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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Equivalent-Salary357 on 2025-05-11 17:04:29+00:00.

Back in the 1970s, I was working in an automotive transmission factory as an inspector. The part I was checking had to be very straight.

If it wasn’t straight, it could be straightened.

But if it went on to heat treat (the next process after my inspection) it couldn’t be bent straight. It had to be scrapped.

I was able to check around 400 pieces each night, sometimes more, sometimes less. A lot depended on the percentage ‘bent’ pieces in each lot. The ‘guy’ on day shift was getting similar numbers.

This was fine for a couple of months, until someone worked a Saturday overtime shift at my station.

At the start of my shift the following Monday evening, my foreman informed me that the ‘weekend guy’ had checked 700 pieces, and he expected me to check 700 that night.

I tried to explain that the only way to check 700 pieces would cause a lot of bad parts to get through.

“Do whatever you have to do, I want you to check 700 pieces tonight,” was the advice I was given.

When I got to my work station I saw that the ‘weekend guy’ had indeed ‘checked’ 700 parts. Exactly 700 parts. With exactly 400 ‘good’ parts, and exactly 300 ‘rejected’ (needing to be straightened). No way those numbers represented accurate measurements. Normally I’d only have 40 or 50 pieces out of 400 needing straightening.

These were fake numbers, although there were 300 pieces ready to be straightened, so I assumed that 400 had indeed gone to heat treat.

But I followed the procedure I had explained to the foreman, still trying to be as accurate as possible. I checked something like 650 parts with around 200 pieces in the ‘re-operate’ racks.

Tuesday night, the foreman stopped me and told me to go back to the way I had been checking previously.

Apparently, between the 'weekend guy’s 400 ‘good’ pieces, my ‘good’ pieces from Monday evening, and presumably the pieces from day shift on Monday, there were a lot of scrap pieces coming out of heat treat.