5 ms·

"An unnamed source told RIA Novosti the person responsible for drilling the hole filled it with glue instead of reporting the mistake." A mistake is one thing.

by skj 8y ago

"An unnamed source told RIA Novosti the person responsible for drilling the hole filled it with glue instead of reporting the mistake." A mistake is one thing. Mistakes are lessons and it's good to have people who have some solid lessons in their backgrounds. Trying to patch it with some glue without telling anyone is a character flaw and the person needs to go, so everyone else gets the lesson.

amelius 8y ago
True, but apparently still a quality control should be in place to find such problems.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  It's precisely this kind of bodging which caused great loss of life with the de Haviland Comet. Installing the radio antenna opening with punch rivets instead of drilling out the holes ended up killing two planeloads of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet
grawprog 8y ago
Ya. That's how things operate at my work and it works well. As much as it sucks mistakes happen, things get damaged, sometimes things worth lots of money. If feels really shitty to have to go tell someone you made a mistake, that a bunch of time got wasted, we're going to have to redo work, that you just destroyed a couple thousand dollars worth of things. It really sucks... But... it sucks a whole lot less than when someone tries to cover up or hide a mistake. It always ends up coming out in the end, it always makes things worse than they could have been in the end and everyone ends up even more pissed off than they would have been. It's not worth it. Actually, my parents forced me to learn this lesson young. Me and two other kids did something fairly terrible when I was in elementary school. My parents took me and made me personally apologize to the person who detrimented from our actions. It wasn't the most pleasant of experiences but in the end t was the right thing to do and it taught me, if you fuck up, the best thing you can do is admit it, try and make it right and learn from it. I've been trying to teach the new guy at my work this. He started off worried about making mistakes, would beat himself up and try to cover them up. It's been a few months of talking to him and telling him to focus on learning and not worrying about mistakes. If they happen, I get him to work through what went wrong before anything too bad happens and i've found his attitude has changed quite a bit since he first started. He doesn't worry so much and he's been learning a lot more quickly. When something does happen, instead of panicking he just comes to tell me and i'll help him work though figuring it out. We're all human, mistakes happen. They just need to be dealt with in a reasonable way and if you make a mistake admit it and if you can't figure out how to fix the problem there's no shame in asking for help.
- canadaduane 8y ago
  Kudos for creating a work culture where it's easier to make good choices that lead to better character.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
That's easy to say from our position, but I'd bet that the person responsible had a pretty good idea what would happen if they reported it. At my current machine shop, I'd have a half dozen people documenting what happened, helping to design, implement, and rush out the repaired part, adjusting customer expectations, and making sure that the process that allowed me to make the mistake is fixed so that others repeat it. In my previous job, it depended on the day. Sometimes you'd get called into the boss' office and cussed at for a while with no consequences, sometimes you'd get something capricious like confiscating the offenders' drill bits and requiring check-out for each hole from the foreman's office for a week. (It only lasted 3 days, but that literally happened.) Sometimes the boss was having a really bad day with customers or vendors he couldn't punish, and you could have a half dozen guys bodging a repair out of the boss' view and keeping him distracted. Or fired on the spot, if it didn't work. I lasted 5 years and 37 hires and fires at that 20-man shop, should have left so much sooner. The official story is: > It is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand -- there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. - http://tass.com/science/1019791 http://tass.com/science/1019791 Drills should not be sliding along the surface of a part. You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Especially in curvy aluminum aerospace work. And there's certainly little opportunity for anyone to go get some glue, install it, wait for it to cure, and paint/cover it up without inspection. I am surprised, though, that they didn't just weld in some filler and grind it smooth. I suspect that NASA and some of their suppliers are nominally more like the former but practically there's still some risk to admitting error, and that Roscosmos/Energia is closer to the latter.
- zaarn 8y ago
  >You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Okay, and now do that in microgravity in a spacesuit with the thick gloves. Good luck.
  - compsciphd 8y ago
    this wasn't drilled in space....
shalmanese 8y ago
This American Life had an absolutely amazing story about how a dropped wrench in a nuclear missile silo caused a cascading series of failures that ended in utter disaster but could have been even worse: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile-situations https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile... It just goes through the story in bone chilling detail and shows how the natural human desire to cover up their mistakes is absolutely anathema to safety culture.

