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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/BestMossadAgent on 2025-10-31 20:26:54+00:00.

Hi there, this is my first post on this subreddit as I usually just lurk here but I thought you all might enjoy this. I’m on mobile so sorry in advanced for any weirdness with this. TL;DR at the bottom.

I work in an aerospace factory in the metal finishing department, which has a wide variety of jobs from painting machined parts, using a blaster that shoots granules of aluminum oxide or even glass beads to put a particular finish on a part or using various chemicals to clean parts in between various stages of their production or for shipping out to the customer.

Throughout the day we have to check three separate data points on each machine. Those points are pH of the water, soap concentration and water conductivity of each washing machine we use to ensure they’re within the limits that are required by the customers. If theres too much of one thing, the parts will fail processes down the line. If there’s too little, the parts just wont get clean. We used to keep all of our checks in a big paper log that was regularly checked by our team leads or the quality control department.

About six months ago the head quality control engineer of our department, “T” for this story, installed SQC to the computer we use to log in and log off of work. T wanted to install this so that we could cut down on the amount of paper we use and to SPECIFICALLY keep better track of the aforementioned data points and how they fluctuate throughout the day.

So six months ago we all do some training on using the SQC system over the course of like, an hour, an we start up using it the very next week.

The standard procedure for our daily testing is to do one test of each machine at the beginning of your shift, before or after lunch and then anytime you need to add soap or water, drain it. If you’re feeling generous to the next shift, you can do their first test of their shift.

So for SIX MONTHS GOING ON SEVEN I have been using this system and every time I have I just used the TAB key to highlight and enter in my data through each of the boxes on the data sheet. I’d go through it and once I finished a row I ALWAYS tabbed it down to the next row so that when I came back to again I just had to start entering in the new data.

TODAY I LEARNED I’VE BEEN FUCKING UP THIS WHOLE TIME.

What I did not pay attention to was the fact that the first data box in the row was the date AND time of that entry. So when I come in at 7:30am and do my testing about five minutes later, I’d do all my data entry then tab down to the next row like a minute or two later, so it would read 7:32am for example. So the data sheets for my machine always just read two tests at the beginning of the day even though I did one test in the morning then one test after lunch.

I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR MONTHS.

I uh, have no real clue as to whats coming this upcoming audit that is gonna happen next week. T left for the weekend hours ago. My foreman left hours ago.

FUCK.

TL;DR: I fucked up six months of data entry and now an audit is coming up for it next week and I need to figure out what I can do for it.

Thanks for reading!