Automated Doors and Stuff

I'm sure we've all had isues with automatic doors or paper towel dispensers or faucets not working optimally. Doors seem to have improves a lot in the last few years - the used to be either too slow at opening or so sensitive that they open when you're just walking by 20 feet away. Paper towel dispensers have worked well for awhile - you just have to know where to wave your hand and accept that the paper towels come at a fixed size. It is very annoying to me when I see someone try to pull the paper while the machine is dispensing it. That's how the machines get screwd up or how they get mis-calibrated and later on give out inappropriately-sized paper towels.

 

Automatic sinks still have significant improvements that need to be made. Maybe they are harder because the background to the next object is so close - only a foot or so from the sensor to the sink wall and therefore it may be harder to judge whether someone's hands are there. You wet your hands, then you reach for soap and the water turns off, you pull your hands back an inch or two and the water turns off, you try to wash your face and the water turns off. Additionally, it is hard to find how to control the water temperature, if that's even a feature of most automatic faucets. I think I would like a job designing automated things. What companies do such engineering?

 

Today I found an automated toilet that really got on my nerves. I was stuck on the toilet longer than I 'd like to be and 3 times the toilet flushed automatically and I jumped up each time to keep from getting my whole butt wet. It got to the point where I was jumping up even when I heard a neighboring toilet flush. It was totally not good at predicting when I was done. A slight movement forward or re-adjustment triggered a flush. I don't even think automating toilet flushing is a very useful thing. I mean, we are all washing our hands afterward so it's not saving on getting out hands dirty by touching things, which I consider to be one of the main benefits of automatic doors and paper towel dispensers. Next time I'll wait for the handicapped spot, like I usually do, which does not have the automatic flush feature.

Que Queue?

It really bothers me when professional people misspell words in professional documents. I was in one of the first groups to take a class this newly required 1 day course on Lean. It was a class on efficiency and assembly lines and generally how to use common sense. I felt like the class should be geared toward lower-level management or quality assurance people, but there were 2 engineers from my office and 20 or so blue collar workers, mostly laboring on aircraft maintenance.

 

Anyway, at some point the instructor started an exercise in which we pretended to be people in a production environment trying to improve efficiency on an assembly line, so the word queue came up a lot. Now, the instructor said the word several times and used it in proper context ("The man at station 4 had a long queue so it might be a good idea to balance the work more evenly so he doesn't have a queue so long that drags down the overall efficiency.") The problem was that he had sheets of paper with "QUE" written on it for where each person was supposed to place their items when passing to the next one in line. I was the last one in the line, the quality control person, and I was defiant and turned the piece of paper over. Que is not a word, at least not in English, and it is painful for me to look at it. The assistant instructor comes over and turns the paper right-side up and I immediately flip it back over, while pointing out that the word is misspelled everywhere. No one acknowledges my comments and everyone goes on with the exercise.

 

Was I the only one to notice this gross misspelling or was I just the only one who knew or was I just the only one that cared? I have seen people make this error other times lately (leaving off the second ue on queue) but I had always thought this was a fairly common word. Some of the engineers I play scrabble with have recently tried to use "que" in our Wednesday scrabble games and I cringe every time I see it. I know engineers aren't supposed to be great at spelling (and neither are assembly line workers) but the guy teaching should definitely know better. Presumably, he at least typed this into MS Word and should have noticed the squiggly red line underneath the word indicating that it is wrong.

 

Que is Spanish for what.

Queue is an English word for a FIFO (first in, first out) line of people or things waiting their turn.

Get it right.

January Blues

While I generally like the idea of having a big holiday season with lots of giving and visiting and being nice to the people you rarely see, it's not something I get to actually experience much since most of my family is so far away and no romance I've had had happened to be going on December. But the college bowl games and New Year's regional bridge tournament in Charleston or Myrtle Beach keeps me happy. But then January hits and there's not really anything to look forward to for awhile.

 

Last year, thanks to db, the January blues didn't hit until March but there weren't any lifestyle changes between 2009 and 2010. This year, there are definitely some changes taking place with the coming of the new year, and I'm hoping/expecting these changes will lead to a more active social life in middle GA and/or more of a sense of purpose at work. If not, I'll jest be getting the January blues late again this year. The days of residing at Northrop Grumman with next to no official responsibilities on a project are over and I am back on base full time, supposedly awaiting work on a new project.

 

One exciting part of January is that we have to submit leave plans for the year. For the first time, I have available to me about as much annual leave as I want, so I just submitted my plan for the 23 vacation days I intend to use in 2011. This includes taking a Friday off for 7 bridge tournaments - Louisville, Gatlinburg, Greenville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Seattle, and Myrtle Beach - 8 work days off for the summer nationals in Toronto (with a side visit to Montreal), and a week for a trip to Europe in May. Of course, it's all subject to change, but I am looking forward to a year of more excitement at work, a return to a more regular local social life, and about the same amount of bridge as last year.