31 | March | 2026 | WEGGIEBOY'S BLOG by Doug Thomas

I’m having some issues keeping up with all of the appointments. Too many doctors and too many pieces of paper changing medications of so aspect of my care!

“Doug! My highway tends to end here! I used to have a great one past the window. It was over the desk. I could run over it or stop to enjoy the window show. Hey!”

Yeah. We need to see about that, Andy. The 80’s girl bear toy can go somewhere else. I don’t know if the books will be a good landing spot for you, yet scrinching them closer together might work. Then you can hop onto the secretaire, which is plenty solid. The secretaire chair is a potential landing spot, too.

=(^+^)=

This week, my almost 36 years in quality came back to haunt me. I kept seeing parallels between making hydraulic hose to given tolerances and a chore given me to measure and record amounts of drainage from my cancer surgery wound….

Henry Ford – yes, that one! – used to say that if you need a tool to do a job and don’t buy it, you still pay for it.

He meant you had more scrap, higher reworks, more employee injuries, more customer returns for off dimension or crap quality, and more with the worn tool needing replacement than the proper new one

The cup I had to measure my drainage was marked ambigously. Below 30ml, there were marks that were in lines in English units (no clue which…) AND metric, also not clearly marked. I mistook the scrambled lines for being for the metric.

My measurements, consequently became blended! And meaningless! And impossible to sort because I don’t know which lines I referenced in my notes. I became frustrated because I used to work in English units, clearly marked on precision tools that were calibrated to reference tools 10 times that precise and accuract. Those tools, in turn, were verified by master tools maintaine⁹d and used by Bell Aerospace’s calibration services. THOSE tools were traceable to the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) master references. I mean, anal obsessive level temperature, humidity, cleanliness, moon suit level master maintenance to an atomic level. They have the atomic clock in Colorado, too, so all time changezzzzzz ! Sorry. I’m endlessly fascinated by the topic, but we were talking about my experiences with more precise and accurate ways to get data compared with the poorly marked measuring cup a Henry Ford might spit tobacco juice into, then toss.

I used to have a quote under my desk cover. My job included a lot of data analysis, crushing those data to learn what they showed about a given product process, etc. (My mind went through each of these uses, intruding on sleep, food, quiet times, and more. I’m sparing a lot of reading here with that simple “etc.!”) That quote help focus me when I sat in front of my computer with a spreadsheet or apps capable of doing lots of statistical mischief to data: “Torture numbers and they’ll confess to anything.”

The data on my drainage…meh! Torture them or not, they won’t tell anyone squat. I’m ashamed to have my name attached to them! Give me a graduated beaker, a bit of scientific glasswork, and you’ll have numbers you can make sense of!

“Go back to sleep, Andy. My readers are joining you, too!”

The right tool in the worker’s hand is the start to the result you need in industry. It seems that applies to your temporary “employee” measuring drainage from a wound,too.

The nature of variation. Now there’s a topic you DON’T want me to get started on. Oh, come on! You know maths are fun! Then we can talk standard deviations; probability theory; design experiments; statistical process control; how Shewhart at ATT developed simple statistical tools (process data collection) methodologies) that Juran, then Deming further developed and taught to the Japanese after WWII; and that’s why you may be driving a Toyota or Honda today! Yeppers! “My world, not that plastic cup one.