Are You a Knee Jerker?

What in Gods name are you really talking about?

I've got a memory of a Knee Jerk reaction to what was going on when I showed up, took one look, and said, "Stop!"

The goal is to get through the working day, accomplish the work, and not kill or maim your co-workers in the process.

I myself am not considering any change in my reactions to plans that immediately look likely to cause injury to the actors, be they pretenders, or real workers.

This is the sort of stuff I have had to fight about, and in one case I took one look getting out of the Taxi, and yelled, "Stop."

In another I simply told the equal department head that what he proposed to do was stupid. He did it anyway. And I had to walk out and stop all the work to control the fire he started before it got out of hand.

If there was any change I might consider, it would be not being forced to work with blockheads, and forced to allow the situation to get even near to destruction of the set, workplace, or for harm to come to any working within my vicinity.

I believe the point the OP is trying to make involves the difference between proactive & reactive maintainance

I used to describe reactive maintenance as being a fireman.

run the equipment until the flames start shooting out

Where I work we use preventitive maintenace programs. We don't run into Knee-jerk reaction based responses because there is no need. The only time that would come up is if a fire alarm goes off. We advance plan emergency responses based on our equipment, chemicals used and other probable situations we might encounter.

Excellent article--thanks for link.

I deal with a lot of knee jerk managers for various buildings. Why they have a PM program I do not know, as they totally do not respond to any recommendations resulting from it.

A classic example was last summer, a make up air/ AC unit for a seniors residence was found to have a failing bearing in the blower section. At this point it would have been a four hour job done during regular hours. He ignored the problem even though he was reminded three times that this unit was critical to the building and left as it was it would get worse.

The weeks passed and on the Friday night of a long weekend during a heat wave the blower tore its self apart. Now it was and emergency and mister knee jerk manager demanded to know why we did not find the problem during the PM and inform him. After reviewing the paper trail with him, he went off in a huff and mumbled something about fixing it now. After getting in writing, I had to call in a crew at double time. Getting parts was even a bigger problem as they were OEM. The end cost was ten times more than it would have been.

After he contested the bill, we dumped the account.

"Lack of planing on your part, does not necessarily constitute an emergency on my part"

Bricoleurs are people that quickly respond to problems using resources at hand. Knee jerkers has an unneeded negative connotation. Surely you don't mean to disparage those of us who are called to respond in a timely manner?

Having said that, I was using non contact thermometry to predict bearing failure in my steel mill back in 1992. It was an effort at predicting failure. But I'd rather be a bricoleur than a bureaucrat.

milo