tops, allowing us to walk along them unhindered. Rumour had it the collected metal was never used.

In the sky. This was the West Riding so no baddies during the day. From time to time the big names (Spitfire, Lancaster) appeared, but mostly it was the twin-engine Avro Anson (presumably a bomber trainer) and the single droning-engine Harvard.

Camouflage. Close to the present Leeds/Bradford airport was an operative factory making goodness knows what. Earthworks were built round the single-storey structure and the top was then disguised with fake trees and a simulated duck pond. Even at ground level this was quite effective.

Health scare. Housewives were urged to hand in their aluminium pans to make more planes. Few did. Then came a story – almost certainly promulgated by The Daily Mail – that cooking vegetables in aluminium pans caused cancer. Could these two themes have been related?

Soldering can make you happier

If a little learning is dangerous, so’s a lot. Especially with electricity. Electrical hyper-sensitivity leads me to worry about the three-pin plug that’s warm when it shouldn’t be and about a woman I know with a physics degree who yanks on the flex of her electric kettle to pull out the plug.

And about my dear late father-in-law who I found poking into the central heating timer with a screwdriver. “It’s all right,” he said, “it works on gas.”

Electricity’s ability to destroy is awesome. Unions between cables and terminals are potential weak points and in some cases the risk can be reduced by soldering rather than just wrapping.

Soldering is fun. Roughen the terminal and the cable end with emery paper, coat each separately with molten solder, wind the cable round the terminal, and apply heat. Two becomes one almost immediately and conductivity is perfect. No worries about the union slackening through vibration. The RAF taught me to solder for free. I am at least grateful to them (it?) for that.

How to soften a rude subject

NEW READERS: Please read the third comment before the post itself. Just to spare my blushes.
I am a connoisseur – though not an intentional user – of euphemisms. We call it a loo while Americans call it a can. That says a lot; genteel plays hard-nose. Ironically the American seeing someone (vs going out with in the UK) hints at an occasional Yankee preference for gentility.

My brother (DIY perfectionist and good cook) has a caravan. Now he’s completed the Land’s End to John O’Groats walk he is taking it to Scotland as a base to resume his assault on the Munros (peaks over 3000 ft). There are some 240 and he’s down to the last twenty.

To limber-up he was in the Brecon Beacons and we had lunch. Afterwards, driven by my taste for euphemism, I inspected his caravan. In particular the technology of the bathroom – the middle-class US alternative for can. Fanatical design effort ensures that when he discharges accumulated waste from his temporary home the caravanner only handles advanced and utterly hygienic products of the plastics industry.

This system is called a cassette. Think of the images that evokes and you’ll agree with me it’s a perfect euphemism.

One foot on, one foot off

The hippety-hoppety antics required to propel a scooter (the children's version not a Vespa clone) surely rules it out as a serious mode of locomotion. Or does it?

The Swedes don't think so and they're pretty serious about most things. They use them for personal transport in high-bay warehouses.

The normal way of getting around a warehouse is by some kind of forklift. But that's wasteful if your journey doesn't require you to extract or re-install a load. Imagine instead a scooter rather like this but scaled up for a full-grown adult. Notably with larger diameter wheels. No brakes needed.

The floors of high-bay warehouses are deliberately made smooth so that forklifts can be aligned precisely with individual bays in the racking. Perfect for scooting. As I watched one dashing Nordic individual, with flowing yellow locks, hip-hop off into the distance it looked like fun. But perhaps that's also the drawback. In Britain we're not inclined to think of work as fun.

Oh sole mio

Do cobblers still exist? Not that they’ve received much help from me over the past decade. My footware routine is unvarying: buy trainers from M&S, wear them until they start pumping in rain water (less than a year), buy another pair, drop used pair into garbage bin.

In my youth all shoes were repaired. Our cobbler was a caricature. Short, hunched, bright-eyed, Mediterranean complexion, loquacious to the point of being prepared to talk to a ten-year-old. What about? I have no idea. All I remember is the backdrop – a huge table piled high with scraps of leather. Plus two items of technology.

In the corner a powerful mangle or wringer. Except that the rollers, instead of having parallel sides, mated convex with concave. Before attachment to the shoe the rough-cut flat sole was passed through the mangle giving it the contours of a shallow dish. I cannot imagine why this was necessary. Nor do I intend to embarrass my correspondents by asking them. Knowing why would require familiarity with those dark, cold, hungry years of Britain’s immediate post-war.

The other item (in fact there were several) was the sharpest knife in Christendom. The blade was hook-shaped and one tour of the newly attached sole was enough to remove all the overlap. As if the leather were a damp Digestive.

And then there was the smell. Ah…

I can’t match the lovely horticultural close-ups of my correspondents so here’s a long shot of part of our garden. It’s low maintenance.

A moment in the world of logistics

In cramped countries like Switzerland and Japan ground space is money. So companies put up high warehouses. But there are limits. A warehouse a mile high would cost a fortune. Putting goods into it – and getting them out – would take time and time is money.

Also, the higher you go the more expensive the equipment. At lower levels a forklift truck will do, beyond that hardware evolves until the system is completely automated. Big money.

A forklift benefits over automation in that it can “free range” – carrying goods at ground level, sometimes taking them out of the racking and loading directly on to a lorry. Most warehouses use forklifts.

When I wrote professionally about logistics, I visited a supermarket warehouse where it was conceded the height limit for a free-ranging forklift system had been reached. The vehicles were reach trucks, more stable variants of the counterbalanced forklifts most people know.

These trucks could lift to just over 11 m. Viewed from beneath this is some distance but I was on a walkway near the roof looking down. The truck cab looked microscopic; the mast uprights throbbed, twitched even groaned with the effort of holding the load that high. Journalists should avoid going anthropomorphic but in this case it was inescapable. In any case, it worked.