"You know I don't like watching anybody make the same mistakes I made"

The verdict is in on the car. The service manager informed me that if you downshift from 5th to 3rd gear or from 4th to 2nd gear in a MINI, you blow the engine, and have to pay $7,400 to have it repaired. The car has a computer-controlled rev limiter that prevents you from over-revving the engine, but doesn't have an interlock to keep you from putting the car into second gear if you're travelling too fast. Somehow, this is not a manufacturing defect, and apparently happens to five or six cars a year (both BMWs and MINIs, according to the service manager).

As I don't have $7,400 lying around in easily-accessible funds, we're scrambling to find the money: possibly extending credit limits, borrowing against retirement accounts, performing lengthy and vigorous oral sex on wealthy dowagers. We'll manage to come up with the money somehow, but it's not going to be pleasant.

In the meantime, for the love of all that is holy, we're warning everyone we know NOT TO BUY A MINI if they want a car that isn't a complete POS. If you don't mind that your car explodes when you downshift wrong, by all means, go ahead--just bear in mind that that particular trait is NOT a manufacturing defect, according to MINI.

( Herein lies a stream of profanity )

LJ Self Analysis

From thedarkpenguin's post, I downloaded the LJ archiver and performed a self-analysis. Here's everything I score 85% or better on:

Custom Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for fancycwabs's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Orality		88.6%
Sound		100.0%
Vision		83.2%
Hard		88.0%
Random Movement		94.9%
Chaos		55.7%
Unknown		80.9%
Brink-passage		94.6%
Descend		100.0%
Order		81.9%
Glory		99.3%

What does this mean?
 

And likewise, everything under 30%.

Custom Categories
Regressive Imagery Analysis for fancycwabs's journal
Compared to: Everyone

Odor		24.6%
Passivity		17.9%
Timelessness		20.0%
Water		27.9%
Social Behavior		28.5%
Sadness		29.9%

What does this mean?
 

We're at Step 1 of our StageGate Process.

Tomorrow, our Danish overlords are coming to town for a pre-meeting to Get Their Shit Together prior to the China trip next week, and I'm invited! Three hundred manhours devoted to reading the contract. The most edumacated member of our team has a Mechanical Engineering degree and an MBA from MIT, from what I understand, and is the party responsible for this travesty.

Look--I'm a pretty well-educated guy, myself. I recall a couple of companies ago when management started passing around copies of Re-Engineering the Corporation and people who had no idea who Thomas Kuhn was were talking about a "paradigm shift" as a synonym for layoffs. I understand the core principals of TQM and Six Sigma voodoo whatsis, but I also understand that these things are not a good fit with our business model, as we don't make widgets. My division's profit has always stemmed from Customer Focused Custom Design Work, and attempts to shoehorn that into economies of scale are destined to fail, and we spend $3,000 composing emails and making phone calls debating who's gonna pay for a $50 box of spare bolts.

Anyway, in the spirit of modern management, we have a ten-person, four-day meeting scheduled for the rest of this week, and I'm THRILLED about losing four days of productive work out of the eleven we have left to get ready for our first design review, which is apparently going to be moved up by two weeks to save some airfare. In the meantime, we still have more fucking managers on the job than we have engineers capable of doing actual work, and what engineers we do have seem to be dropping like flies.