Stupidest Quality Manager, Ever! (And Funniest)

[Foolmewunz]

This is probably a category that could get a thousand nominations, but I'd like to submit my personal favorite. (I was teaching a class today and something reminded me of the event and conversation.)

Background - I was doing a quality audit (just for documentation and practices on our seafreight product) in Houston, and one of the staff comes in and interrupts his boss and I. There's a problem... they have some pails of a powdered metal that we've shipped dozens of times before, but this time the pails arrived with Hazardous (Hazmat) IMCO Class 9 labels. Class 9 is something they came up with in the late 80s or 90s, and is basically, "Icky Stuff, Not Elsewhere Specified". And there was nothing in the MSDS(material safety data sheet - required for moving any chemical substance or compound in the USA originally, and now globally) that said what exactly the nature of the hazardous risk was.

Houston is absolutely religious about labels on hazmat - what with all the petroleum coming in and out of the area.

Sez the boss.. "Call the shipper and ask them if the product's maybe changed."
"Oh, I've already done that. Their new QM says it's always been hazardous but no one caught it before him."

So we're figuring we've got to backtrack and file reports ratting ourselves out for shipping unlabeled hazmat, but the local boss decides to call a friend of his at a competing drilling mud supplier. "Never heard of it being hazardous", he advised - and their product is identical to ours, in fact we stole their formula for the mixture about twenty years ago. Lemme check with Ed - he still works there."

The short of it (this portion, at any rate) is that Ed tells him they've got this new whiz kid in from Penn State, and he reviewed everything and made them change a couple of products. This was one of them, but no one understands where he got the idea from that it was suddenly hazardous after shipping thousands of tons of the stuff for forty years.

They decide to get a conference call, together. Participating was Eric the-whiz-kid, and a bunch of engineers. I happen to generally love working with engineers in my job, because they're generally so damned practical. One of the engineers was calling in from the field, in Singapore - he was their resident expert, and a grizzled old Scot from his accent.Everyone's just chatting away having a good ol' time of it when Eric arrives on the line.

Our Branch Manager: We've got our quality and compliance guy in from New York, so I'd like to let him field this if you guys don't mind.

Them: Sure... why not... blah blah....

Me: Hi, Eric. We're trying to get a handle on the nature of the problem, here. This stuff's never had a label before, and I can't find anything in any of our UN volumes on the stuff, nor see anything on the MSDS, where it ----

Eric: (Cutting me off with a noisy sigh).... it's on page 17 of the MSDS!

(by about page four of an MSDS your into clean-up info and stuff like that... I never bothered to go to page 17)

Me: (rifling through the document)... Umm what's the specific notation, Eric.

Eric: Right there, number ______. It says, "Flammable if molten".

Me: Umm, well, you're right. But there's no indication of a temperature range, so I presume it's above any of the flammable liquids or solids ranges.

Eric: (distinctly pleased with himself)I looked it up. It's molten at 100C.

Me, our three staff and 7 engineers: Gasp!!!!

Engineer in Singapore: Jeebus Kryst, f*****g Yanks! Laddie, do you know that at 100C the seas are boiling? I think we've got bigger problems than whether this stuff catches fire... Beelzebub is coming up to claim our souls!

Eric tried to sputter out something but with ten people howling laughter from six different points of the compass he didn't get very far... within a minute his line just beeped off and we continued discussing life in Singapore vs. life in Houston. It ended with the Scot saying, "just rip the labels off the things and ship 'em"!

[WildCat]

I love stories like this!

[Pantaz]

What a perfect example of book learnin' versus practical experience (or common sense).

[geni]

What a perfect example of book learnin' versus practical experience (or common sense).

To be fair it would take a significant amount of book learning to get over the US instinct (or common sense) that 100 degrees means 100F and isn't that high a temperature.

[rjh01]

This may be more dangerous than you think. If there is a fire on your metal mixture might start burning. Then it is a question of how much heat it will produce when it burns.

