Absolutely nothing serious here, or long. Just wanted to share this picture of a freshly returned rental car that pulled in next to mine.
Did the driver not notice an abnormality? Maybe did, but didn’t care? Who knows, other than the “operator”?
click to enlarge
I wanted to engage the person in some 5 why’s, but I thought it a bit too forward. Of course, I’m sure me taking a picture while the driver was standing nearby wasn’t too strange. Amateur lean photojournalists are relatively immune to embarrassment.
One lean lesson here? Unasked questions are hard to answer.
Harder still if you were not engaged in direct observation at the gemba when the defect occurred.
This one will haunt me forever…
Related post: Effective Visual Controls Are Self-Explaining
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#1 by Dale Savage on January 26th, 2012
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Mark,
It would be interesting to have the whole story, but don’t let it trouble you too much. There is another lesson that came to my mind. You ask, “Did the driver not notice an abnormality? Maybe did, but didn’t care? Who knows, other than the ‘operator’?” It seems to me that you are making an assumption about who was the cause of this abnormality. I was wondering if maybe this driver stopped at a full service gas station and that the abnormality was caused by someone else just down the road and that he did not have the opportunity to notice it before you did. Again, without direct observation we have could come up with numerous possibilities – and unfortunately this happens all the time in the manufacturing world.
Thanks again for sharing this.
Dale
#2 by markrhamel on January 26th, 2012
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Hi Dale,
Thanks for the comment. Hey, I thought I covered myself by using the term “operator”?! Of course, living in a predominately self-service gas station state (with ridiculously high gas prices), I tend to just assume it’s the driver.
Glad you’re keeping me honest!
Best regards,
Mark