So, I was fiddling around with this latest batch of stuff the other day. Supposed to be a straightforward sorting job, you know? But then I hit them. The ‘red raisins’. That’s what I started calling ‘em in my head, anyway.
Most of these components, they’re all a standard color, let’s say blue. Easy peasy. But every now and then, bam! A red one. Not supposed to be there. Sticks out like a sore thumb. And it’s not just the color, these things are often a slightly different shape, or the connectors are just a bit off. Total pain.
It’s funny, or maybe not so funny, how these little red annoyances can just derail your whole flow. You’re cruising along, and then you gotta stop, inspect this oddball, figure out if it’s a dud, or if it needs special handling, or if the whole batch is now suspect. Throws everything off.
It Really Drags You Back
And you know what? It really dragged me back to my time at that old manufacturing plant, “Precision Parts Inc.” Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Well, it was anything but precise a lot of the time. We had our own version of ‘red raisins’ there, big time.
We were making these little gears. Millions of ’em. And the machines, they were old. Real old. Like, my grandpa probably worked on newer stuff. So, most of the gears came out fine, but then you’d get these… well, let’s call ’em ‘burnt’ ones. Not quite red, more of a dark, angry brown. Totally unusable. Our ‘red raisins’.
The thing was, nobody wanted to really fix the root cause. That meant stopping the line. That meant spending money on new parts for the machines. Oh no, can’t have that. So, what did we do? We had a guy, poor old Dave, his whole job was to sit there with a magnifying glass and pick out the burnt ones. All day long. Can you imagine?
And the excuses from management? Oh, they were classic:
- “It’s just a small percentage, deal with it.”
- “Dave’s got it covered, what’s the problem?”
- “We’re hitting our numbers, mostly.”
- “Focus on the positives, team!”
But these ‘red raisins’, these burnt gears, they weren’t just a nuisance for Dave. Sometimes they’d slip through. And then? Then they’d jam up the assembly down the line. Or even worse, they’d make it into a final product. Then you’ve got customer complaints, returns, the whole nine yards. All because nobody wanted to fix the actual problem that was spitting out these ‘red raisins’ in the first place.
I remember one time, the big boss came down. Saw a pile of the burnt ones. He didn’t ask why they were there. He asked why they hadn’t been “disposed of discreetly.” Yeah. That was the mindset. Hide the problem, don’t solve it.
So, when I’m here now, picking out these literal red components from a pile of blue ones, it’s like a weird echo. These new ‘red raisins’ are way less of a headache, thankfully. No Dave suffering for hours. But still, that feeling pops up. That feeling of, “here we go again, another thing that’s not quite right, another little imperfection we gotta work around.”
It just makes you think, doesn’t it? How often we just accept the ‘red raisins’ in whatever we’re doing, instead of figuring out why they’re showing up. Sometimes it’s easier in the short term, I guess. But those little things, they add up. They always do.
