Jim Medding’s Blog

A few years ago, I had, shall we say, an unusual event occur. On a Saturday I was shuttling my sons and a couple of their friends to and from a local event in between doing my usual weekend projects. After dropping one of their friends at his home, I pointed the van towards our home. We were coming up the hill towards our house when all of a sudden things started to happen. Cars were honking their horns and my son, calmly, says “Dad, there’s smoke coming out of the vents.” I pulled the van over towards the curb, open the door and as I put my left foot on the ground, a Good Samaritan yells “There are flames coming out from under your van.” That’s about all I needed to know, bless his heart. I simultaneously turned the van off and told the boys to get out of the van and move away. Then I called 911. OK, your standard van fire, no big deal. The fire trucks show up and put the fire out; what’s so interesting about that?

Well, the interesting part, at least to me, is that as I was talking to the 911 operator, waiting for the fire truck to come, I watched traffic continue to squeeze by my van as it was spewing smoke and flames. At this point I realized that…Saturday’s are busy times and people are not going to be put out by the threat of death and destruction. Places to go; things to do; no time to wait for some rube’s silly van fire.

Senator Joe MacCarthy is reported to have said, about George Marshall, “If Marshall was merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America’s interest.” I bring this quote up, not because I agree with the statement, but because I find it an interesting assertion concerning incompetency. The assertion is that an incompetent decision maker is not likely to “never get it right” where as a destructive decision maker is.

While my grandfather, Walter L. Medding, was stationed in Japan in the early 1950’s he apparently made a couple of trips over to Korea. This news came as surprise to my father because when I asked Dad about it, he said “Grandpa was never in Korea.” The reason why I asked Dad is that I found three slides which had to be taken in Korea – they are of the negotiating tents at Panmunjom. And they were, most likely, taken by Grandpa. I’ve include two of the slides here.

All three slides are undated; the two here have legends, hand lettered by my Grandfather. The first appears to be in a very primitive setting – no road to be seen, a little gravel out in front of a standard army canvas tent. This slide is titled Panmunjom; Chinese guard at Panmunjom, Korea.

The second slide shows a bit more refined tent and surroundings. This slide is titled Panmunjom; Armistice tent Panmunjom. Two additional things about this second slide I find interesting- it was taken from, apparently the Chinese side and in the background, off to the right of the tent, appears to be a US solder using either a camera, or surveying equipment. Surveying would, conceivably, be a reason for my grandfather to make a trip over to Korea since this would be a service provided by the Corp of Engineers.

In Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, he defines, I think quite eloquently, the process of product evolution:

The evolution of form begins with the perception of failure, but is propagated through the language of comparatives. ‘Lighter,” “thinner,” “cheaper” are comparative assertions of improvement, and the possibility of attaching such claims to a new product directly influences the evolution of its form. Competition is by its very nature a struggle for superiority, and thus superlatives claims of “lightest,” “thinnest,” “cheapest” often become the ultimate goals. But, as with all design problems, when there is more than a single goal, the goals more often than not are incomparable. Thus the lightest and thinnest crystal can be expected also to be the most expensive. But limits on the form of artifacts are also defined by failure, for too light and too thin a piece of crystal might hardly be usable.

I was fresh out of college with no more than a few weeks of employment under my belt when a really weird guy called out to me from over my cubical wall, “Hey, I need blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t really catch what this guy, who I later learned was named Marvin, was asking, but my cubical mate, Tim, said he knew how to do this and would help me do it. Tim, having a couple more months of professional experience than I, had taken me under his wing to show me the ropes. Our days had been filled with equipping our desks with supplies and walking the halls of the facility. Even though I was a bit timid, Tim assured me that this was a task I could accomplish. He furnished me with a stack of forms and showed me how to fill them out using the information Marvin had supplied. When I completed the forms, I handed them back over the wall to Marvin and went home that evening feeling like I had earned my salary.

A few weeks later, a gentleman named Max walked into my cubical with a stack of, vaguely familiar, forms and asked me “What’s the reason for this change you’re making.”

I looked at Max with a blank expression.

Max insisted, “You have to have a reason for change.”

At this point I blurted out “I’m making a change?”

Max fidgeted with noticeable exasperation so I said I would figure it out and took the stack of forms back. After Max left, I began studying the forms. After a few trips to get copies of various drawings (all that walking around had paid off) and studying them intensely, I realized that I was, indeed, making a change. I was changing the dash numbers of a handful of capacitors used on each drawing and the only difference between the old capacitors and the new capacitors was their reliability rating. The new capacitors had a higher reliability rating. So in the Reason for Change block, I wrote “Higher reliability parts.” I was pleased with myself as I proudly presented the stack of forms back to Max. That was the last I ever saw of those forms.

Fourteen years later, after I had moved on to numerous other projects, Mike, who was still with my original project, approached me and asked me if I remembered a bunch of capacitors I had changed many years ago. Apparently, the higher reliability capacitors were no longer readily available. Because the Engineering Change Notice had specified that the reason for making the change was reliability, they had been unable to change the drawings back to the originally specified capacitors. In retrospect, if I had asked Marvin, using the time honored professional method of letting it roll down hill, what was his reason for making this change he would have said “Parts availability.” But if I had done this, Mike would never have been compelled to stop by and have a conversation with me. Mike’s wife and kids were doing fine.