My biggest ever professional mistake. See I was a factory worker and working nights. That night one thing I had to do was put our product into a fancy oven. It would run for over 12 hours but at x temperature for a few hours, then y temperature for some more hours then z temperature for some more hours etc. I took about $90k worth of product(internal cost, not sell price) put them in the oven, went to the touchpanel pressed a button, did all the paperwork, and went home.
Day shift started at 6am, by 630 I got a phone call from the manager asking what the hell happened last night? I said nothing, everything went smoothly. He said well the oven is over 2x the max allowed temperature for the devices. See on the touch panel there was a button for “auto” that started the pre-programmed temperature cycle the button immediately below that just turned the heat on full blast untill manually turned off, no confirmation, no protection at all. I cost the company over twice my annual salary by pressing the wrong button on a touchpad.
Basically it was determined that it wasn’t my fault and was poorly designed. The touch panel got redesigned and shortly afterwards anything besides auto required entering a password. I wasn’t punished at all but probably took a few years off my life in anxiety and fear.
That’s just how the production industry is, nearly every piece of equipment I work with has a touchscreen HMI. That is a very poor design choice tho to have the “auto” button right next to the “full temp fuck you” button, it should have been password protected from the start or at the very least on a different screen
This is not the same thing at all but it reminded me of the one time I tried to turn off my mom’s baseboard heater where the numbers have worn off. She got home later that night and was like wtf why is my room ten million degrees.
My biggest ever professional mistake. See I was a factory worker and working nights. That night one thing I had to do was put our product into a fancy oven. It would run for over 12 hours but at x temperature for a few hours, then y temperature for some more hours then z temperature for some more hours etc. I took about $90k worth of product(internal cost, not sell price) put them in the oven, went to the touchpanel pressed a button, did all the paperwork, and went home.
Day shift started at 6am, by 630 I got a phone call from the manager asking what the hell happened last night? I said nothing, everything went smoothly. He said well the oven is over 2x the max allowed temperature for the devices. See on the touch panel there was a button for “auto” that started the pre-programmed temperature cycle the button immediately below that just turned the heat on full blast untill manually turned off, no confirmation, no protection at all. I cost the company over twice my annual salary by pressing the wrong button on a touchpad.
Basically it was determined that it wasn’t my fault and was poorly designed. The touch panel got redesigned and shortly afterwards anything besides auto required entering a password. I wasn’t punished at all but probably took a few years off my life in anxiety and fear.
Yeah having a touchpad controlling any machinery functions is stupid (cars included).
That’s just how the production industry is, nearly every piece of equipment I work with has a touchscreen HMI. That is a very poor design choice tho to have the “auto” button right next to the “full temp fuck you” button, it should have been password protected from the start or at the very least on a different screen
Pretty common for HMIs in a factory, in my experience. Keyboards are dirty and difficult to keep clean.
This is not the same thing at all but it reminded me of the one time I tried to turn off my mom’s baseboard heater where the numbers have worn off. She got home later that night and was like wtf why is my room ten million degrees.