How about a nice palate cleanser of a taxonomy post? Like a tier list Youtube video, but with fewer MIND-BLOWING BRAIN-MELTING QUICK CUTS
Every durable product out there needs maintenance at some point1, and that maintenance involves human beings and human judgment. So any producer of a durable good, the robotics industry included, creates spare parts chains, documentation, tools, and training to ensure that our product can be maintained in working order over the course of its design life2. But no matter how hard you work at it, there’s always gonna be That Guy who somehow screws it up. Today, we are categorizing That Guy: the gremlin.
Gremlins are sneaky, imaginative, and have far more time on their hands to invent new ways to gack up the system than you have to foolproof it. So let’s talk about the kinds of gremlins and how they show up.
The Dumbest Person You Know
The gremlin for whom the phrase “can’t pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel” was born.
It does not matter how simple the instructions are, how obvious the warning message is, or how clear to anyone with two working eyes what the issue is, this gremlin just Does Not Get It.
Sometimes we fall into this pattern because the documentation or the diagnostics suck. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t slept right in three days and the Monster hasn’t kicked in. And sometimes it’s just because the world needs ditch diggers, too.
But this is the jackass who looks at your flat tire and decides that you need to replace the ECU.
The Craziest MFer In The Shop
An absolute chaos goblin whose main goal in life is adding pages to the safety handbook.
All gas and no brakes, sometimes literally, this gremlin is the most consistently dangerous one you’ll encounter because they have zero regard for consequences. If you’ve ever found a penny stuck in to replace a fuse, you’ve met one of them. You don’t know how they’re still alive and have most of their fingers. They’ve got red JB Weld on Subscribe & Save.
Remember the time you were building that sick leaf spring powered ballista and had a moment of clarity that if the cable snapped you’d kill everyone in a ten foot radius? That was you snapping out of the Craziest MFer In The Shop mode.
Hit the e-stop now and save yourself some time.
Just The Unluckiest Guy
This poor schmuck does everything right and still loses. They may somehow be the embodiment of bad luck themselves or simply its favorite victim, but the things that this gremlin endures will make you superstitious.
I had a warehouse I worked with that I was convinced had a gremlin in it. This building had lore. It had multiple lightning strikes, a flood, a tornado rip off its roof, a microburst come through and do it again, a La Migra scare, and a sinkhole start opening up in the back so that the rear wall started sinking and the pad started calving. The robotics in it weren’t immune, with a critical design failure showing up as well as one bot that just wanted to spin in circles until its battery died, usually while facing the break room so it could watch Price Is Right. Constant absolutely unhinged things regularly occurred there, until one day when we flipped the robotics fleet to a new model. Suddenly the building was right as rain. I am absolutely certain that a gremlin lived there and had hitched a ride out on a ‘bot Fallen-style. I visited there again a few years later with a TPM and found two large black feathers near the sinking concrete. I steered him carefully around those two feathers to leave them untouched. The mammal brain knew that they were harmless, but somehow I knew even my gitano godmother3 wouldn’t be able to fix what happened if I disturbed them.
You can’t fix this one, only endure it. Try a young priest and an old priest, or maybe wrapping a red thread around it.
The Filthiest Animal Who Is Forever Banned From Touching Your Stuff
Oh, ew.
This gremlin differs from the guy with the BO problem or the one unacquainted with a toothbrush. This runs deeper. Somehow they always leave a rind or a film or something horrible in their wake.
Sometimes driven by fatigue, or lack of care, or some bizarre Freudian obsession with disgust, this gremlin leaves a palpable residue behind. It doesn’t matter whether cleanup is part of the instructions. There’s always evidence: a greasy handprint on the wall, some yellowish substance smeared into the upholstery, or sticky handles and buttons. The work may be to spec, but at what price?
Regardless of the driver, this gremlin can usually be mitigated by making things either easier to clean up or harder to make gross in the first place.
Too Smart For Their Own Good
These gremlins are why there are anti-tamper strips in your phone.
They tinker, they fiddle, they think they know better than the teams that made the design decisions. When they’re told otherwise by subject matter experts they react spectacularly poorly. They and their blown engines account for roughly 30% of the Subaru subreddit.
While the Craziest MFer In The Shop is the most consistently dangerous gremlin, this one has the highest overall risk because of their unpredictability. They’re also different in that the former is driven by pure poor impulse control. These gremlins believe they’re thinking the problem through and accounting for the consequences and generally get agitated when they receive pushback.
Too Smart gremlins aren’t all malevolent in nature; they can be born out of desperation. A maintenance team dealing with a shortage of motors may work with a small engine shop to get those motors rebuilt without understanding how that can introduce risk into their machines.
But generally, you’re not going to stop a Too Smart For Their Own Good gremlin because they’re just clever enough to get around your guardrails. You need to be able to detect when they’re working around you and make sure you fail safely when they get too far out over their skis.
While there are certainly people out there who are full time gremlins, we’ve all been gremlins for a moment, or an hour, or a day, or ten days. Therefore, the lazy response of “just hire better people” doesn’t actually prevent gremlins; it’s just attempting to avoid the work of gremlin-proofing your stuff.
- How do you know it’s durable? Well, you don’t throw it away when it breaks or wears out. You fix it. The slow descent of formerly durable goods on the market becoming consumable goods is being driven by companies that can’t figure out how to show short-term profits on maintenance activities. There’s a whole rant about how customers also can’t calculate Total Cost of Ownership to (sometimes literally) save their lives, but I digress. ↩︎
- Design life, which differs from operating life, which differs from fiscal amortization life… which deserves its own taxonomy post. But again, I digress. ↩︎
- Yes, complete with the flamenco dancing and tarot reading. ↩︎
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