Behold, my recently expired kitchen knife. Cause of death was the first quarter of a fairly boring soft cheese that I had for dinner. You read that right: soft cheese. Today, I will narrate the life story of this knife, and many like it.
Our tragic tale of consumerist usury starts on the drawing board. An engineer of some description was asked to come up with a cheaper and lighter kitchen knife. Now, this engineer was not the top of his class. If he had been, he would be designing fighter jets or something, not household tools. This guy is a ways below the spatial reasoning prodigy that his job title used to be associated with. Furthermore, he's anything but happy to be working this job. Regardless of his professed faith, he is highly unlikely to try being 'faithful in little things'. In short, he's neither competent nor motivated.
So here he is, asking to cut weight and costs out of the previous design, in a way that prototyping won't notice. Since prototyping and design testing is going to be done by people of comparable skill, they won't notice too much. In mass production, plastic is cheaper than metal every time. Therefore, he makes the blade socket as short as he can get away with. The cheapest production material of all is air, so the plastic grip is hollowed out. Maybe the CAD has a button to automatically insert some ribs into the hollow, that will make the FEA guys happy, while saving weight. [1] [2]
Here is where the problems start to show up: neither CAD nor FEA are particularly handy, because so few of my generation are. Especially the nerdier guys, who constitute the bulk of engineering students, grew up in the gaming chair, not in dad's garage. Ergo, their structural requirements and tests are fairly inaccurate. To save weight and cost, they always err on the side of too litttle material. After all, the worst that could happen is that the knife breaks sooner, giving them an easy sale in six months time.
A third way to cut costs is to use lower grades of material. The stuff will break sooner, but it's cheaper, lighter, and probably easier to work with. Now we have an under-strength design of inferior materials, so let's go to the actual manufacturing of our short-lived knife.
As we already saw, nobody's trying to spend any money whatsoever on this thing. So the cheapest manufacturer gets hired. You get three guesses where this manufacturer is and how much he cares about training his workforce, but you'll only need one. These guys do not care to make the end product one iota better than their QC forces them to. Here's an audio of their QC guy looking at bad production runs. I have heard stories about QC getting pressured to pass a certain amount of product, to make their toxic manager look good. The effect of that is the same as curves and affirmative action in academics. [3]
Finally, we get to the last culprit of this tragic knife, the customer. You and I share some of the blame. See, we're also not as handy as our forefathers. So we use the underspecced cheap knife in ways that it should not be. For instance, the tragedy up there was not a cheese knife. And when it did not want to cut, I just pressed down even harder.
This is one of the ways in which nothing works anymore. Looking on the bright side, consider the benefits of teaching your children the universally attainable virtues of thoroughness and humility. If they don't think of their work as beneath them and pay attention to it, they will outperform a lot of people.
[1] Computer Aided Design: drawing stuff on a computer.
[2] Finite Element Analysis: a way to stress test a design on the computer, without having to make a prototype and then smash it up.
[3] Quality Control: the people who are supposed to stop bad product from hitting the market.
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