bizarre-o world?

Took a nap earlier; can't sleep now. I opened my eyes while laying in bed and with room being all dark and whatnot, i was very confused for an instant: I was expecting my room from college, then my old room from my parent's house. It was odd and made me a little reminiscent.

I spent my day today in an assembly plant in Detroit. The majority of the time was invested discussing life at the company with an old time engineer who had at one point retired to Florida, but then got called back to be a contract worker. (i guess he was good, so like Superman and George Foreman, they called him out of retirement) I learned more about my job and the company in 4 hours than i had in the past three weeks. This guy had it all nailed down; he could walk through a plant one time, listen to the sounds and watch the people work and tell you exactly how efficiently the place was running. He's been back in the game for a month and can already pin down every guy in the office; what motivates him and what's his agenda. He knows the game the union workers play, and as an old supervisor and worker himself, he's seen all the angles. He's an engineer so he's planted in one of the main offices, but he's at home in the assembly plants, interacting the people who build the product. And most folks in the plant take to him like they would any friendly old man, which is contrary to the typical worker/engineer feudal system. The best part is, he's out there, accessible and willing to give all he knows to anyone who would be interested.

We talked about company engineers and the faux notion that they "design" a product. The reality is, no one designs a circuit; a supplier engineer clones a design from clone from clone that was designed by an Asia-man. They package it into a universal module with specs that can fulfill 78% of all application. A team of electrical engineers who don't even need to know what an electron is (in our company now) are handed a set of general requirements from some higher up and then develop specific sets of specs for say, a switch or Nav System. These specs are pumped to the supplier, who in turn throws back at them a black box that is probably utilized by some other companies in various applications. The engineers take the module, which is perhaps needing 2/3 of it's capabilities (maybe we'll use that other 1/3 later, in next year's model) and if need be tweaks the design. (i.e. pumps a redefined set of specs back to the supplier who then either reprograms the black box or pulls a different box off the shelf). With the boxes in place, we tie them together and test the shit of them, reworking the iterations and driving the error towards zero again and again until you run out of time.

As for the old engineer, he claims 30 years since he last designed a circuit that was bread-boarded, printed and then evaluated to make it's way into a product; He used a slide rule last time he needed to derive a value. I'm entering into the realm of speculation now, but i figure this is why he likes to spend time in the plants. Since we're not the guys making the sexy drawings, this is the last venue for him to put his influence on the final product, i suppose. He identifies where the process is failing and fixes it. Quality issues for part X go down. And that is truly the name of the game now; Quality. Quality is directly measured in money and vice versa, and both are easily represented on a piece of paper. I'm not disheartened. I suspect i was saved when any preconceptions i had about all this died years ago. It's just, i guess, you can't really wrap yourself around what it's all about in a company this big until you're in it. The reality is, no one truly understands the process; too much information.