What goes around

Back in my youth, I worked for a steel fabrication company. We made things like heat transfer products, and acid storage tanks, and heat transferring acid storage tanks. It wasn't a career to recommend to the kids on Career Day at high school, but it paid the bills.

One of the people I knew there claimed to be a Sikh priest from India. I won't mention his name, because he was a total asshole. It was a firmly held part of his personal belief system that Jews were at the bottom of the ladder of humanity, and that Christians were one rung up. This sometimes made me a little jealous of the Jews, because it seemed to me that he should have held us Christians in greater contempt than the Jews, as contempt by Mr. Patel was, in my mind, confirmation that I was doing something right. Mr. Patel was management level, and had direct authority over scheduling.

My research on Sikh tells me that it requires a belief in the equality of all humans, and rejects the caste system. Or so a website tells me. So I think he was lying about his priesthood in the first place. Assholes do lie sometimes. But he had us convinced at the time.

His asshole-ness was happily balanced by a man named Madhav Cadambi, who was always a gentleman, always kind, and always welcome at the break table. Madhav served as a life's lesson that we shouldn't judge a people by one bad example. Madhav was in the blueprint and design part of the place.

My job at this steel plant was in Quality Control. Most of the time I wandered around the place with a measuring tape and randomly inspected parts along the manufacturing process to make sure they were within tolerance, and to stop the process if they weren't. These pieces didn't require inspection at each step of the way before moving on, because they were rarely out of tolerance. When the odd piece was too  long or too short or the gauge was wrong, it had to start over, but the practice worked well.

But there were some checks that were mandatory. For example, if a piece was supposed to be  made from 316 stainless steel rather than 304 stainless steel, it had to be checked for that quality at a certain point before moving along to the next step. My job was to do that. I had a little kit that I used, where I placed a special piece of paper with a chemical on the piece of metal, and then ran a small current of electricity through it. It would turn either blue or pink on the paper, depending on the presence or absence of molybdenum. If 304 SS, it would have to be rejected, because it would not withstand acid corrosion as long. The wrong grade of steel would result in shorter life for the tank or heat exchanger if acid had to go in it or through it. The grade was to be checked again and again, at various stages of manufacture.  If and when it passed, I signed a little piece of paper verifying the grade of steel.

One day I was summoned to do this "molly check," as we called it, and I whipped out my little molly kit, and ran the test. And it remained the wrong color, which meant that there was no molybdenum present. Which also meant it was 304 SS, not the required 316. Fail.

But for some reason, management, especially Mr. Patel, really wanted that piece to pass inspection. He wanted it so much that he had me come back and do the test again. It failed again. He had me do it yet again, this time with other management types present. We were all gathered around as I applied the chemicals again, put the current to it, and waited for it to change color.

We stood in the sun. "Wait, wait. I think it's changing." It wasn't changing, and in any case, it has to do it within a certain allotted time, but OK, let's stand around some more. It was beginning to dawn on me that these people wanted me to sign off on the piece whether it passed or not. But I also knew that if I did, they would come back to me if the container opened up and spilled acid on somebody passing by the tank where it was installed. I refused to sign it. The entire project had to be delayed, while they waited for a new sheet of the special gauged 316 SS to be ordered and delivered.

Very soon thereafter, management decided that we had too many people in Quality Control, and so I was transferred to the Shipping Department. Everybody knew why. I was to spend the rest of my time at this place building shipping crates and loading them onto trucks.

And it got worse. Scheduling, controlled by Mr. Patel, somehow managed to make all these products almost but not quite finished, so that they stacked up almost in the way... and then got them all completed on two consecutive days. This meant that the Shipping Department was busting its tail to get everything out for those two days, then pretty much hiding for the rest of the week. This was not a good business model for people who didn't want to provide an excuse for getting fired. All mere coincidence, of course.

So we got those crates built, and the products shipped, and the folks getting them finished unofficially looked out for us and warned us when anyone was approaching from the offices, so we could sit around on the three idle days but keep a few crates ready to build when needed. The system worked. And eventually, the 304 SS product that was supposed to be 316? It was completed and shipped "as is," meaning no new steel was ordered or used.  And we in shipping built the crates, as was our job. Out it went.

What was supposed to happen was that the customer would install the product, and use it for years, none the wiser. By the time the darn thing corroded badly enough to be noticed, the warranty would be expired. It wasn't right, but how were they to know? Hey, it's just business.

Shipping that piece was expensive, because it was a wide load and over weight, which meant that it had to have special permits, and move slowly down the highway, with an advance vehicle, and a tail vehicle, and signs that said WIDE LOAD, and sometimes there were police escorts to get it across narrow bridges. You get the picture. Delivery was made, and accepted.

But somebody made a mistake. Somebody in Quality Control, or somebody in Blueprints and Designs - it could have been almost anybody - but certainly not somebody in Shipping. Why, we didn't even have access to the paperwork. Somebody packed the original papers certifying that the piece was made of 304 SS. The papers I had signed, rejecting the product. 

Oh, the poop hit the fan that day. But it didn't hit me. I was just doing my job.

Is karma part of the Sikh belief system? I don't know these things. I suppose I could Google it.

(This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is to be assumed. There, that ought to satisfy the lawyers...)