Something about today's WTF (One At a Time Please).... probably running databases with Excel spreadsheets.... reminded me of my first co-op placement years ago.
We were an industrial automation shop, and I was working on SCADA interfaces. One of our customers, the plant engineer at the local auto factory, phoned up. We had installed a PLC system to control the electric drives pulling the whole assembly line, complete with a nice SCADA interface and emergency stop controls.
The union boys were complaining that the assembly line was running too fast. You see, one of the displays that showed a schematic of the entire assembly line, along with some stats (AC drive status, line speed etc.) sat in the plant maintenance shop. The local union steward would check in once a day to see how many cars they'd made so far that year (counted by the SCADA app). Well, the display also showed the line speed down to the thousandth of an inch per hour. The union contract said X inches / hr. The display was showing X.001 inches / hr.
We could call up the actual values direct from the AC drives that showed (the equivalent of) exactly X, and we assured them that it was a harmless rounding error. These were the days of Windoze 3.1 after all... 16 bit stuff. (The fact that the requirements from the customer had been to show up to 1 decimal place of accuracy and the additional two were .. uh... features, was lost on everyone) If you went to the line with a stopwatch and a ruler, you could measure that it moving at the correct speed.
Now, the rational person would do the math and consider that this + .001 equated to something like an extra 8.76 inches ... per year. Not a big deal right? Well the union folks calculated that this would produce an extra car every 12.5 years. Thats right, the suits were taking advantage of the hard working folk again, and they insisted that we "slow that line down to exactly X inches / hr" as per the latest union contract.
The tricky part was that the drives were calibrated to run the line in only 2-3 preset speeds for different shifts... getting all the drives calibrated for a new speed (or changing a preset speed) required several days of extensive recalibration, during which the line would be shut down - not an option for an auto plant running 3 shifts 7 days a week. "Isn't there something you can do?" asked the tired plant engineer who really wanted the union steward to stop camping out in his office.
So we opened up the SCADA application and just tweaked the scaling factor between the raw line speed (in millifleems per doozlehoofer) and the value displayed on the screen in inches / hr. It was amazing how that value was always amazingly accurate from that point on..