by skj 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

True, but apparently still a quality control should be in place to find such problems.

stcredzero 8y ago
It's precisely this kind of bodging which caused great loss of life with the de Haviland Comet. Installing the radio antenna opening with punch rivets instead of drilling out the holes ended up killing two planeloads of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet

grawprog 8y ago

Ya. That's how things operate at my work and it works well. As much as it sucks mistakes happen, things get damaged, sometimes things worth lots of money. If feels really shitty to have to go tell someone you made a mistake, that a bunch of time got wasted, we're going to have to redo work, that you just destroyed a couple thousand dollars worth of things. It really sucks... But... it sucks a whole lot less than when someone tries to cover up or hide a mistake. It always ends up coming out in the end, it always makes things worse than they could have been in the end and everyone ends up even more pissed off than they would have been. It's not worth it. Actually, my parents forced me to learn this lesson young. Me and two other kids did something fairly terrible when I was in elementary school. My parents took me and made me personally apologize to the person who detrimented from our actions. It wasn't the most pleasant of experiences but in the end t was the right thing to do and it taught me, if you fuck up, the best thing you can do is admit it, try and make it right and learn from it. I've been trying to teach the new guy at my work this. He started off worried about making mistakes, would beat himself up and try to cover them up. It's been a few months of talking to him and telling him to focus on learning and not worrying about mistakes. If they happen, I get him to work through what went wrong before anything too bad happens and i've found his attitude has changed quite a bit since he first started. He doesn't worry so much and he's been learning a lot more quickly. When something does happen, instead of panicking he just comes to tell me and i'll help him work though figuring it out. We're all human, mistakes happen. They just need to be dealt with in a reasonable way and if you make a mistake admit it and if you can't figure out how to fix the problem there's no shame in asking for help.

canadaduane 8y ago
Kudos for creating a work culture where it's easier to make good choices that lead to better character.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

That's easy to say from our position, but I'd bet that the person responsible had a pretty good idea what would happen if they reported it. At my current machine shop, I'd have a half dozen people documenting what happened, helping to design, implement, and rush out the repaired part, adjusting customer expectations, and making sure that the process that allowed me to make the mistake is fixed so that others repeat it. In my previous job, it depended on the day. Sometimes you'd get called into the boss' office and cussed at for a while with no consequences, sometimes you'd get something capricious like confiscating the offenders' drill bits and requiring check-out for each hole from the foreman's office for a week. (It only lasted 3 days, but that literally happened.) Sometimes the boss was having a really bad day with customers or vendors he couldn't punish, and you could have a half dozen guys bodging a repair out of the boss' view and keeping him distracted. Or fired on the spot, if it didn't work. I lasted 5 years and 37 hires and fires at that 20-man shop, should have left so much sooner. The official story is: > It is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand -- there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. - http://tass.com/science/1019791 http://tass.com/science/1019791 Drills should not be sliding along the surface of a part. You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Especially in curvy aluminum aerospace work. And there's certainly little opportunity for anyone to go get some glue, install it, wait for it to cure, and paint/cover it up without inspection. I am surprised, though, that they didn't just weld in some filler and grind it smooth. I suspect that NASA and some of their suppliers are nominally more like the former but practically there's still some risk to admitting error, and that Roscosmos/Energia is closer to the latter.

zaarn 8y ago
>You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Okay, and now do that in microgravity in a spacesuit with the thick gloves. Good luck.
- compsciphd 8y ago
  this wasn't drilled in space....

shalmanese 8y ago

This American Life had an absolutely amazing story about how a dropped wrench in a nuclear missile silo caused a cascading series of failures that ended in utter disaster but could have been even worse: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile-situations https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile... It just goes through the story in bone chilling detail and shows how the natural human desire to cover up their mistakes is absolutely anathema to safety culture.