“Good news! We’ve shoddily reconfigured this triangle maker to make circles. You have to hold onto it as it goes through the machine or else it will get thrown around, because the machine is designed with the assumption that the product has corners. Ignore those stickers that say not to put your hands that close when it’s operating, that’s just CYA shit that doesn’t matter in the real world. Also when the machine jams because it wasn’t designed to operate on circles, we’ll blame you for using it wrong.”
— Management the last time I had a factory job.
(At that job it was actually a machine that was designed to wrap large objects in plastic, but was being used to wrap cabinet doors, some of which were less than 18 inches long and weighed just a few pounds. The thing is covered in labels that say not to put your arms near the rotating plastic spool, but if you don’t hold onto the doors for dear life it will fling them all over the place, endangering you and everyone else nearby, because it is only intended to operate on stuff that weighs many times as much as the average object they were putting through it. Also if the doors are not wide enough, the plastic will be in the wrong position when it gets cut and some of it will get caught on a moving part, which will eventually jam it, so you have to hold onto the door with one hand and pull the plastic out of the way with the other, and if you fail to do that enough times (due to needing both hands to hold the smallest doors as they move through the wrapper) then it will jam and it will be your fault, because you should have magically had an extra hand or something.)
Sorry, I didn’t start this comment intending to write a whole rant, but it kind of ended up there. :P
“Good news! We’ve shoddily reconfigured this triangle maker to make circles. You have to hold onto it as it goes through the machine or else it will get thrown around, because the machine is designed with the assumption that the product has corners. Ignore those stickers that say not to put your hands that close when it’s operating, that’s just CYA shit that doesn’t matter in the real world. Also when the machine jams because it wasn’t designed to operate on circles, we’ll blame you for using it wrong.”
— Management the last time I had a factory job.
(At that job it was actually a machine that was designed to wrap large objects in plastic, but was being used to wrap cabinet doors, some of which were less than 18 inches long and weighed just a few pounds. The thing is covered in labels that say not to put your arms near the rotating plastic spool, but if you don’t hold onto the doors for dear life it will fling them all over the place, endangering you and everyone else nearby, because it is only intended to operate on stuff that weighs many times as much as the average object they were putting through it. Also if the doors are not wide enough, the plastic will be in the wrong position when it gets cut and some of it will get caught on a moving part, which will eventually jam it, so you have to hold onto the door with one hand and pull the plastic out of the way with the other, and if you fail to do that enough times (due to needing both hands to hold the smallest doors as they move through the wrapper) then it will jam and it will be your fault, because you should have magically had an extra hand or something.)
Sorry, I didn’t start this comment intending to write a whole rant, but it kind of ended up there. :P