Jim Medding’s Blog

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.