User blog comment:SuperFlash101/Civility and Blogs: What's Allowed and What's Expected/@comment-961279-20100403161809

At work last month, we had to discuss a procedure for doing maintenance on a package sorter. Things went pretty well until Fred came along and told us, "I think we should redesign the sorter. If we take out the motor and put this other one in, then route the track over here, we can get it to run twice as fast."

"Well, that's great, but we don't have the money for that right now and all it needs is some maintenance."

"No, no, no. It'll be good. Let me go get the manager in on this." And off he went to find Brent. Brent liked Fred's idea, so he told us, "Stop what you're doing. Redesign the sorter." We tried to reason with him, to get things back on track to just performing the maintenance, but Brent was convinced.

So, we redesigned the sorter. Everything had to be moved over to other sorting lines while this was was changed. When the day came to test the design, it was a disaster. Brent didn't want any testing, just move everything back into production, which is never a good idea. The new sorter didn't work twice as fast. It was faster. Packages slammed into the wall. When we heard glass break in one of them, even Brent had to admit that maybe faster wasn't better.

In the end, the old sorter was put back in and 10 people lost their job because there wasn't any money left in the budget. And all of this because the original conversation got sidetracked from what was truly needed.