Here is an exercise for you. Take a small sample to somewhere where they have welding equipment and get them to burn the sample. See what happens. Will it burn after the heat has been taken away? Does it send off UV rays? What happens if you put water on the burning mixture? If that does not put it out then you got hazardous material.

[Foolmewunz]

This may be more dangerous than you think. If there is a fire on your metal mixture might start burning. Then it is a question of how much heat it will produce when it burns.

Here is an exercise for you. Take a small sample to somewhere where they have welding equipment and get them to burn the sample. See what happens. Will it burn after the heat has been taken away? Does it send off UV rays? What happens if you put water on the burning mixture? If that does not put it out then you got hazardous material.

Well, interesting, but totally inapplicable.

Flammable termperature in IMCO/UN terms means that it will ignite if exposed to a flame at that temperature. Otherwise, all those drums of various liquids with a "flashpoint of 10C" would be spontaneously combusting all the time, as they're never shipped under temperature control. These types of things are in specified drums and pails for a reason.... so that they won't be pouring out on deck. The reason for the declaration is not to tell you to keep your vessel chilled to a certain temperature, but to tell the crew, emergency responders, etc... what containers or cargo holds to worry about if there's a fire.

In this case, the stuff was molten at 100C, and flammable if molten. If, somehow the internal temperature of a cargo hold or container got to 100C, without exposing the product to an open flame, then it still wouldn't combust. You could put many such items into an oven in a sealed container of some kind and heat them well beyond their flammable point.

[JEROME DA GNOME]

:D

[Soapy Sam]

A powdered metal, molten at 100 deg C and flammable? Used in drilling mud? What are we actually talking about here? (And this is another grizzled old Scots mud engineer , so dinna geez ony waffle.) Incidentally- don't go burning any powdered metals with welding equipment unless you either know exactly what they are or you're wearing full B.A gear under your welder's mask. It might be bloody zinc, for starters.

[Magic 9-Ball]

We have similar meetings quite often. The main points are that someone is checking (that's good), you got concerned parties together (good, too), and answered the concerns (a winner) all in one meeting. These things can take weeks and dozens of emails if people don't talk.

And I've seen many a young engineers come through and have to "learn the ropes" ;)

[Foolmewunz]

A powdered metal, molten at 100 deg C and flammable? Used in drilling mud? What are we actually talking about here? (And this is another grizzled old Scots mud engineer , so dinna geez ony waffle.) Incidentally- don't go burning any powdered metals with welding equipment unless you either know exactly what they are or you're wearing full B.A gear under your welder's mask. It might be bloody zinc, for starters.

Damn, always experts here! (S'okay... if someone posts something dumb on container shipping, I'll jump all over 'em in a second.)

Soapy, I have no idea what the stuff was, and in fact, just to find out if I was insande, I went and tracked down the guy I used to work with.

Memory is funny, so here's the revised version according to Tom, our branch manager at the time.

We weren't shipping for the actual manufacturer. We were shipping for a service company who'd bought stuff from Baker & Hughes. The guys we were talking to in Singapore, to be even more clear, were not with the same company we were dealing with in Houston. In fact, it was their contract (in Singapore) and they'd sub-contracted the sourcing with the guys in Houston, who in turn bought product from various people, B&H being just one.

So, other than that - he had little recollection except to say that he didn't think that X ever shipped drilling mud. "Drilling mud" may have just been something that stuck in my mind from dealings during that era. All I can actually remember is powdered (metal or mineral) and the MSDS and the discussions on at what temperature it was molten and thus flammable.

(Tom, being the branch manager, didn't even remember the issues with the quality guy, but remembered all the relationship details because that was his long suit and he was the relationship-guy. Me, I was concerned with quality issues, so I remembered the other part. Like I said, memory is funny.)

Note to self: Don't use expressions just because they sound better than saying "some kind of stuff". (Which is what I should have said.)

ETA: Dang! Now I have to go and revise one of my class lectures. I do training, and I always use this anecdote. I've been saying "some sort of component for drilling mud" for what must be 10 years, now!