Imagine that you are sitting at your desk in your office
with ten people sitting in front of you with loads of problems on their mind
that must be solved immediately and by none other than you. You look at the
watch and realize that you have fifteen precise minutes, because that is the
latest time by which you must leave office, if you want to catch your flight in
time. In such a scenario, what would be your feelings? There is a feeling of
inertia, because you want to continue in office and do not want to leave back
unsolved matters. At the same time, there is a feeling of restlessness or anxiety.
You do not want to miss the flight as there is an important appointment waiting
for you.
I am sure that many of readers must have gone through such
experiences. How such situations develop is a mystery. It is not that your
journey has been decided at the last moment. It must have been planned at least
a week before. Yet it is unknown how problems suddenly crop up on every front, when
there is no time available to solve them.
Problems also crop up, when we are not in proper mental
frame to receive them or rather they only crop up when we do not want to
welcome them. I am reminded of one incidence, etched in my mind. I was working in
Mumbai then. We were shifting office and we had decided to have a small
get-together for the evening at the old venue after official office time was
over. About 2 or 3 months before, we had supplied some equipment to a textiles
mill in Mumbai and since then not a word was heard from them about
commissioning the equipment. After the office time was over, as the first coke
bottle was being opened, the phone rang. Our textile mill customer identified
himself and requested us to start immediately for the mill as he was having
some problems with our equipment. We had to give up idea of get-together and
rush to the spot, where our equipment was supplied. It was well past midnight,
when I reached home that night to finally assure my restless wife that all was
well. In those days, Mumbai had very primitive kind of phone network and
mobiles were non-existent. Wives did not worry too much, when husbands were
delayed or were late.
As an equipment designer, I learned Murphy’s Law (Edward
Aloysius Murphy Jr. (1918 – 1990) was an American aerospace engineer who worked
on safety-critical systems.) very early in my professional career. The law
simply says, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong". My
early experiences or inexperience firmly imbibed this law in my mind. I shall
give a very simple example. In most of the mechanical parts of any equipment,
lock nuts or split pins are fitted on screws tightened with nuts so that they
do not come loose. Imagine that in some hypothetical equipment, someone goofed
and forgot to put some such locking device on one particular screw out of
several hundred of them existing in that equipment and the equipment was
shipped. I am quite sure that, when the equipment is to be commissioned, the
lone screw without locking device will come loose and spoil everything. This is
how Murphy’s Law works. Unfortunately, no
one taught us this law in the college, instead of those hundreds of laws of
Physics found useless in practical life.
There are several variations and corollaries of Murphy’s
law, all of them quite true. One variation says; If that guy has any way of
making a mistake, he will. Another one says; If it can happen, it will
happen. Two more variations are as follows. If there is a wrong way to
do something, then someone will do it and if there's more than one way
to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do
it that way. The worst is Drucker variation, which states; If one thing
goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time.
Modern manufacturing, particularly automotive engineering,
has somehow overcome Murphy’s law with a new work philosophy known as “Zero
defect”. In effect, this philosophy ensures that no defects are left over,
which would show up eventually, according to Murphy’s law. However, manufacturing might have managed to
overcome Murphy ’s Law, what about us humans and things we do. There is no way,
in which we can escape Murphy’s law and we shall continue to suffer under its burden.
30 September 2018
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